The Wrath of Priapus: Rémy Belleau's "Jean qui ne peult" and its Traditions

In recent decades scholars have occasionally turned, with less distaste or embarrassment than earlier in the twentieth century, to a set of poems describing that not uncommon but dismaying condition: impotence. ¹ Sometimes this embarrassing sexual poverty--a "Hell," Aphra Behn succinctly calls it with the crispness of one who will never go there--is the result of spending too much too soon; sometimes the sufferer realizes, like George Gascoigne, that age or misfortune has deprived him of the needed "pence." ² More often he claims to be young, vigorous, and puzzled. Sometimes he suspects that his problems are his partner's fault. European poets wrote of both sorts of impotence, that due to speedy excess and that caused by defect, sometimes in the same poem. The topic itself is compelling for obvious reasons, but its rueful poetic treatments from antiquity to the Restoration have considerable literary and cultural interest as well. Several informative articles have already traced the history of the "imperfect enjoyment" poems from Ovid to Nashe to Behn and Rochester, that series of sometimes interrelated texts in which the afflicted lover (usually, if not quite always, also the narrator) fails to stand stiffly to his task. The poor man's dysfunction is sometimes left mysterious, but more often he ascribes it to sorcery, his own overeager desire, the lady's excessive or insufficient attractiveness, or the wrath of the gods--although never, so far as we know, the wrath of the Christian God.

Because one of us, Roger Kuin, has recently been examining the three manuscript versions of a witty poem in this series by Rémy Belleau (1528-1577), and because this poem--"Jean qui ne peult," or "John Who Can't"--has been noted only in passing and never examined in detail, still less translated, we think that it would be valuable to describe how it fits and does not fit into this series. In this essay we offer the text, a literal blank-verse translation, some thoughts on how Belleau makes use of Roman models in ways that set him apart from later poets in this oddly cheerful tradition, and speculations on what his poem might be doing aside from satisfying his age's taste for such naughtiness. In its own way, Belleau's poem is a fine example not only of briskly clever obscenity but also of clever humanist translatio--there is nothing slavishly imitative about his verse and its generic memories are complex. ³ In this regard, Belleau follows the lead of Renaissance Neo-Latin writers who, it has been said, broke with medieval amatory traditions by reviving or adapting the erotic or obscene manner of such ancient authors as Propertius, Ovid, and Horace. ⁴ He may even have added a touch of allegory, or at least some overtones especially audible to his first readers.

Those readers had already brought Belleau recognition, for he was not only an intimus of the great and good but a member of the group of learned and fashionable poets eventually called the "Pléiade." One important contribution to that group's program of humanist recovery and the "illustration" of French literature was his French translation of Anacreon's odes (1556), a project typical of a poet known best for writing in exquisite miniature. It was Belleau's colleague Pierre de Ronsard whose ambitions led him to the grander Greek odes; if "Pierre de Ronsard" can be turned into "Rose de Pindare," as Estienne Tabourot reports in his Bigarrures, "Rémy de Belleau"--"ce doucereux & gentil Poëte" can be "Abrevé de Miel" ("slaked with honey"). ⁵ Most famous for lovely and sometimes pleasantly erotic lyrics in his Bergeries and, later, his Pierres précieuses, Belleau also wrote a comedy, La Reconnue (1577), based on Plautus' Casina, and an anti-Huguenot brief epic in carnivalesque macaronic...