as well, as another poet whose achievement has been called "highly original and at its best unmistakably his own" [Leishman]. In such a context there is no need to stress illustrations of Ronsard's bearing on such obviously traditional poets as Sidney, Spenser, and Drayton, as this influence has recently been done more than justice; and Milton's debt is no less accepted if incompletely detailed. In such cases as those of Milton and Spenser, Ronsard's influence is of the most conventional order, derived from moments when he is "most traditional … employing, with variations, some well-established pattern or formula, or elaborating upon some well-established and immediately recognisable topic" [Leishman]. By contrast, in the supposedly unique artistry of the other three poets we are not concerned with such an admittedly marginal advance, but a "miraculous" transmutation. My aim here is to suggest that in Donne, Shakespeare, and Marvell certain traits that have been held to be unique and characteristic may well have been largely inherited; and to imply that if Ronsard provides a necessary model in such important cases, then by analogy other sources may ultimately be uncovered which largely assimilate these "exceptional" authors to the European tradition as a whole. Britain always has been an intrinsic part of Europe, in culture as well as politics and economics, and there is probably no distinctly "English" tradition, only an English "selection" from a shared tradition.

Since the case for Donne's direct indebtedness to Ronsard is so unheralded as to have largely escaped notice, perhaps some highly specific examples are needed first, simply to establish that Donne must indeed have used Ronsard consciously as a model in some of his most distinctive poems. The neatest illustration also happens to be one of Donne's better-known religious sonnets. Perhaps, knowing his Ovid, Donne would still have scolded the intrusive sun as a "busie old foole" in "The Sunne Rising," even if Ronsard had not insulted Phoebus by exclaiming: "Va te cacher, vieil pastoureau champestre." But surely, without Ronsard the fourteenth Holy Sonnet of Donne is far less likely to have begun so forcefully as it does:

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, 'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to 'another due,
Labour to 'admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely' I love you, 'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, 'untie, or breake that knot againe.

The vigor of that opening and the passionate, sexual intensity of the kinetic imagery must seem to us at first pure Donne. Yet clearly, the structure, thought, and imagery derive direct inspiration from a little-known sonnet of Ronsard's:

Foudroye moy le corps, ainsi que Capanée,
O pere Jupiter, et de ton feu cruel
Esteins moy l'autre feu qu'Amour continuel
Tousjours m'allume au coeur d'une flame obstinée….
Ou bien, si tu ne veux, Pere, me foudroyer,
Donne le desespoir, qui me meine noyer,
M'élançant du sommet d'un rocher solitaire,
Puis qu'autrement par soin, par peine et par labeur,
Trahy de la raison, je ne me puis desfaire
D'Amour, qui maugré moy se campe dans mon coeur.

Donne contributes his own bizarre heightening in the opening allusion to the Trinity and in the Hopkins-like massing of verbs; but we must also note Ronsard's image of the death of Capaneus by thunderbolt at the seige of Thebes, a city usurped by Eteocles at the expense of the legal title of Polynices. For it is this implicit allusion which definitively clarifies the military imagery of Donne's sonnet in such phrases as "like an usurpt towne, to 'another due." Ronsard also firmly establishes for Donne man's desperate need of God's grace in view of the intransigent sinfulness of human nature, betrayed as it is by its own best ally, Reason. Ronsard thus contributes the theological theme, the despairing sexuality, the military imagery, the alliterative verbal intensity, and the supposedly unique dramatic opening to Donne's sonnet. This is not to say the poems are completely identical, they are not and cannot be—as a lapsed Catholic, Donne is far more explicitly theological, less formally classical and Petrarchan, more intensely paradoxical, if scarcely more subjective. But his real contribution to the theme, and his distinctive character, cannot be identified precisely without close comparison to the sonnet of Ronsard to which he is so deeply indebted.

