The focus of this article is mainly on Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, whose poetry features the themes of sleep or dream in many ways, aspects and levels.Among Ronsard’s odes we can find a lyric prayer to a personifi ed and divinized Sleep (Voeu au Somme); the poem is marked by a strong desire for oblivion or even for death as eternal sleep, considered as liberation from the troubles and anxieties of the daily life, as a remedy for extreme torments.
Dream visions are also structural elements of du Bellay’s cycles of love poetry, e.g. the Somnium (in the case of Latin elegies) or Sonnet V of L’Olive (in the case of French sonnets). On the other hand, the Songe, linked to the Antiquités de Rome, represents a series of pessimist and catastrophic visions inspired by Ecclesiastes and the Book of Revelation.
As for reveries, they are often comparable to a mental voyage, a kind of a quest, related to the Platonic ladder of love with three main steps: love of a beautiful body, love of a beautiful soul and love of beauty itself, i.e. the eternal and absolute beauty. Among the Platonic infl uences we can also classify the androgyny myth and the idea of metempsychosis, noticeable in Ronsard’s poetry (Élégie XV), presenting a very pessimistic vision of the human nature.Th e Hymne de la Surdité of du Bellay, in which the poet transforms his own disability into an ideal reality, is probably rooted in a similar vision.

The focus of this article is mainly on Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay, whose poetry features the themes of sleep or dream in many ways, aspects and levels.Among Ronsard’s odes we can find a lyric prayer to a personifi ed and divinized Sleep (Voeu au Somme); the poem is marked by a strong desire for oblivion or even for death as eternal sleep, considered as liberation from the troubles and anxieties of the daily life, as a remedy for extreme torments.
Dream visions are also structural elements of du Bellay’s cycles of love poetry, e.g. the Somnium (in the case of Latin elegies) or Sonnet V of L’Olive (in the case of French sonnets). On the other hand, the Songe, linked to the Antiquités de Rome, represents a series of pessimist and catastrophic visions inspired by Ecclesiastes and the Book of Revelation.
As for reveries, they are often comparable to a mental voyage, a kind of a quest, related to the Platonic ladder of love with three main steps: love of a beautiful body, love of a beautiful soul and love of beauty itself, i.e. the eternal and absolute beauty. Among the Platonic infl uences we can also classify the androgyny myth and the idea of metempsychosis, noticeable in Ronsard’s poetry (Élégie XV), presenting a very pessimistic vision of the human nature.Th e Hymne de la Surdité of du Bellay, in which the poet transforms his own disability into an ideal reality, is probably rooted in a similar vision.