Pierre de Ronsard

(11 September 1524 – December 1585)

(pdf) Sonnets Pour Helene

  PIERRE DE RONSARD, « PRINCE OF POETS »

“In the self-same year of this so unhappy defeat of our arms at Pavia”, says De Thou in the eighty-second book of his Universal History,  “there came into the world Pierre de Ronsard; as though God had sought to compensate France for the debasement of her fame which that battle wrought, and for the almost utter ruin of our fortunes which followed, by the birth of so great a man.” If the ven­erable judge and grave historian could speak in this way, we need not wonder at the attitude of Ronsard’s bio­grapher and disciple, Binet. “Great as was the misfor­tune of this unhappy disaster,” he says, “it may well be doubted whether on that Fate-marked day there came not to France a benefit and glory yet greater, by the happy birth of her poet.”

Ronsard was born, not, as Binet would have it, on the very day of the battle at which King Francis I was de­feated and captured By Charles V, but within a year of it, and by the Old Style calendar, in the same year. The exact date is probably September 11, 1524. He came of one of the noble families of France, going back at least to the reign of Philip of Valois ; and his mother’s family was allied, by various marriages, with the very greatest of the nation, the Montpensiers, the Condés, and the Guises themselves, branches of the royal blood. The Chateau de la Poissonnière, Ronsard’s birthplace, is still standing, in the heart of that Loire country which is the very centre of France and the home of the Renais­sance chateaux; not by La Loire itself however, but by the smaller river Le Loir, which flows through Vendôme. Like other chateaux of the region, this one has its great central chimney built of hewn stones, on which are carved the armorial bearings of the family; you may still see there the flames and roses that represent Ronsard, for the name, said ancient heraldry, is from Ronce, the briar-rose, and ardre, to bum. Though modern ety­mology may disprove the derivation, it cannot take away the significance. He was the poet of flame and the poet of roses, if ever one was. The flowers themselves, when he was born — or so the old biography would have us think—knew that he was come to be their poet. “The day of his birth,” says Binet, “had like to have been that of his burial; for, as he was carried to be baptized, she that carried him, while crossing a field, dropped him unwittingly. But on tender grass and on flowers he fell, that received him the more softly.”

Loys de Ronsard, the poet’s father, was a man of some importance, Knight of the Order of St. Michael, and Maitre d’Hotel to Francis I. He was chosen, after the battle of Pavia, to take the King’s two sons to Spain as hostages, and obtain their father’s release; and he was employed on other missions of trust. He was some­thing of a poet, too, at odd moments; that is, he could write fair verse in Marot’s vein. But he was a gentleman of the old school, untouched by the Renaissance idea of the nobility of poetry; and he would not let a son of his take such trifling seriously. In the “Epistle to Pierre Lescot,” which is a sort of autobiography, Ronsard tells us : —

Often my father scolded me, and said:

“ Why waste thy days, poor fool, and tire thy head,

Courting Apollo and the Muses nine!

What shalt thou gain from all thy friends divine,

Save but a lyre, a bow, a string, a song

That like to smoke is quickly lost, along

The wind, and like the dust in air dispersed. ”

So the wise father admonishes, bidding him

“Leave this poor trade that never advanced a man,

Even the most skilful” . . .

nor ever even fed him, he adds — witness your Homer himself, who “ had never a red ”: —

“His Muse, whose voice, men say, was passing sweet,

Could never feed him, and in hunger sore

He begged his wretched breadfrom door to door.”

Be a lawyer, advises the father: then you can

                         “ Talk all you please, at some poor man’s expense”

Or embrace the “ moneyed skill ” of Medicine, that other daughter of Apollo to whom he gave all goods and honors, leaving her sister Poetry only a “ musty lyre.” Or best of all be courtier and soldier; for the king is quick to reward those who serve him in war. In short, be anything save poet! But, says Ronsard:—

How hard it is to change our nature's bent!

For threats or prayers or courteous argument

I could not banish verses from my head—

 My love of song grew more, the more he said, . .

Scarce twelve years old, hid in the valleys deep,

Or far from men, on wooded hill-sides steep,

I wandered careless of all else but verse,

And answering Echo would my songs rehearse.

Fauns, Satyrs, Pans, Dryad and Oread,

About me danced, in clasped tunics clad,

And leaping AEgipans with horned head,

And gentle troops of fairies fancy-bred.

It is a pretty picture of the poet-boy, for whom all na­ture is alive with comradeship; and reminds us a little of the boy Shelley.

No wonder he pined when he was shut up in a col­lege, under a pedantic master. After six months’ trial, in which he “got no good,” as he says, his father let him come home ; and later took him to court and gave him as page to the Dauphin of France. This plan worked better, for Ronsard was a born courtier as well as passionate nature-lover and poet. The Dauphin died soon after, and Ronsard was then attached to the suite of James of Scotland, who had come to marry Made­leine, the daughter of King Francis; and with him went to Scotland, spending nearly three years at the court there, and six months in England on his way back to France. Again a page in the royal family, he was sent to travel with several diplomatic missions: to Holland, to Scotland again, to Piedmont, to Germany. He was a favorite of King Francis, and especially of his son Henry, who was to be King Henry II., and who loved him most for his athletic prowess, and “ would never play a match but with Ronsard on his side.”

