Ronsard and his fellows did create a Western tradition from Homer and Pindar via Virgil and Horace to Petrarch and later Italians, instituted future dominant poetic genres and their prosody, and set the benchmark to follow or reject. Modern French students still learn Nicolas Boileau’s (1636–1711) scorn in his 1674 Art poétique (refusing Ronsard’s call for glad abundance) and, with his “enfin Malherbe vint” (at last came Malherbe [1555–1628]), that poet’s fabled erasing of Ronsard’s poetry. They do not read Descartes’s intimate, Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), who, hailing the creative musician Jacques Mauduit (1557–1627), notably his requiem for Ronsard, lauds “this prodigious Genius of poetry” (in whose verse music is crucial). Nor do they hear the regard of Louis XIV’s and Colbert’s critical czar Jean Chapelain (1595–1674). Do they see the key topos of Stéphane Mallarmé’s later, radical Coup de dés, whose speaker says “nothing … will have taken place … but the place … save … maybe … a constellation,” as conjuring the Pléiade, being, like these ancestors, end and beginning?—not least as his earlier well-known “Sonnet in-yx” (one a Phénix reborn) evokes a seven-star constellation, is built of standard quatrains and tercets, in the capitalized regular alexandrines normalized by Ronsard, and ends on “Anguish,” “deceased nude in the mirror, even / as, in the oblivion enclosed by the frame, it is fixed / By twinklings right upon the septet”? The Pléiade as burden and comfort alike? Will they see the same reference in René Char’s self-vision as Orion, whose belt points to the Pleiades? Such allusions can be unlimitedly multiplied.
Ronsard vastly did what du Bellay said in the Deffence (whose writing Ronsard shared). They meant to forge a tradition by translating language, meaning, and culture from great poets of other ages and places (like a bee, said Ronsard, echoing Seneca, and others, flitting among flowers to blend pollens into honey); create an idiom able to express and build on these vitalities; mold familiarity with poetic genres able to sustain the highest levels of thought and culture; fix prosodic rules that best transmitted these; and fit all to a politics and ideology of the stable state and society that these techniques sought to help establish. Gustave Cohen ended his Life and Work by listing nine new/ ancient genres this project entailed: Horatian and Anacreontic “odelet,” Pindaric ode, Virgilian and Theocritan eclogue, Tibullan elegy, political satire, long philosophical poem, Homeric and Virgilian epic, Petrarchan love sonnet, comedy and tragedy. Ronsard excelled at the first eight, initiated the first seven. The project also involved rethinking prosodic forms, notably what had been the old heroic decasyllabic line (that Ronsard still used by royal order for the Franciade, he said, equivocally à contre cœur) and replacing it by the twelve-syllable alexandrine: he perfected the last and rethought the first, as well as octosyllabics for the chanson, penta- and heptasyllabics (Paul Verlaine’s touted vers impair?).
Ronsard did this in civil war’s soon increasingly savage embrace, many of whose key players he knew with some intimacy: a status amplifying his influence on the elites. This was unusual, if not unique. Marot, the major poet just before him, was Marguerite de Navarre’s court poet and secretary before being both to her brother François I. At the time of Ronsard’s first publications, a laureate role at Henri II’s court was held by Mellin de Saint-Gelais (1491–1558), who unwisely attacked Ronsard, only to find himself fast rebuffed by such elite opponents as Marguerite, Henri II’s sister, and Michel de l’Hôpital, the king’s and Catherine’s great chancellor—further brightening Ronsard’s star. As he said in a great ode to l’Hôpital on poetry’s power (written just after the mid-1550s spat, printed in the Fifth and then First Book), the more envy tried to sink him, the higher he floated. For Ronsard had entered these circles long before he shone as poet and public intellectual with a cultural role eclipsing that of any court fore-bear—as his death’s impact would show (akin, mutatis mutandis, to public passions at those of later icons like Voltaire, Hugo, Valéry, or Sartre).
