Translations/Adaptations: 1 Ronsard Poem by Rob Dyer

After Ronsard

When you are old beside the quiet evening fire,
knitting and winding beneath the cold electric light,
you will say, singing my verse with aged bewilderment,
Ronsard me célébroit du temps que j'estois belle.
You'll have no servant girl or lover to hear my words,
nodding and dreaming, worn with children or teaching
spinsterish, who might at my secret name awake
in startled recognition, learning you Beatrice,
ever young and flowering on my lips of praise,
I shall be among the myrtle shades, armed with no flesh
or bone, beneath the earth, finding my immortal peace,
and you, old, bent, arthritic by the hearth, think, you,
will you regret you turned my guilty love away.
Live now to earn not just your established fame -
she saw the wild thing emprisoned in the skin,
the song the world had caged, and let him loose,
with fragile, girlish words, to roam his wilderness...