'In years away from this when I am quite forgotten, maybe you will turn up some of these old letters & feel a little like saying
"Ronsard m'a celebree
Du temps que j'etais jeune!"
But then i am not Ronsard!
I never, indeed, remember to have read anything of R's, except that...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ford Madox Ford Print: Book
'With Mademoiselle Fleury that morning I had been struck by some lines in Ronsard's "Sonnets pour Helene", bittersweet, barbed, that drove home a feeling I had recognised and resisted long before, a sense of the intransigent flux of life, unappeasable in the midst of sweetness - intimations of mortality, of transient triumph. I tried out the thought on Bill:
"Quand vous serez bien vielle, au soir, a la chandelle,
Assise aupres du feu, devidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous emerveillant,
Ronsard me celebrait du temps que j'etais belle".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Glasser Print: Book