Here, in addition to earlier glimpses of poetic content, remarks on two famous odes are in order, one printed, both written, in 1550, and later added to the collection. The ode on Henri II’s March 1550 peace with England became the first of the First Book. Extravagant praise of Henri’s moral, cerebral, and martial gifts swiftly yields to the myth of the goddess Peace’s defeat of Chaos and the forming of the four elements to create a golden age world. She cannot, though, prevent the discord of Troy—happily, it turns out—for Hector’s son Francion will, as Cassandra and Hector’s ghost predict, found the French royal dynasty whose latest avatar proves able to bring back Peace and her putative golden age. With Henri’s pay, Ronsard will sing this epic and give the king the one sure lasting memorial of “the divine and rare equity in which a king is clothed” (ll. 422–24), against slander, flattery, and poetasters’ cackle. He ends with a call for victory now in Italy against Spain and in the “Indies” in the future, but also with seriocomic barter for the king’s cash, whose tone makes the most of his early proximity to Henri and his siblings. This ode and the ode to l’Hôpital appeal as much to the same pantheon of poets, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, as to myths of Peace. But the former’s ten triads pale beside the latter’s twenty-four.
“Wandering through the fields of Grace,” the poet gathers flowers to crown the gods’ darling who, defending Ronsard, has restored Memory’s daughters, the Muses. Seven years after their birth, wanting to meet their father, Jupiter, they fearfully follow Memory to Ocean’s undersea palace where the gods are feasting, and where “by Nature are enclosed in the depths of a hundred thousand vessels, the seeds of all things” (ll. 137–39). At Jupiter’s wish, they sing of the strife of peace and war (Minerva and Neptune), truth and heresy (gods/titans), culture and ignorance (gods/giants). After three triads, the last, too, is brought to peace by the Muses’ “sweet song,” ravishing Jupiter and charming Mars, war itself, to sleep. Sung poetry’s defeat of war’s chaos mirrors Peace’s victory over Chaos in the near-concurrent peace ode. So it does Love’s victory over Chaos, opening sonnet 42 of the first Amours, which prefigures the “rounding of the perfections of my passions’ petitz corps [those seeds of things],” shaping in love “my soul’s sphere”; or sonnet 37’s ordering of the same “little bodies, swerving as they fall, cast together by chance blow, [having] composed the world” as love my heart. Both odes were collected in 1552 with the Amours: these ties of amity, love, and sociable peace are as willful and important (we shall see), as was Lucretius’s paean to Venus’s ordering of atomic chaos.
The ode to l’Hôpital is not half over. Jupiter gives the Muses rule over nature’s sounds, over seers, poets, prophets, oracles, and universal harmonies. He grants reverence from princes who honor poetry’s power and vows poetry’s power to eternalize such princes. Poetry is part art (art of arts), mostly virtuous inspiration (rarest gift, he tells du Bellay in ode 1.16), shown so in a history from first vates to late “melancholics.” Of these he is one, says a 1556 chanson, ultimately in Amours 2, about how imagination puts all he sees into visions of his beloved: “Et m’esjouys d’estre melancholique / Pour recevoir tant de formes en moy” (And I revel in being melancholic, to receive in me so many shaping fantasies). Aristotle felt that a melancholy disposition defined all those “eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts” (953a10–12). Antiquity provided not just poetic authority. Philosophy offered poetry grounds for untold intellectual authority. All this, says the ode to l’Hôpital is reborn via its dedicatee and a few others: love, peace and poetry uniting. The Franciade is forecast here, too.