Thus the wishes of his father bade fair to be fulfilled — in fact, success at court was assured — when a fever caught in Germany brought on partial deafness, and unfitted him for the life of a courtier — “ who should be dumb rather than deaf’ suggests Ronsard. So he gave up his career; happy, it may be, to have this good excuse for not “ succeeding in life,” and for listening no more to the babble of court ambitions, but to the “ inner voices.”

Nature had taught him. The life of the world had taught him. Now, reversing the usual order, books were to teach him last. He had acquired a taste for ancient learning at the courts of France and of Scotland, where the Renaissance was in the air. His trip to Germany had been made in the company of Lazare de Bai£ that noble humanist who, when ambassador to Venice, left his post and travelled over the mountains to Rome, to attend the courses of a Greek professor there. Ron­sard was full of the Renaissance enthusiasm for the clas­sics, but he knew as yet only the modem languages. So this boy of eighteen, who was already a travelled man of the world, set himself to school again, and shut himself up in the College Coqueret to begin the work of boys of ten or twelve. And there he worked for seven years.

It was no ordinary college, this Collège Coqueret in the heart of the old Latin Quarter. And its master was no ordinary pedant, but a poet himself— in Latin and Greek only, of course, but still no scorner of poetry in the vulgar tongue. Here gathered the “Brigade,” as it was called before it knew itself for a new constella­tion of stars shining in the new heavens, and took the more pretentious name of “the Pleiades.” Beside Ronsard, the most important members of the group were D’Aurat, their teacher or rather leader in learning — older, of course, but still their comrade ; Jean Antoine de Baif, the son of Lazare de Baif, who, though eight years younger than Ronsard, could at first help him with his Greek; and Joachim du Bellay, whom Ronsard had met on a journey, at an inn ; they had talked together of the new dawn, had liked each other, and Du Bellay had come to live with Ronsard at the college. This little group of comrades was the very centre and hotbed of the Renaissance in France. They set themselves with passionate industry to acquiring the new knowledge, D’Aurat leading them on. When it was time to ap­proach the difficulties of Aeschylus, which hardly a man in France had yet attacked, he called Ronsard one day and read him “at a breath” the “Prometheus Bound,” “to give him,” as the old biography says, “the more eager taste for this new knowledge that had as yet not passed the seas to come to France.” And Ronsard ex­claimed, we can hear with what passionate enthusiasm, “My master, my master, why have you so long hid­den these riches from me!”. Greek, alas I is hardly studied thus in our colleges today. “With what desire and noble emulation,” says Binet, “did they toil to­gether !. . . Ronsard, who had spent his youth in courts, being accustomed to watch late, studied until two or three o’clock past midnight; and then going to his bed, woke Baif, who rose and took the candle, and did not let the place grow cold.” That pictures the spirit of the Renaissance — studying by relays, as it were. We have another such picture in Ronsard’s sonnet “To His Valet,” demanding three days of quiet to read the Iliad through. As Sainte-Beuve says, most of the Renaissance is in this sonnet — its devouring passion of study, its de­votion to the classics, its home-like familiarity with the Olympian Gods, its love of revel, and its love of love; the last being strongest of all, its claim superseding all others. This sonnet shows, too, how their devotion to study, passionate as it was, did not shut out life and love. It was in these years that Ronsard, “ following the court to Blois ” (for these students, all noble gentlemen, some­times returned to court) first saw his Cassandra. Nor did books shut out nature, or comradeship. Many were the excursions to wood and field, and many the open-air revels, that these boon companions of the Collège Coqueret had in those years when they were turning by night and by day, as Horace recommends, the leaves of ancient learning. “Summer’s Idlesse”, the “Comrade Song,” “Wine and Death,” and “The Praise of Roses” give us some conception of their comrade-spirit. There are many songs like these, among the verses of the Pléiade ; but not in all their works, I think, is there a single tavern-song, such as are so common at most other periods from Villon to Verlaine.

In the mean time there were serious talks, and high plans made — plans to enrich their own language with a literature that should rival in splendor those of old. The noblest thing about this group of scholars and wor­shippers of past beauty is their belief in their own lan­guage and their own new country, in which nothing had yet been achieved. A hundred and fifty years before the “Querelle des anciens et des modernes,” more than a hundred years before Racine, and fifty years before Shakespeare — when modern literatures, except in Italy, had not yet begun to be—a mind in love with the beau­tiful necessarily found its ideal in the completed and perfected literatures of the past. When almost every scholar or man of letters who felt that he had anything of real importance to say, or anything worth preserva­tion as literature to express, thought he must put it in Latin, and when rhyme was considered a mere amuse­ment of the vulgar, it took faith for these students to be­lieve that literature was possible in their own tongue, and courage to attempt to create it. The men of the Pléiade had this faith and courage, and that is their glory. They fear not to launch their manifesto, proudly proclaiming what can and shall be done, even before it is begun; and they call it ^f * The Defending and the Making Illustri­ous of the French Language.”

