Euphemism for death pervades French poetry: Villon speaks of those who "sont trespassés," those who have passed on, rather than died, while Ronsard describes his beloved's future death as "quand vous serez bien vieille," softening mortality through temporal indirection; Racine employs euphemism for sexuality and bodily functions throughout his tragedies, following classical decorum by substituting elevated periphrases for direct description: the "feux" of Phèdre's desire replace any explicit acknowledgment of physical passion; The political euphemism is a powerful figure in satirical poetry: when a poet describes a tyrannical king as "notre guide éclairé," the gap between the flattering euphemism and the brutal reality creates a devastating irony visible to every reader; A student studying euphemism in poetry should also consider anti-euphemism, the deliberate refusal of indirect expression practiced by Rimbaud and the Surrealists, understanding that Baudelaire's choice to name spleen, carrion, and corruption directly was itself a radical poetic gesture against the rhetorical conventions of his time; Apollinaire's war poems use euphemism with careful ambivalence: the shells are "roses" and the trenches are "jardins," creating a bitter irony in which the beauty of the euphemism makes the horror it conceals more rather than less apparent; The history of poetic euphemism is also a history of social taboo: the topics that poets most consistently avoid naming directly, death, sex, political violence, and bodily functions, reveal the pressure points of any culture's self-presentation.