There have been poets whose
whole fame has rested on one poem, as Gray's on the Elegy in a Country
Churchyard, or Ronsard's, as many critics have thought, on the eighteen
lines of one famous ode. Du Bellay has almost been the poet of one poem;
and this one poem of his is an Italian thing transplanted into that green
country of Anjou; out of the Latin verses of Andrea Navagero, into
French: but it is a thing in which the matter is almost nothing, and the
form almost everything; and the form of the poem as it stands, written in
old French, is all Du Bellay's own. It is a song which the winnowers are
supposed to sing as they winnow the corn, and they invoke the winds to
lie lightly on the grain.
D'UN VANNEUR DE BLE AUX VENTS*
A vous trouppe legere
Qui d'aile passagere
Par le monde volez,
Et d'un sifflant murmure
L'ombrageuse verdure
Doulcement esbranlez.
J'offre ces violettes,
Ces lis & ces fleurettes,
Et ces roses icy,
Ces vermeillettes roses
Sont freschement ecloses,
Et ces oelliets aussi.
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