Sonnets pour Hélène
An ageing court poet is set to write love verse to Hélène de Surgères, one of Catherine de' Medici's maids of honour, and makes of the commission a sequence about the distance between an old man's praise and a young woman's civility. He tells her to picture herself grey by candlelight, spinning and half asleep, hearing his name read out and marvelling that she was once sung so; he tells her to gather the roses of life today. His last great sequence, written at fifty-three, and the poem Yeats afterwards turned into When You Are Old.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ Canzoniere
- ↓ When You Are Old
Attributes
Genre
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
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- 67% · 10 shared