Joachim Du Bellay, L'Olive

When Love* lowers your beautiful eyes to the earth,
And assembles your spirits in a sigh
With his hands, and then looses them
In a clear, angelic, divine voice,

Then of me a sweet rapture
Comes about, in myself: I lose myself, it seems as if
My thought and my will are stolen
Along with my heart, from the depths of my breast.

But this sweet sound, whose divine accents
Have occupied the portal to my senses,
Holds back the rushing forth of my ravished soul.

This is how on human doings
Not the three Sisters*, but Love* with his hand
Weaves and weaves again the tissue of my life.


(note: the "three Sisters" refer to the Parcae, or the three Fates, from classical mythology, when many believed that human lives were predetermined by the Fates, or fate as we know it today. "Love" refers to the God of Love. It seems in this poem Du Bellay is saying that through love one can overcome one's fate. )