Written by Du Bellay, this “Défense et Illustration’’ expresses the ideas of the whole group, as shaped chiefly by Ronsard, who was now their recognized leader. In fact, no better summary of its doctrines could be made than is found in these few phrases of Ronsard’s in the Preface of the “Franciade” : “I counsel thee then to learn diligently the Greek and Latin languages, nay also the Italian and Spanish ; and then, when thou knowest these perfectly, come back like a good soldier to thine own flag, and compose in thy mother-tongue, as did Homer, Hesiod, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Virgil, Livy, Sallust, Lucretius, and a thousand others, who all spoke the same language as the ploughmen and servants of their day. For it is the crime of lese-majesty, to abandon the language of thine own country, which is alive and blos­soming, and seek to dig up I know not what dead ashes of the ancients. ... I beseech those of you, to whom the Muses have granted their favor, that you no more Latinize and Grecanize (as some do, more for display than duty) but take pity on your poor mother-tongue... For it is a far greater thing to write in a language that flourisheth today and is even now received of peoples, towns, cities, and states, being alive and native to them, and approved by kings, princes, senators, mer­chants, and traffickers over-seas, than to compose in a language dead and mute, buried beneath the silence of so long space of years, which is learned no more save at school by the master’s whip and the reading of books. ... It were better, like a good citizen of thine own country, to toil at a lexicon of the old words of Arthur, Lancelot, and Gawain, or a learned commentary of the Romaunt of the Rose... For we speak no more be­fore Roman senators... One language dies and an­other springeth from it alive, even as it pleases the decree of Fate and the command of God, who will not suffer mortal things to be eternal as He is — and to whom I humbly pray, gentle reader, that He both give thee His Grace, and the Desire to enrich the language of thine own country.”

These are the chief ideas of the “Défense”; it bids the poet first to “bury himself” in the best authors, chiefly the Greek, and “ devour them, digest them, make, them bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.” Then, choosing national subjects, and using his own native speech, let him produce as the ancients did, and as the Italians have done, new poetry to the glory of his nation. “Up, then, Frenchmen I march boldly upon that haughty Roman city ; and with its spoil adorn your own temples and altars... Invade mendacious Greece...  and sack the sacred treasures of the Del­phic temple! Fear no more the mute Apollo, nor his false oracles, nor his blunted arrows !”. You can see Du Bellay stand, like the Herald-at-Arms in a Renais­sance painting, and hear him call in trumpet-tone to all, that they rally to this new army for the Defending and Making Glorious of France and the French tongue.

The “ Défense ” appeared in 1549, and marks the beginning of modern French literature. Then, carrying out the program, there came quickly, one upon another, the works of the school. Ronsard’s first four books of “Odes,” containing all the “Pindaric” odes, appeared in 1550 ; his “Amours,” and a fifth book of odes in 1552. Before 1560 there were six other editions of the “Amours,” each enlarged, and three of the Odes, beside no less than twenty new poems or collections, including the first book of the “Hymns” (extended mythological poems like the “Homeric Hymns,” and also allegori­cal and philosophical poems) in 1555, and the second book in 1556. A collected edition of his works was published in 1560, and included for the first time the first five books of the “Poems,” the sixth and seventh of which appeared in 1569. In 1562 and 1563 came the “Discours” and the “Remonstrance au Peuple de France,” in 1564 the “Epistles,” in 1565 the “Ele­gies ” and the “ Art of Poetry,” and in 1572 the first four books of his epic, the “Franciade.”

No other poet made any such broad attempt as is represented in this mass of work, to reproduce in a mod­ern vulgar tongue all the forms of the classic literatures. Ronsard tried to create for France, in French, the Elegy, the Eclogue, the “Hymn,” the Horatian Ode, the great Pindaric Ode in all its sweep and fulness, the light Ana­creontic, the Epigram, the Inscription, the Idyl, the higher Satire, the Epic. If he omitted one of the great forms, the drama— and he did not omit it entirely, for in his earliest days of writing he made an adaptation of the “Ploutos” of Aristophanes which was played at the College Coqueret, and was the first French comedy — it was because some of his disciples, notably Jodelle, were working under him in that field, leaving him the higher and harder forms (as they were then considered) of the Pindaric ode and the epic. Perhaps, too, it was because in that early attempt of the “Ploutos” he had recognized that the drama, being subject to material conditions from which the other forms of poetry are free, could not yet exist in France. It was a question not of writing dramas, but of creating the theatre; and it took nearly a century more to do this. In all the other forms of poetry, from the lightest to the highest, his attempt was notable; and , the few in which his achievement was less so were, with the exception of the epic, forms in which no modem poet has achieved success.

On this ride, then, he is the representative poet of the Renaissance. And this is really its most important ride—not the digging up of a dead past, but the birth, of a new world and a new art from the buried old. The true significance of the Renaissance lies in the true mean­ing of the word, which is not resurrection but re-birth. As Goethe symbolizes it in the child of Faust and Helen, the Renaissance had the mediaeval for its father and the classical for its mother, but it was not a reproduction or a resurrection of either, it was the offspring of both, and was a new birth, a new age, a new art — the begin­ning of the modern, even more than the revival of the ancient. Ronsard loved the mediaeval, while so many smaller men of the Renaissance despised it; he knew the old romances, the “Roman de la Rose’’ in both its parts, and the lyric poets down to Marot; but he worshipped above all the newly discovered treasures of old Greece and Rome, as any true man of the Renaissance must. He knew not only the Latin writers but the Greek directly, in fact, he learned Greek before he did Latin; and he knew not only the easier Greek authors but the more difficult, and attached himself by preference, at least during the earlier part of his work, to the three most difficult of all, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and in chief Pindar, rivalling the most enthusiastic humanists in the passion of his scholarship. Thus he represents the Re­naissance in its double origin. He represents it, too, in the freshness and richness of its young life in Europe’s Spring-time ; in its intensity of life, and its tense real­ization of life’ bitter briefness; in its passionate worship of Poetry and Beauty; and in its strange sincere mingling of Pagan thought and emotion and conduct with Chris­tian belief. But it is by the attempt to create in his modem tongue a complete new literature, that should have all the glories of the old literatures in all their forms and aspects, that he represents it best, and is its poet.

