The Rose

Poem by Jean-Antoine De Baïf Collection PassetempsPeriod 16th century

During this beautiful season
Of gracious renewal,
When everything is renewed
Full of delicious love,
Neither through the painted meadow,
Nor on the flowering hedge,
Nor in the most beautiful garden,
I see no flower so exquisite
That more than it I do not prize
The rose with divine perfume.

But the white one does not please me,
Pale with deadly pallor,
Nor the red one colored
With a bloody hue:
The one with sickly paleness
And the other with faint scent,
Please neither nose nor eye.
All the others it surpasses,
The one that vividly combines
From these two a vermilion tint.

The incarnate rose is the one
In which I take more pleasure:
But however much it may be so,
I still wish to choose it well.
For one picked at one hour,
And another at another is better
By the choice of our reason.
Every thing is born, ends,
Soon grows and then declines
According to its own season.

I will not force the rose
That hides, in the bosom
Of a tight bud enclosed,
The beauty of its bloom.
Let some impatient person pick it
Before the vermilion flower
Shows its treasure open;
My desire does not carry me
So strongly that I take away the one
That feels nothing but green.

Jean-Antoine de Baïf

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

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