Selected Poems

'Live now and listen, do not wait in vain
Until tomorrow; pluck life's rose today.'

Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard are two of the major sixteenth-century French poets and leaders of the extraordinary group known as 'La Pléiade'. Determined to create a national vernacular literature, the Pléiade poets profited from an intense study of Greek and Roman models and from a creative use of classical mythology to produce a body of verse that reflects the vigour and variety of European Renai...