Clear by now was that if Dorat was the group’s beloved, sensitive mentor and scholarly guide, Ronsard was its inspiring poetic heart. Only he had exultant omnifarious sweep. In his funeral oration, du Perron said that if “past ages have seen men excel in one genre of poetry, none has been seen till now who embraced all facets of poetry at once, as he has. Homer did bear off the palm amid epic poets, Pindar amid lyric, another amid bucolic and so on. But they
have split poetry’s universal glory between them, and each has taken his bit. Never has there been but one Ronsard who possessed it totally in full and totally whole.” The poet’s Pléiade editors echo Gérard de Nerval in hearing a maid in Scarron’s 1651 Roman comique trill an ode of “old Ronsard’s” as she does dishes. Actually, street musicians “sing the old air badly,” but if all are misrecalling another case, mine is enhanced. This is not, they say, “imaginary ‘popular’ ronsardism,” but a jibe like Malherbe’s, Balzac’s or Boileau’s. But Ronsard’s appeal was wide, and the vignette equally recalls Virgil’s mass appeal or Montaigne’s report of peasants of both sexes in Florentine fields singing Ariosto to their lutes’ tune. Du Perron records a view general during Ronsard’s life and after. Scarron (and another?), like Montaigne, is retailing fact, however interpreted. Memoirs and chronicles record not just formal musical performances of Ronsard, but, says Kenneth Jones, “their being sung or hummed by lawyers, soldiers, and ladies accompanying themselves on the lute or guitar” (72).
A perfect such song is another ode(let), to Cassandre, first inserted in the revised 1553 Amours, moved to the First Book of the Odes in 1555: “Mignonne, allon voir si la rose / Qui ce matin avoit desclose / Sa robe de pourpre au soleil / A point perdu, cette vesprée / Les plis de sa robe pourprée / Et son teint au vostre pareil.” (Darling, let’s see if the rose / That this morning did unclose / Its crimson robe to the sun / Has not wholly lost, this eve / The folds of its crimson sleeve / And its tint to yours akin.) Stirring popular and elite publics, this carpe diem’s eighteen octosyllables became anthology fodder, like many of Ronsard’s love sonnets: “Que me servent mes vers, & les sons de ma lyre”; “Mignongne, levés-vous, vous estes paresseuse,” to Marie in 1555; “Comme on voit sur la branche au mois de May la rose,” on her death; or, to Hélène, “Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle,” both 1578. I name these to mark signal prosodic change after the Odes and first Amours. The 1554 Bocage and Meslanges assay eight-, ten-, and twelve-syllable lines. The first, notably, accents alexandrines even in its sonnets. Of the next two collections, 1555’s Continuation des amours (sonnets to Marie) and Hymnes, the first uses alexandrines near-exclusively in its sonnets (decasyllables rule his earlier love sonnets); the second in twelve of fifteen hymns: the dedication and all of the longest, most subtitled vers heroiques (as are fifty-eight of seventy Continuation sonnets) versus three in vers communs, the decasyllables of hymns printed earlier. The second book of hymns (1556)—some of them test runs for the Franciade, said Ronsard in at least one—uses only alexandrines. He also now added the alexandrine dedications to Henri II for the complete Odes and their third book.
Since Corneille, Racine, and Boileau, the alexandrine has been touted as the grand meter of epic French reason, clear and distinct thought, and a generally well-ordered condition, if sadly ancien régime–oriented: “governments change; prosody stays ever intact,” Mallarmé ironizes in La musique et les lettres. By his day, poets were voicing anguish at the poetic and ideological curbs that they felt this meter coerces. Ronsard’s hymns, of Homeric, orphic, Callimachan, and Christian sources, indeed told devotion to monarchy, its values, and its agents’ antique and Christian virtues and heroic aura, as well as its, their, and France’s accord with nature, seasons, cosmos, and divine reason. All things human yield to vicissitudes of time and temper. Virtue and God right them. The sonnets confuse issues, but for now their and the hymns’ subtitles offer alexandrines as heroic verses to replace the epic meter of old French roman, which was (save Alexandre) decasyllabic—and until Ronsard, the only line called “heroic” (as du Bellay said in the Deffence, where, indeed, he never so much as mentioned the alexandrine). In the Abbregé, equating the alexandrine to the Greco-Latin epic hexameter (“our hexameter … hereditary instrument … national cadence,” says Mallarmé in Crise de vers), he details usage of the twelve-syllable line, its “rest” (caesura) always on the sixth, and its rimes plates (aabbcc: his norm, here only implied) alternating masculine and feminine, for setting to music, “for Poetry without instruments, or without the grace of one or several voices, is not at all enjoyable, any more than instruments without animation by a pleasing voice’s melody.” “Composition of Alexandrines must be grave, noble and (so to say) high-spoken, the more as they are longer than others and would feel like prose if not composed of select, grave and resonant words and in rhyme rich enough that its richness prevents a prose style, and lingers in the ears until the next line’s end.” Two years later, he adds that he had wanted to compose the Franciade in alexandrines (“that I brought into fashion and honor”), but had to obey, “against my wish,” royal orders to do otherwise.
