Ronsard, Part II

Here is the rest of my post on Ronsard. There is *so* much to say about him, but I hope I have captured the essence and have given you some insight. See you in two weeks! Holly

Some notes about poetic ‘mechanics’

In case you haven’t figured it out, I love the ‘inner workings’ of poetry: the meter, the rhyme scheme, the rhetorical tricks, the sheer musicality. Ronsard makes full use of these, and, with your indulgence, I’d like to do a ‘mini’ close reading on this bad boy:

XIX
Avant le temps tes temples fleuriront,
De peu de jours ta fin sera bornée,
Avant ton soir se clorra ta journée,
Trahis d’espoir tes pensers periront.

Sans me fleschir tes escriptz flétriront,
Et ton desastre ira ma destinée,
Ta mort sera pour m’amour terminée,
De tes souspirs tes nepveux se riront.

Tu seras faict d’un vulgaire la fable,
Tu bastiras sur l’incertain du sable,
Et vainement tu peindras dans les cieulx:

Ainsi disoit la Nymphe qui m’affolle,
Lors que le ciel pour séeller sa parole
D’un dextre ésclair fut presage à mes yeulx.


Vers Feature(s)
all Ronsard uses either the future tense or the future anterior, resulting in
extensive use of ‘r’, ‘ont’ (3rd person plural), ‘é(e)’, all of which are very
sonorous
1 alliteration with ‘temps’ and ‘temples’, both with the ‘t’ and the nasal
also internal rhyme
2-3 juxtaposition of ‘jours’, ‘soir’, ‘journée’
3 alliteration of ‘t’ in ‘ton’ and ‘ta’
3-4 internal rhyme ‘soir’ and ‘espoir’
4 extensive alliteration with ‘t’, ‘p’ (both stops), and ‘r’ (sonorous)
5 alliteration with ‘fl’, ‘es’, ‘r’
6 play with ‘desastre’ and ‘destinée’: similar sound but juxtaposed meaning
7 play with ‘Ta mort’ and ‘m’amour’ as above
9 alliteration with liquid ‘l’
9-10 anaphore with ‘Tu’
13 strong alliteration on ‘s’
14 alliteration on ‘d’

I don’t know if this makes a lot of sense, but I thought it would throw it out there.

As far as the sonnet as a whole goes, the traditional narrative structure of a Ronsardian sonnet goes something like this (part of this was in an earlier post on Labé):

Quatrains: Description, visuality, realism, language,
Tercets: Hyper-realism, represents discourse

With that in mind, here’s how this sonnet plays out: the quatrains are definitely descriptive of what may happen. The tercets are filled with hyper-real imagery: ‘tu peindras dans les cieulx’, ‘la Nymphe’. There are also many references in the tercets to discours: ‘la fable’, ‘peindras’ (a stretch, but still a form of expression), ‘disoit’, ‘parolle’.

Ronsard’s legacy

Always copied, never bettered? There is no doubt that Ronsard had a profound influence on both his peers and those who followed him. According to Michel Beaujour, “French poetry would not be a mere repetition of the old poems. Imitation meant invention as well as translation and transposition. Ronsard kept insisting on his Frenchness, on his rootedness in French places which it was his task to raise to [a] level of poetic universality...Writing under the influence of ancient spirits, Ronsard put into practice a kind of poetics that would remain paradigmatic until the waning of French classicism.” (p. 202)

There you go.

Sources:

Beaujour, Michel. ‘1550: Pierre de Ronsard publishes his Quatre premiers livres des odes; Inspiration and Poetic Glory’. In Hollier, Denis, ed. A New History of French Literature.

Cave, Terence, ed. Ronsard the Poet. London: Metheun & Co. Ltd., 1973.