Let Us Use Here the Gall of Our Wretched Lives

Poem by Théodore Agrippa D'Aubigné Period 16th century

… Let us use here the gall of our wretched lives,
Making horrible with our cries the shadows of these woods:
These stray rocks, these fountains followed
By the echo of the forests will answer our voices.

The continual winds, the thickness of these clouds,
These black ponds filled with asps, not with fish,
The timid stags, the bears and wild lizards
Will break their rest to hear my songs.

Like the cruel fire that has laid waste
A palace, raging lightly from place to place,
Misfortune devours me, and thus exterminates me
The torch of love, the pitiless god.

Alas! Forest Pans and you wild fauns,
Do you not heal the wound that harms me,
Do you not know a remedy for amorous rages,
From so many beautiful flowers that the earth produces?

To the rescue of my life or to my approaching death
Hasten, deities who inhabit these places,
Either be physicians of my bloody pain,
Or make your eyes the witnesses of my ruin.

Relagated among you, I wish that in my dwelling
No footprint of delicate pleasure be marked,
Except when it will be time that, consumed, I die,
Satisfied with the most beautiful of my sad desire.

The place of my rest is a chamber painted
With a thousand whitening bones and skulls,
Where my joy is sooner extinguished by its object:
A gracious oblivion does not push it out.

Let all those depart from there who still have the desire
To sow and seek some contentment,
Let those come who wish to resemble me in life
Provided that love be the cause of their torment.

I gaze while adoring in an anatomy
The portrait of Diane among the bones, so that
Seeing her beauty my enemy fortune
Surrounds it everywhere with my cruel end.

In the body of death I have enclosed my life,
And my beauty appears horrible among the bones.
Thus is my joy followed by regret,
Thus from my labor only my death has rest. […]

Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-let-us-use-here-the-gall-of-our-wretched-lives-theodore-agrippa-d-aubigne/