Emblems of Desire

Emblem XVII
Ivy & Wall
"To love I suffer ruin"

"Each day spent with you was a halcyon day in a dark winter, making the night of your absence the gloomier, more troublesome than the life which now rejects me is to my body. For since you left, like a hare squatting in its hole, I stretch my ears, pricking up my ears at every strange sound, lost in Egyptian darkness."

—prose translation of Délie 129 by Maurice Scève, found in Arnold Hauser's Mannerism.

Archipelago Books' description for Emblems of Desire, translated by Richard Sieburth:

"A forgotten masterpiece of French poetry, Emblems of Desire is a selection of 449 love poems first published in Lyons in 1544. Full of passionate ironies and charged obscurity, Scève is considered a sixteenth-century Mallarmé. His oblique self-portraiture laid the groundwork for many contemporary poets. This edition is accompanied by fifty emblems created by the author. The illustrations and Latin mottoes contained within each emblem offer poignant, and often witty, responses to his poems."

Here's a translation by Sieburth, Délie 378:

White Dawn had barely finished crowning
Her head with gleaming gold, & roses,
When my Spirit, utterly foundering
In the chaos of all it supposes,
Now behind the Curtains which enclose it,
Returned to render me less exposed to Death.
But you, who (all alone) have the power
To augur well for my fatality,
You will be the incorruptible Myrrh
Against the worms of my mortality.