Ronsard, Pierre de | Cathy Yandell (essay date 1997)
Cathy Yandell (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: “Carpe Diem Revisited: Ronsard's Temporal Ploys,” in Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, 1997, pp. 1281-1302.
[In the following essay, Yandell investigates the carpe diem theme in Ronsard's poetry and its relation to the poet's dread of aging.]
For women are as Roses, whose faire flowre Being once displaid, doth fall that verie howre.
Orsino to Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (2:4:36-39)
The carpe diem (“pluck the day”) motif, whose onomastic origins can be traced to Horace, permeates not only classical Greek and Latin poetry but also lyric poetry from fifteenth-century Italy to sixteenth-century Spain to seventeenth-century England.1 Few students of English literature are unfamiliar with Robert Herrick's “Corinna's Going a Maying,” John Donne's “The Anagram,” William Shakespeare's Sonnets 3 and 4, or Andrew...
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