He was so recognized at once. Coming at the very bright of the Renaissance movement and in the central nation of Europe, he was hailed by all Europe as its “Apollo” and its “Prince of Poets.” The slight op­position which the court poets of the older schools could make to his success was quickly swept away before him; and as one work succeeded another, the success was transformed into a triumph. He was the favorite and friend of six successive kings of France, from Francis I, the first Renaissance king, to Henry IV, whose birth and marriage he celebrated, and whose accession he looked forward to and longed for, as the only hope of peace for France. Queens and princesses the most powerful and beautiful of their time vied with each other to be his pa­tronesses : from Catherine of the Media to Elizabeth of England, who once sent him a great diamond in token of her esteem ; from Marguerite of Savoy, the daughter of King Francis (not that other Marguerite, King Fran­cis’ sister, who was Marot’s friend) —the type of all that was sweet and pure and noble in the women of the sixteenth century, in short, of perfect goodness, united in rare combination with brilliance and beauty, who was his champion at court in the early quarrels, and his lifelong friend—to Mary, Queen of Scots, the bright star of his inspiration in her brief reign as Queen of France, the subject of many of his most beautiful poems and of one of his noblest sonnets, to whom in her captiv­ity his volumes were dedicated, who sent him out of her poverty rich gifts inscribed “To Ronsard, the Apollo of the Muses’ fountain,” and who said of him on her last day of life (at least so our own poet Swinburne makes her say, and there is no reason why we should disbelieve him): —

                                                 “Ah ! how sweet

Sang all the world about those stars that sang

With Ronsard for the strong mid star of all,

His bay-bound head all glorious with grey hairs,

Who sang my birth and bridal”

The Kings and Princes of the realm of poetry recognized him likewise as their chief, from his followers Du Bellay, Jodelle, Gamier, and the rest, to his rivals like Saint-Gelais; scholars lauded him in Latin verse, and in Greek, and in the lesser languages, from his own master D’Aurat to those of distant nations. One, Saint-Marthe, called him “ the prodigy of nature and the miracle of art.” Tasso came and sat at his feet to learn, submitting to him the first cantos of the “Jerusalem Delivered.” And Montaigne said in one of his Essays, that “in the parts of his work in which he excelled, he hardly fell short of the perfection of the ancients.” There was no higher praise that a poet of the Renais­sance could receive.

Yet all this did not spoil him. He was proud indeed. That he had always been. It was born in his race. He even believed himself the chief of all poets of his time and country — as in truth he was. He believed, too, that he was the first to give to his country something that could be called poetry by those who knew also the lit­eratures of the past and of Italy; he boasted that he first “Pindarized ’’ and “Petrarquized” in France. He held himself aloof from the “common crowd,” like Horace, and boasted the consecration of the Muse’s kiss. He thought himself a poet, in short — and he thought that in this world there is no higher thing than to be a true poet. But just because he knew how high a thing it is to be a true poet, and because he truly knew the great poets of the past, he was humble too. He felt some­times that among the poets of all time he was one of the least, and one most dependent upon others. He even called himself but a half-poet. He made his Franciade kneel before the Aeneid and Iliad, and worship them — as it ought. Then, too, there was another saving grace in his proud and contradictory and charming personal­ity. The favorite of courts was a recluse; the singer of princes was a lover of nature (how different in this from all the courtier-poets of two following centuries; and the owner of abbeys and chateaux (for material success had come too) was a gardener—he must cul­tivate his roses, yes, and his cabbages, with his own hands; and he must wander alone through his woods and on his hill-sides, communing with a book created by one “greater than he,” or with Nature herself, “cre­ated by One greater still.”

Only of one thing he was always sure, in his pride or his humility : that he had given to France a litera­ture new and greater than she had had before — which was true; and that therefore his name and feme could never die — and no poet’s hope of continuous immor­tality was ever so completely disappointed. The story of Ronsard’s reputation is perhaps the mast dramatic contrast in all the history of literary feme and oblivion. There were many splendid editions of his works, till 1623, and a poor one in 1629; then, for two hundred years, silence ; not an edition ; not even a volume of extracts.

