Imitations of Immortality: Du Bellay’s Les Regrets, Petrarch, Horace, and Ovid

Les Regrets sont un journal: mais le journal d’un poète. Des confidences mais artistiquement composées. Son double sentiment, moqueur et désolé, sera mis en forme dans les Regrets, comme dans les Antiquités son émotion devant la grandeur. Pour s’exprimer et se définir, l’originalité de l’âme ne méprise pas de fixer un peu son attitude en s’inspirant d’habitudes littéraires.

(Saulnier 89)

Dans les Regrets, une nouvelle problématique intervient pour le poète: ce qu’il propose comme sujet dans son texte, c’est partiellement un extérieur, la Rome hostile, le people romain, mais tout ceci est mis au second plan, pour que ce nouveau sujet se propose à l’attention du poète: le moi.

(Gray 64)

In his 1558 collection of sonnets, Les Regrets, Joachim Du Bellay proposes to write a collection of poems that would be produced spontaneously and published in no particular order:

Je ne veulx point fouiller au seing de la nature,     Je ne veulx point chercher l’esprit de l’univers,     Je ne veulx point sonder les abysmes couvers,     Ny desseigner du ciel la belle architecture.

Je ne peins mes tableaux de si riche peinture,     Et si hauts argumens ne recherche à mes vers,     Mais suivant de ce lieu les accidents divers     Soit de bien, soit de mal, j’éscris à l’adventure.

Je me plains mes vers si j’ay quelque regret,     Je me ris avec eulx, je leur dy mon secret,     Comme estans de mon coeur les plus seurs secretaires.

Aussi ne veulx-je tant les pigner & friser,     Et de plus braves noms ne les veulx deguiser     Que de papiers journaulx, ou bien des commentaires.

(1)

How the poet could write what is, in fact, a collection of formally homogeneous and thematically related poems “à l’aventure” is never explained, nor is how the writing of such a group of poems could be known ahead of time and announced at the opening sequence.¹ Thus, from the beginning, the collection appears to be more complex than its stated program would lead the reader to expect. Furthermore, the self-conscious poetic intent which this programmatic statement bespeaks should be sufficient to subvert any unqualified acceptance of the poet’s claim to spontaneous “self-expression” and instead signal the presence of a more complex and self-reflexive lyric consciousness founded on the multiple and recursive temporalities of the poetic collection (cf. Miller Lyric Texts).

This, however, has not normally been the case. Following the poet’s own pronouncements, the Regrets have generally been read as an ad hoc collection of confessional poems, with no internal coherence beyond that supplied by the immediate experience of the poet himself. Unlike other Renaissance sonnet sequences, whose debt to Petrarchan convention is more apparent (such as Du Bellay’s own L’Olive; Gadoffre 35), Les Regrets is often thought of as a straightforward record of a unified subject, uncontaminated by artifice, imitation, or social posturing and unfolding along a homogeneous and univocal time line that coincides with the experience of the poet.² We are in the presence, we are told, of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. Does not the poet plainly say, “Je me contenterary de simplement escrire / ce que la passion seulement me fait dire” (4.9-10)?

The history of Du Bellay criticism shows that programmatic statements like this have generally been taken at face value, at least since the nineteenth century when Du Bellay’s verse was rediscovered by Sainte-Beuve and his contemporaries.³ In a typical study, the occasional obvious literary allusion is noted, certain formal refinements observed, but the possibility that Les Regrets might be other than an unmediated expression of the poet’s inner feelings or that the concepts of selfhood and sincerity are problematized is never seriously considered.⁴ This same set of basic assumptions continues to shape the reading of Du Bellay to the present day. Different aspects of this traditional interpretation have come under criticism at different times. Nonetheless, there has yet to be a sustained attempt to...