SOURCE: “Carpe Diem Revisited: Ronsard's Temporal Ploys,” in Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, 1997, pp. 1281-1302.

In the following essay, Yandell investigates the carpe diem theme in Ronsard's poetry and its relation to the poet's dread of aging.

For women are as Roses, whose faire flowre Being once displaid, doth fall that verie howre. 

Orsino to Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (2:4:36-39)

The carpe diem (“pluck the day”) motif, whose onomastic origins can be traced to Horace, permeates not only classical Greek and Latin poetry but also lyric poetry from fifteenth-century Italy to sixteenth-century Spain to seventeenth-century England.¹ Few students of English literature are unfamiliar with Robert Herrick's “Corinna's Going a Maying,” John Donne's “The Anagram,” William Shakespeare's Sonnets 3 and 4, or Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress.” Similarly, in the Spanish tradition, Garcilaso de la Vega's “En tanto que de rosa y azucena,” Luis de Góngora's “Mientras...