Why?...Because Malherbe had come, and imposed new ideals upon literature. There was to be no more freedom, no more nature, no more freshness of life, but only perfect regularity of form, and wonderful analysis and picturing of human emotions such as they might appear in the dress of court and town. Symmetry was substituted for harmony in the structure of verse, eloquence was substituted for lyrism in its substance. A noble eloquence indeed it was — not merely rhetorical, as it often seems to the narrow Anglo-Saxon taste, in­capable of appreciating French classic literature — and it produced high and beautiful and truly poetic work. But it struck dumb all singing; and the silence lasted till Chenier and Lamartine, Berenger, Musset, and Victor Hugo. Malherbe one day took a copy of Ronsard, and crossed out the lines which struck him as the worst. An­other day he crossed out the few that were left. Balzac — the Balzac of the seventeenth century, Balzac the little, not Balzac the great — in one of those carefully polished “Letters” that delighted the Hotel de Ram­bouillet, wrote to Chapelain the prosy: “Monsieur de Malherbe, and Monsieur de Grasse, and yourself, must be very little poets, if Ronsard be a great one” . .. and knew not how true he spoke! When Boileau, the final judge of all such matters, came, the question of Ronsard’s place was long since settled and forgotten. In his history of French poetry he condemned Ronsard without a hearing, as one who “in French talked no­thing but Greek and Latin” (poor Ronsard! the cham­pion and almost the creator of the French poetic lan­guage!), and dismissed him contemptuously as “that proud poet fallen from so high.” From Boileau on, even the name was almost forgotten.

Then after two centuries came the rehabilitation — or the resurrection—of Ronsard’s fame, in that new Renaissance of poetry which made glad the early years of the nineteenth century. Sainte-Beuve published in 1827 his “Survey of French Poetry in the Sixteenth Century,” and supplemented it in the following year with a volume of selections from Ronsard. The old edi­tions were exhumed from the dust of libraries. Finally a new complete edition was undertaken in 1857 by Prosper Blanchemain, and finished in 1867. To its last volume almost all the younger poets of importance contributed in verse their homage to Ronsard, as Sainte-Beuve had already contributed his. More recently a complete edi­tion of all the poets of the Pleiade has been published, under the editorship of Marty-Laveaux. There are also many books of selections. In short, the poetry and the fame of Ronsard and the Pléiade are now alive again.

Of course not all of Ronsard’s work has been restored to real life. “No man,” said Voltaire, looking ruefully at his fifty volumes, “can take the long journey to pos­terity encumbered with all that baggage.” No poet, except the very greatest, can carry more than one sub­stantial tome on that long journey. In Ronsard’s work there is enough that deserves to survive to make one fair­sized volume. It would include, not any of his epic — that is a failure; probably none of the eclogues — they are of the artificial pastoral type, full of contemporary interest because they usually present noble or famous personages of his own day disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses, and possessing touches, but too rare, of genuine nature-poetry; possibly none of the Pindaric odes, though it is hard to give this verdict — we should surely include, for instance, if it were only one tenth its length, that noble ode on the Progress of Poetry which was so famous in its day, and which deserves, for the scholar’s reading, to be placed beside or even above Gray’s ode on the same subject — but it is “ too heavy baggage ” for posterity ; and none of the “ Discours,” alas!—great as are their interest and their power, noble as are their patriotism and their appeal for peace and unity — they were creatures of the time and died with it, but they set the standard of satire and of national poetry in France; but some of the elegies, yes, for they are briefer, and in them he is a true and sincere poet of Nature and of love; some few of the “ Hymns,” like that “ On Death,” which Chastelard, Brantôme tells us, carried to the scaffold for breviary, taking Ronsard as his only father-confessor; and a very few of the longer “Poems”; but most of all, his lyrics and sonnets and lighter odes — not the greatest of his work, but the most beautiful, and ±e most portable on that “long journey.”

The sonnets stand halfway between Petrarch and Shakespeare, and are almost as anticipatory of the later poet as they are reminiscent of the earlier. Ronsard is one of the few masters of the sonnet. It is probably safe to say that he uses it with more variety of effect than any other poet, and yet without seeming to force its character. He makes it descriptive, epigrammatic, epic, philosophic, elegiac, idyllic, dramatic ; he even makes it purely lyr­ical. Brunetiere, a critic not given to superlatives nor wont to praise, says: “ I know of no more beautiful son­nets than those of Ronsard.” The statement surprises, but can it be refuted? Grander there are, in Milton and Wordsworth; nobler, perhaps, from Dante to Petrarch; more wonderful in perfection of form and in power of condensation or suggestiveness, among Heredia’s; but more beautiful, no — though we may perhaps put with the best of Ronsard’s some few of Keats. Keats, once in his brief life, made a translation; and it was from a sonnet of Ronsard’s.

Then there are the lyrics — lyrics that have almost the cutting pathos of the Greek regrets for fleeting youth and life, or the light sincerity of Herrick, or even snatches of that peculiar grace and haunting naturalness of exquisite melody which give to our early Elizabethans the sweetest note in all the gamut of song. Ronsard’s mastery of form, in an almost unformed language, is marvellous. He was the first creator of more than a hundred different lyric stanzas — the most prolific in­ventor of rhythms, perhaps, in the history of poetry. He ranges from the great ten-line stanza, a favorite of Vic­tor Hugo’s, to the so-called “Hawthorn-tree” metre, which, difficult as it apparently is with its quick-return­ing rhymes that dart in and out like squirrels at play and respond to each other like answering bird-notes, never even in a long poem like the “Spring Love-Song ” seems for a moment, as Ronsard uses it, to interrupt or hamper or turn aside the movement of the thought.

