Let Us Pour These Roses Beside This Wine

Poem by Pierre De Ronsard Collection OdesPeriod 16th century

Let us pour these roses beside this wine,
Of this wine let us pour these roses,
And let us drink to one another, so that
The sadnesses enclosed in our hearts
May find some end in drinking.

The lovely Rose of Spring,
Aubert, admonishes men
To pass the time joyfully,
And while we are young
To make merry the flower of our years.

Just as she loses her bloom
Withered in a single morning,
So our age fades away,
Alas! and in less than a day
The springtime of a man perishes.

Did you not see yesterday Brinon
Speaking, and making good cheer,
Who alas! today is nothing
But a little dust in a bier,
Who of him has nothing but the name?

No one steals away his death,
Charon packs everything into his net,
Kings and poor alike fall down there:
But meanwhile time passes
Rose, and I do not sing of you.

The Rose is the honor of an enclosure,
The Rose is the fairest of flowers,
And above all others has the prize:
It is for this that I call her
The violet of Cypris.

The Rose is the bouquet of Love,
The Rose is the play of the Graces,
The Rose turns white all around
In the morning with little pearls
That she borrows from the Break of day.
The Rose is the perfume of the Gods,
The Rose is the honor of maidens,
Who their breasts much rather prefer
To enrich with new Roses,
Than with gold, however precious.

Is anything beautiful without her?
The Rose embellishes all things,
Venus has skin of Roses,
And Aurora has fingers of Roses,
And the brow of the new Sun.

The Nymphs have breasts of Rose,
The elbows, the flanks and the hips:
Hebe has a hand of Roses,
And the Graces, however white they be,
Have their brows all full of Roses.

May mine be crowned with her,
She is a Laurel of victory to me:
Come, let us call the twice-born,
The good father, and let us make him drink
Surrounded by these Roses.

Bacchus smitten with the beauty
Of the Roses with vermilion leaves,
Without them has never been,
When in his shirt under the trellises
He drank in the hottest of Summer.

Pierre de Ronsard

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

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