Du Bellay's Sonnet 36: Exile and Universal Meditation

Extract

[...] The dialectic between macrocosm (the cosmos) and microcosm (the lyrical already universalizes the suffering to come. The second quatrain opens with a syntactic break with the coordinating conjunction We observe the return of the first person singular from the first verse of the stanza. The lyrical is at the heart of this stanza; we move from the cosmic scale to the individual's scale. Ovid's text adopts this same structure / We note that Du Bellay universalizes his complaint both through his relationship with the cosmos and through the use of an ancient model. [...]

[...] Du Bellay gives his poem a more dramatic, fatal dimension. The entire poem is based on emphasis. As for the opposition 'jours' and 'nuits' in line 11, this antithetical parallelism creates hermeticism, the idea that everything is confused in the struggle against time. This lyrical duality is taken up many times, notably in Romantic poetry three centuries later in Victor Hugo's famous poem 'Demain dès l'aube' ('and the day will be for me like the night'), to symbolize mourning, the conflict with the universe in the face of the loss of a loved one. [...]

[...] Ovid, in his elegiac collection entitled Sad, was writing the distortion of time, when the lyrical I finds itself far from its homeland, Rome. In fact, exile is a motif that lends itself to the sentiment of nostalgia and a time that flows slowly. Du Bellay, a poet of the Renaissance, will reappropriate the tenth elegy of Ovid's fifth book. Ironically, it is here in Rome that the poet seeks to flee. More than anything, he desires to return to France. [...]

[...] Du Bellay concludes his poem with a return to the private address. The pathetic register is still deployed with the adverb of quantity ('combien me dure') which insists on the immense character of the ordeal experienced, in a hyperbolic way. The pronominalization of the verb 'durer' is surprising. Conventionally, this verb is attributed to an inanimate object. Here, the poet makes the duration bear on himself, as if exile were embodied in his body. Besides this hypallage, we note the sylleptic use of the term, which can also underline the difficulty, the fact of 'enduring', and thus the long and painful character of exile. [...]

[...] LThe chiasmus between lines 8 and 9 ("Lentement son tour. Il fait son tour si lent") imposes by its typical structure a logical connection between our two movements. It always produces the effect of a cycle, but from now on, the poet no longer seems able to escape it. The more the poem progresses, the more the vise tightens around the lyrical who was already imprisoned at the beginning of the sonnet by a force that surpassed him. If the previous movement expressed a clear opposition between the place coveted by the poet and the place where he is enclosed, as well as a utopian enthusiasm for his return home, this second movement plunges into an infernal and violent cycle. [...]