The three great lyric themes, nature, and love, and death, are never long absent from his work, and usually they are interwoven with each other in it. He is more a poet of nature than any other French poet save La­martine. Unlike Lamartine, he seeks in nature not a refuge from life, but a living comradeship. Unlike Wordsworth, he is not so much the observer and interpreter of nature as its passionate lover. All nature alive to him, even as it was to the Greeks, and as it has been to no other modern except, at moments, to Shelley. His nature-mythology is less of the mind, like that o most modems, or even of the imagination, like Shelley’s than of the heart. His love-poetry in particular is permeated with nearness to nature and her spirit.

Of love Ronsard has sung in all its phases, from the simplest human passion to the philosophic love of Dante and the Platonists, the shaping power of the universe and of man’s soul, the

                                  “ Love that moves the sun and the other stars,”

which he celebrates, without quite believing in it, in “ Love’s Quickening” and other sonnets. If his expression of love, with all its “burnings ” and “ freezings,” sometimes seem insincere, it is to be remembered that he was speaking the dialect of his time, a dialect that to us seems artificial, and to a certain extent, but far less than we think, was so. Every age that has character has its dialect — and we can hardly assert that we have a nobler one than that of the Renaissance. Often, too, Ronsard speaks the universal language, which is absolute simplicity. But even the touches of artificiality grow to seem sincere, and only add to the charm of these old-world loves of the golden Renaissance the love of Cassandra, his boyhood’s adoration, whom he first saw in the glorious beauty of her girlhood as the Nymph of the meadow of Blois, —

                                     Walling among the flowers, herself a flower,

a little lady of the court, but simply clad, and wandering free with wind-blown golden hair — Cassandre Salviati du Pré she was, and in her veins ran blood that was born of Beatrice’s and of Laura’s nation, and was to be transmitted through succeeding generations till it flowered again in the greatest passion-poet of France, Alfrec de Musset; and the love of Marie, the simple country girl of Anjou, the passion of his ardent youth; and last of Helen, the Lady Helen of Surgères, whom the Queen mother bade him celebrate, and whom he grew to love with the complete love of the mature man and poet, and with something of the bitter intensity of premature old age —, a love that with the advancing years grew into friendship. “ Dear dead women,” they live still in his verse.

As the years, whose flight he would so fain have stayed, passed by, his characteristic theme of “ Gathe Rose-buds ” little by little disappeared from his work. There came in its stead a quiet acceptance of life, and of death as the completion of life, that are classic in their simplicity and strength. This theme too, which fount its expression in many poems like “Life-Philosophy” and “Transit Mundus,” became characteristic of Ronsard ; and his treatment of it is the more valuable as it is the rarer in modern literature.

Finally, the noblest of all his poems are those of Poetry itself. This is the theme for which he cares the most. It is intertwined for him with each one on the others. Nature is to him always the home of the Muses. Love itself is to him the impulse to sing, an finds its true consecration in song. The thought of death brings with it always the thought of fame in living poetry — that is its justification, its consolation, the one sure immortality. All else may die — kings, empires, and the unsung fame of noble deeds — but, says Ronsard in one of his Pindaric odes: —-

Tue poetry forever lasts,

Obdurate 'gainst the years.

The men of the Pleiade introduced into France a new conception of poetry. “Surely it would be a thing but too easy, and worthy of all contempt, to win eternal fame,” says Du Bellay in the “Défense,” “if mere nat­ural facility, granted even to the unlearned, might suffice to create a work worthy of immortality. Nay!—he that would fly abroad upon the lips of men, must long abide shut fast in his chamber ; he that would live in the memory of posterity, must, as though dead unto himself, labor and oft sweat and tremble; and even as our court poets do drink, eat, and sleep at their ease, so much must he endure hunger and thirst and long watchings.” Still nobler are the words of Ronsard : “Above all things” he says in his “Art of Poetry,” “ thou shalt have the Muses in reverence, yea truly in most especial venera­tion. Thou shalt never make them serve low ends, but shalt hold them dear and holy, as being the daughters of Jupiter, that is to say of God, who through them by His sacred grace first made known to ignorant peoples the excellence of His majesty. . . . And since the Muses will dwell in no heart save it be true, holy, and virtu­ous, thou must be first good, then open-hearted and generous, . . . true in spirit, letting no thing enter into thy thoughts that is not super-human and divine. Above all let all thine imaginings be high, noble, and beautiful.” . . .

Almost all poets have worshipped Poetry and the Muses with living faith and fervent self-devotion. There have been exceptions, like Lamartine and Byron, even among the great; and they have been the lesser poets for it. But hardly one has worshipped and believed with the fervor of Ronsard. It is a consecration to live in his atmosphere of high devotion to poetry ; it is a joy to serve him, and try to spread a little the feme for which he cared so much ; and to give him honor in each new age is a duty. For this was his faith —that though the leaf of the rose may fade and fell, the leaf of the laurel shall be ever green.

TRUE GIFT

As a young maiden, in the morning air

Of Spring-time, when the year with youth is thrilled,

Goes seeking through the garden freshly tilled

Roses and lilies to adorn her hair,

But finding not by any roses rare

Nor other flowers the new-made garden filled,

Takes simple ivy, and with fingers skilled

Tresses a wreath to crown and make her fair,

So I— who in my orchard find no roses

Nor any flowers whose worth is worthy you,

Pinks, lavender, pansies, nor marigold—

Bring you this bit of verse, love-twined and true,

In hope its simpleness more worth may bold

Than heaped-up flowers no thoughtful care dis­poses.

