The second motif dwells on the frightful spectacle of human beauty gone to decay. The third is the death-dance: death dragging along men of all conditions and ages.
Compared with the two others, the first of these themes is but a graceful and elegiac sigh. After having taken shape in Greek poetry, it was adopted by the Fathers, and pervaded the literature of all Christendom, and that of Islam also. Byron, too, used it in Don Juan. The Middle Ages cultivated it with special predilection. We find it in the heavy rhythm of the erudite poetry of the twelfth century:
"Est ubi gloria nunc Babylonia? nunc ubi dirus
Nabugodonosor, et Darii vigor, illeque Cyrus?. . .
Nunc ubi Regulus? aut ubi Romulus, aut ubi Remus?
Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus."[1]
Franciscan poetry of the thirteenth century (if the following lines are not of an older date) still preserves an echo of these rhyming hexameters:
"Dic ubi Salomon, olim tam nobilis
Vel Sampson ubi est, dux invincibilis,
Et pulcher Absalon, vultu mirabilis,
Aut dulcis Jonathas, multum amabilis?"[2]
Deschamps composed at least four of his ballads on this theme. Gerson worked it out in a sermon; Denis the Carthusian in his treatise, De quatuor hominum novissimis (on the four last things of man); Chastellain in a long poem entitled Le Pas de la Mort. Olivier de la Marche, in his Parement et Triumphe des Dames composed on it a lament over all the princesses who died in his time. Villon gives it a new accent of soft tenderness in his Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis, with the refrain:
"Mais où sont lex neiges d'antan?"
And then he sprinkles it with irony in the Ballad of the
- ↑ Where is now your glory, Babylon, where is now the terrible Nebuchadnezzar, and strong Darius and the famous Cyrus? Where is now Regulus, or where Romulus, or where Remus? The rose of yore is but a name, mere names are left to us.
- ↑ Say where is Solomon, once so noble, Or Samson where is he, the invincible chief, And fair Absalom of the wonderful face, Or sweet Jonathan, the most amiable?
