On This Day, 1818, John Keats Sent a Sonnet of Ronsard in a Letter to an Amorous Friend

At The American Reader, a feature called "This Day in Letters" presents September 23, 1818, as the day John Keats wrote to to his close friend, the English poet John Hamilton Reynolds, "with words of encouragement regarding Reynolds’ new love for an unnamed young woman. 'But I conjure you to think at Present of nothing but pleasure,' enjoins Keats. '[G]orge the honey of life.'” Keats included with the note a translation of a sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, who had a pretty nice house. Good find!

...Give yourself up to it—you cannot help it—and I have a Consolation in thinking so. I never was in love—Yet the voice and shape of a Woman has haunted me these two days—at such a time, when the relief, the feverous relief of Poetry seems a much less crime—This morning Poetry has conquered—I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life—I feel escaped from a new strange and threatening sorrow—And I am thankful for it—There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of Immortality.

Poor Tom—that woman—and Poetry were ringing changes in my senses—Now I am in comparison happy—I am sensible this will distress you—you must forgive me. Had I known you would have set out so soon I could have sent you the ‘Pot of Basil’ for I had copied it out ready.—Here is a free translation of a Sonnet of Ronsard, which I think will please you—I have the loan of his works—they have great Beauties.

Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies,

For more adornment, a full thousand years;
She took their cream of Beauty’s fairest dyes,

And shap’d and tinted her above all Peers:
Meanwhile Love kept her dearly with his wings,

And underneath their shadow fill’d her eyes
With such a richness that the cloudy Kings

Of high Olympus utter’d slavish sighs.
When from the Heavens I saw her first descend,

My heart took fire, and only burning pains,
They were my pleasures—they my Life’s sad end;

Love pour’d her beauty into my warm veins.

* * * * * * * * * *

Read the rest of the letter at The American Reader. Image at top: Isabella and the Pot of Basil, by John White Alexander, 1897 or 1898.