LOVE'S CONQUERING

If ’t please you see how Love's might overcame,

How He attacked and how He conquered me

 How my heart burns and freezes for His glee

How He doth make His Honor of my Shame;

If ’t please you see my youth running to claim

What brings it nought but pain and contumely

 Then come and read, and know the agony

Of which my Goddess and my God make game.

Then you shall know that Love is reasonless,

A sweet deceit, a dear imprisonment

An empty hope that feeds us with the wind.

Then you shall know how great man's foolishness

And his delusion are when he's content

To choose a child for lord; for guide, the blind.

ONE ONLY AIM AND THOUGHT

When Nature formed Cassandra, who should move

The hardest hearts with love’s soft passionings,

She made her of a thousand beauteous things

That she had hoarded like a treasure-trove

For centuries. And Love too interwove

All He was dearly nesting neath His wings

Of gentle, to make honey-sweet the stings

Of her fair eyes, that even the Gods must love.

And when from Heaven she was newly come

And first I saw her, my poor heart, struck dumb,

Was lost in love; and love, her minister,

So poured her charm into my very veins

 That now I have no pleasure but my pains,

No aim or knowledge but the thought of her.

LOVE’S CHARMING

Maid of fifteen, in childlike beauty dight,

Fair head with crinkled ringlets golden-tressed,

Rose-petalled forehead, cheeks like amethyst,

Laughter that lifts the soul to Heaven's delight;

And neck like snow, and throat than milk more white,

And heart full-blossomed neath a budding breast —

Beauty divine in human form expressed,

And virtue worthy of that beauty bright —

An eye whose light can change the night to day,

A gentle hand that smooths away my care,

Yet holds my life caught in its fingers' snare;

Withal a voice that ’s ever fain to sing,

Still stopped by smiles, or sweet sighs languish­ing—

These are the spells that charmed my wits away.

A PICTURE AND A PLEA

SOMETIMES,your head a little downward bent,

I see you play at gossip with your thought,

Sitting apart, alone, as though you sought

To shun the world and live in banishment.

Then oft I would approach, in dear intent

To greet you — but my voice, straightway dis­traught

With panic fear, behind my lips is caught,

And silence leaves me standing shamed and shent.

Mine eyes do fear to meet the beams of thine,

My soul doth tremble neath those rays divine,

Nor tongue nor voice can to its function move.

Only my sighs, only my tear-stained face

Must do their office, speaking in their place,

And bear sufficing witness of my love.

LOVE’S PERFECT POWER

SUN of my earthly worship, I declare

She equals him in Heaven ! He with his eye

Makes glad, makes warm, makes light the spacious sky;

She gladdens earth with beauty yet more rare,

Nature and art, earth, water, fire, and air,

 The stars, the Graces, and the Gods on high

Combine in rivalry to beautify

My Lady, and to make her wondrous fair.

Thrice happy were I, had not Fate’s disdain

Walled in with adamantine magnet-stone

So chaste a heart behind so fair a face

And happiest, had I not filled every vein

With fire and ice — because my heart is gone

And love beats, burns, and freezes in its place.

EVEN UNTO DEATH

TO think one thought a hundred hundred way

Neath two loved eyes to lay your heart qui bare,

To drink the bitter liquor of despair

And eat forever ashes of lost days —

In spirit and flesh to know youth's bloom decays,

To die of pain, yet swear no pain is there,

 The more you sue, to move the less your fair,

Yet make her wish, the law your life obeys —

Anger that passes, faith that cannot move ;

Far dearer than yourself your foe to love;

To build a thousand vain imaginings,

To long to plead, yet fear to voice a breath,

In ruin of all hope to hope all things —

These are the signs of love — love even to death.

LOVE’S WOUNDIN$

Ss the young stag, when lusty Spring supreme

O'er Winter's biting cold at last prevail

To crop the honeyed leafage seeks new trails

And leaves his dear retreat at dawn’s first gleam;

Alone, secure, afar (as he may deem)

From bay of hounds, or hunters' echoing hails,

Now on the mountain-slopes, now in the vales,

Now by the waters of a secret stream,

He wantons freely, at his own sweet will,

Knowing no fear of net or bow, until,

Pierced with one dart, he lies dead in his pride —

Even so I wandered, with no thought of woe,

In my life's April— when one quick-drawn bow

Planted a thousand arrows in my side.

LOVE'S SUBMISSION

WHAT though it please you light my heart with fire

(Heart that is yours, your subject yur domains)

With fire of Furies, not with Love’s sweet pain,

To waste me body and bone till life expire

The ill that others deem too cruel-dire

Is sweet to me — I will not once complain,

For I love not my life, nor hold it fain

Save as to love it pleases your desire.

But yet, if Heaven hath made me, Lady mine,

To be your victim, may it not suffice

To lay my loyal service at your shrine ?

'T were better you should have my service meet

Than horror of a human sacrifice

Stricken and bleeding at your beauty's feet.