His 1572 preface explains his epic’s decasyllables differently. While, thanks to him, Ronsard agrees, alexandrines are now in fashion at court and with the young, and “would have been a hundred times easier to [use] than others, the more as they are longer and so less constrained [moins sujets],” he had “the ashamed awareness [la honteuse conscience] that they savor too much of prose [qu’ils sentent trop leur prose].” His longer, posthumous, 1587 preface opens on the topic. In youth he had “ignorantly” given alexandrines “the rank of our language’s heroic meter,” as “more suited to mighty tales and the mind’s finest ideas than other common verses.” Long thought, use, and experience “had disabused” him: “they savor too much of over-facile prose, and are too enervated and flabby,” save, he repeats, for translation, where their length eases explanation, or tragedy, where performance alters effect. Alexandrines’ rhythm and meter now seem too near the heart of normal French usage (as the Protestant Bible might be in mass explanation). A taut conflict between the two prefaces illuminates this thought. In 1572, Ronsard claims having based his epic “rather on Homer’s simple ease [naïve facilité] than on Virgil’s meticulous care.” By 1587, Virgil has taken over, despite Ronsard’s knowing that “the envious will cackle on about my stressing Virgil more often than Homer, his master and model.” Does not Virgil’s curieuse diligence now resonate with what Ronsard calls the extra difficulty of the greater metric constraints of decasyllables?
It is as if Ronsard were afraid and “ashamed” of the alexandrine, which is too “easy” because too close to French’s natural rhythms, potentially constraining the language itself by imposing revealed metric bonds that could ultimately constrain its rhythms and therefore its meanings. Poetry and its demands would be not a separate, vatic, or elite practice, but at the very core of language. Mallarmé usefully returns, again in Crise de vers reflecting on Victor Hugo’s death to the effect that not only he thought “verse is simply itself literature; that you have verse as soon as diction is accentuated, rhythm as soon as style is.” This is the other chronological end, as it were, of Ronsard’s fear about the alexandrine and its need to be endowed with high tropes and figures (he repeats in the posthumous preface) for its richness to “prevent prose style”: a proximity to prose marks the meter as capturing something like an essence of French langue. For Ronsard, attaching poetry to music may have been another way to displace that capture; for Mallarmé, quite the contrary: “music rejoins verse to form poetry.” For Ronsard this might increase, if not (shameful) nightmare, at least a weight of political and intellectual responsibility that the 1562–63 civil war polemics and attacks unpleasantly typified. If rhythm and meter capture the heart of everyday language, speaking to power is no vatic activity, but targets the core of what enables such power to function at all—which was exactly the point of late-nineteenth-century poets’ attack on the alexandrine, as the Jesuit Victor Delaporte’s irate 1898 polemic against them, De la rime française, makes conspicuous.
This may be why Ronsard’s period of emphasizing alexandrines was relatively short, more or less from 1554 to 1565, except for the late sonnet sequence for Hélène (1578). The most important Discours on the civil wars are dated 1562–63, the elegies were mostly all written by 1565, and the sixty-four alexandrines closing the late Franciade pre
face may be their own commentary. After 1560, 80 percent of Ronsard’s still prolific output was in non-alexandrine meters—not counting the epic’s 6,150 decasyllables. What Ronsard says about the alexandrine may be one thing; what he does, perhaps another. Let us look at a short passage from Hymne de la Justice to his old college colleague, Cardinal Charles de Guise:
A History of Modern French Literature Page 16