Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TO THE SKYLARK, by PIERRE DE RONSARD


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO THE SKYLARK, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Skylark, how I envy you
Last Line: To herald each return of spring.
Subject(s): Birds; Larks; Love; Spring; Skylarks


SKYLARK, how I envy you
Your gentle pleasures ever new,
Warbling at the break of day
Of love, sweet love, sweet love alway,
And shaking free your beating wings
Of dew that to each feather clings!

Ere Apollo risen hath,
You lift your body from its bath,
Darting up with little leaps
To dry it where the cloud-flock sleeps,
Fluttering free each tiny wing
And "tirra-lirra" carolling
Sweet, so sweet, that every swain,
Knowing Spring has come again,
Thinketh on his love anew
And longs to be a bird like you.

Then, when you have scaled the sky,
You drop -- as swift, as suddenly,
As the spool a maid lets fall
When, caught at eve in slumber's thrall,
Distaff forgot, she nods so much
Her cheek and bosom almost touch;
Or as by day when she doth spin
And he that seeks her love to win
Cometh near her unbeknown --
Abashed she casts her glances down,
And quick the slender thin-wound spool
From her hand afar doth roll. . . .
So you drop, my lark, my lover,
Dainty minion, darling rover,
Lark I love more tenderly
Than all the other birds that fly,
More than even the nightingale
Whose notes through copse and grove prevail.

Innocent of every harm,
You never rob the toilsome farm
Like those birds that steal the wheat
And spoil the harvest -- thieves that eat
Growing grain in stalk and leaf
Or shell it from the standing sheaf.
Greening furrows are your haunts,
Where the little worms and ants,
Or the flies and grubs, you seek,
To fill your children's straining beak,
While they wait, with wings ungrown,
Clothed in clinging golden down.

Wrongly have the poets told
That you, the larks, in days of old
Dared your father to betray
And cut his royal locks away
Wherein his fated power lay.
Out! alas! not you alone
The wrongs of poets' tongues have known.
Hear the nightingale complain
And from her bower their tales arraign.
Swallows sing the self-same plea
The while they chirp "cossi, cossi."
None the less, then, I entreat,
Your "tirra-lirra" still repeat --
Make them burst with very spite,
These poets, for the lies they write!

None the less, for what they say,
Live ye joyously alway!
Seek at each return of Spring
Your long-accustomed pleasuring.
Never may the pilfering raid
Of quaintly dainty shepherd-maid
Toward your furrows turn her quest
To spy your new-born cheeping nest
And steal it in her gown away
The while you sing in Heaven your lay.
Live, then, birdlings, live fore'er,
And lift aloft through highest air
Warbled song and soaring wing
To herald each return of Spring.





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