CASSANDRA’S PROPHECY

time’s frost shall touch thy temples in the morn,

Ere evening comes thy day shall ended be,

Cheated of hope thy thoughts shall die with thee,

ⁿear ways shall lead thee to thy farthest bourn.

“Thy songs, that move me not, shall wither, shorn

Of youth's fresh bloom; and when for love of me

Thy death has proved my fated mastery,

Posterity shall laugh thy sighs to scorn,

“Thy fame shall be a by-word in the land,

Thy work prove built on quickly-shifting sand,

Thy pictures vainly painted in the skies

So prophesied the Nymph I dote upon;

When Heaven for witness to her malison

With lightning from the right struck blind mine eyes,

LOVE’S ATTRIBUTES

Ceres rules the fields of grain,

Goat-foot Gods the wood;

Phoebus gives the laurel-vine,

Pallas the olives good,

And Chloris guards the tender grass in bud;

To Cybel’s reign

Belongs the fair lone pine.

All sweet fruits that orchards bear

Own Pomona's power;

All sweet sounds that stir the grove

Are the Zephyrs’ dower ;

Nymphs rule the waves, and Flora every flower;

But tears and care

Are consecrate to Love.

A PROPER ROU^CDELAY

See thou, my joy, my care,

Haw many a wondrous thing

In me thou art perfecting

Through beauties beyond compare :

So utterly thine eyes,

Thy laughter and thy grace,

Thy brow, thy hair, thy face

Fashioned in angels guise,

’Do burn me, since the day

When first I knew thereof

Longing with passion of love

To win them in love’s sweet way,

That but for the saving tears

Wy life is bedewed withal,

Long since beyond recall

’T were wasted by heat that sears.

And yet thy beauteous eyes,

Thy laughter and thy grace,

Thy brow, thy hair, thy face

Fashioned in angels guise,

So freeze me, since the day

When first I knew thereof.

Longing with passion of love

To win them in love's sweet way,

That but for the saving heat

 My soul is enflamed withal,

Long since beyond recall

‘T were wasted through eyes that greet.

See then, my joy, my care,

How many a wondrous thing

In me thou art perfecting

Through beauty beyond compare.

LOVE-JOY LOVE-SORROW

A THOUSAND lilies, a thousand pinks,

I take in my arms and clasp them round

Close as the loving vine-branch links

The bough in its clinging tendrils wound.

For joy has taken abode with me,

And care no longer turns pale my face,

Hove all life — and if these things be,

‘T is the gift, fair dream, of thy heaven-sent grace.

I could climb the sky thy flight to follow . . .

But alas ! my joy lives but a breath,

For the fleeting dream is a vision hollow,

Like clouds in the wind it vanisheth.

LOVE’S COMPARINGS

Carnations and lilies are hueless

When set by the face of my fair,

fine-woven gold is but worthless

If weighed with the wealth of her hair;

Through arches of coral passes

Her laughter that banisheth care,

And flowers spring fresh mongst the grasses

Wherever her feet may fare.

THE WAYS OF LOVE

Love’s infidel

Whom I adore.

You know too well

That I love you more

By a hundred score

Than mine eyes or heart !

So you ‘d die before

You ‘d be called “sweet-heart! ”

But if I could seem

To set no store

By your esteem,

Then you’d love me more

By a hundred score

Than your eyes or heart,

^And almost implore

To be called “ sweet-heart ! ”

’T is the way of love

That who loves the best

The least can he move

His Lady’s breast’.

Ah, would I could test

The proverb’s truth

And hate — in jest —

Till you loved in sooth

MADRIQAL

Take my heart, Lady, take my heart —

Take it, for it is yours, my sweet,

So yours it is, that t were not meet

Another shared its slightest part.

So, yours, if yours it pine and die,

Then yours, all yours, shall be the blame,

And there below, your soul in shame

Shall rue such bitter cruelty.

Were you a savage Scythian’s child,

Yet love, that turns the tigers mild,

Would melt you at my sighing.

But you, more cruel-fierce than they,

Have set your will my heart to slay,

And live but through my dying.

TO THE BEES

OH whither, honey-bees,

 Oh whither fly you,

Seeking o’er blosmy leas

Food to supply you ?

If you would feast on flowers divine,

No longer range without design

But hither hie you.

Come seek Cassandra’s lips

Warm with my kisses —

Your honey-comb that drips

Less sweet than this is.

Here roses blow, and blood-red bowers

 Of Hyacinth’s and Ajax’ flowers

Breathe perfumed blisses.

Sweet marjoram all Winter through,

And arum fragrant,

Wait not Spring’s leave to bloom anew

That March and May grant,

But match the laurel, ever young,

While anise blossoms ever among

The woodbine vagrant.

But sheathe your stings, in care

Her lips to cherish.

She too can sting, beware !

And where there flourish

Athousand flowers, leave some for mine

To bear the manna and the wine

 My life that nourish.

LOVE ME, LOVE ME NOT

The better you know of my true love’s throe,

The more you fly me,

My cruel one.

The more I woo you, the more pursue you,

The more you defy me,

The less are won.

Then shall I leave you?  Though ‘t would not grieve you,

Alas ! believe me

I’m not so brave !

Yet I’ll bless the hour of Death’s full power

 If you ’ll receive me

To die your slave.