Ode in Dialogue of the Eyes and His Heart

Poem by Pierre De Ronsard Collection The MélangesPeriod 16th century

I had my eyes and my heart
Sick with a langour,
Each from the other different;
Always a burning fever
Consumed my poor heart,
And always my eye distilled
A catarrhal rain,
Which, flowing dangerously,
Drained all my brain.
Then my heart to my eyes said:

THE HEART
It is quite right that ceaselessly
A vengeful rain
Wash away the harm you have done,
For through you entered the dart
That caused my fever,
Then my eyes, full of dew,
Distilling my care,
Answered the heart thus.

THE EYES
But it is you who were the cause
Of the first harm, which causes
In you the burning heat,
And in us the humid tears.
It is very true that we were
The authors of the harm, who received
The dart that wounded you,
But it passed so quickly
That scarcely had we seen it shot
When already we felt it within us:
You should, as the stronger,
Against its first assault
Have made a little resistance,
But you became acquainted
All at once with it,
To give us all the sorrow.
O the fine vain enterprise!
Since you suffer the pain
As well as we, for having
Wished alone to deceive us.
For the thing is reasonable
» That the wretched deceiver
» Receive the harm upon himself
» That he plotted against others,
» And that for his fraud he die.
Thus my eyes at every hour,
And my heart against my eyes,
Quarreled seditiously
When you, my sweet mistress,
Having care for my distress
And for my new torment,
Made me a present of a water
That the lost light
Of my two eyes restored to me.
There remains only to succor
The heart that is going to die,
If it does not please you that one grant it
As to the eyes some grace.
Now to extinguish the heat
That consumes it, nothing is needed
But that once I touch
With mine your mouth,
So that the sweet kiss
May wholly appease
By the wind of its breath
The too inhuman flame
That with its wings Love
Fans all around me,
Since the hour when the arrow
From your eyes made the breach in it
So deep, that it could not
Heal unless it died,
Or unless your sweet breath
Drew it out of pain

Pierre de Ronsard

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

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