It would be a mistake to think that Donne learned from Ronsard only such vehement theology steeped in thoughts of death. He also learned all those delicate refinements of subjective emotion divined by the subtle self-analysis of his lonely old French master. No other author could have taught Donne the whimsical self-scrutiny of his paradoxical "Negative Love":

I never stoop'd so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheeke, lip, can prey, …
My love, though silly, is more brave,
For may I misse, when ere I crave,
If I know yet, what I would have.

Donne is talking about the sensation of as yet unlocalized sexual desire in the male mind, before that desire is focused on an actual mistress—a theme he develops in both "The Goodmorrow" and "Aire and Angels." Yet, as I have shown in The School of Love, only Ronsard among Renaissance poets before Donne had mapped out this pattern of latent desire and unfocused sexual attraction:

L'homme est bien sot qui aime sans cognoistre.
J'aime et jamais je ne vy ce que j'aime; …
L'oeil peut faillir, l'aureille fait de mesme
Mais nul des sens mon amour n'a fait naistre.

Ronsard teaches Donne how to plot the elusive logic of such complex private emotions; and Donne's lyrics are not only studded with verbal echoes of Ronsard but derive many of their plot situations and dramatic tensions between personalities from suggestions in Ronsard. Thus the melodramatic haunting of his faithless mistress by the dead lover's ghost in "The Apparition" derives from suggestions in Discours I:

Que je serais marri, si aux enfers là bas
Quelqu'un me venoit dire apres ce mien trespas:
"Celle qui fut là haut ton coeur et ta pensée,
Qu'avecq'si grand travail tu as si bien dressée,
Aime un sot maintenant!" Ce despit me seroit
Plus grief que les tormens que Pluton me feroit…

Et si je ne reviens fantosme veritable,
Tu croiras que l'Enfer n'est sinon qu'une fable.
Helas, il ne l'est pas! et pource toute nuict
En dormant je seray le Démon de ton lict.

Of course again, in his still more melodramatic version, Donne selects, heightens, and even burlesques his source; but the image of the nervous ghost of her lover presiding over a fickle mistress' bed appears to be largely Ronsard's invention, not Donne's.

These three pairs of poems illustrate in the most positive detail the kind of illuminating precedents and analogues for Donne available in Ronsard. But they far from exhaust the obvious resemblances between the two poets. I have elsewhere [in Notes and Queries V, 1958] discussed the bearing of the "Elegie à Marie" on Donne's "The Canonization," for which the Ronsard poem offers a unique precedent. The second elegy on Marie, written after her death, similarly exploits much of the material used in "The Relique." Donne's opening ironies about double graves find their theme anticipated in Ronsard's wish:

J'ordonne que mes os, pour toute couverture,
Reposent pres des siens sous mesme sepulture.

Donne's idea of the continued union of the lovers' souls everywhere (even at the Last Judgment) is also suggested by Ronsard's phrases:

Puis Amour, que je sens par mes veines s'espandre,
Passe dessous la terre, et r'atize la cendre
Qui froide languissoit dessous vostre tombeau
Pour r'allumer plus vif en mon coeur son flambeau,
A fin que vous soyez ma flame morte et vive,
Et que par le penser en tous lieux je vous suive.

Donne's blasphemous equation of his mistress with Saint Mary Magdalen and himself with Christ in a new religion of love is fully rationalized by Ronsard's imagery:

Son ris et son regard et sa parole pleine
De merveilles, n'estoient d'une nature humaine,
Son front, ny ses cheveux, son aller, ny sa main.
C'estoit une Deesse en un habit humain….
Bien qu'elle eust pris naissance en petite bourgade,
Non de riches parens ny d'honneurs ny de grade,
II ne faut la blasmer: la mesme Deité
Ne desdaigna de naistre en tres pauvre cité,
Et souvent sous l'habit d'une simple personne
Se cache tout le mieux que le Destin nous donne.

More conventionally, Donne's love is full of "miracles," and Ronsard's mistress is "pleine de merveilles." Ronsard calls his beloved "Le miracle du Ciel, le miroër de Nature," while Donne protests:

All measure, and all language, I should passe,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.

And, in this case, like Donne's mistress Ronsard's is convincingly chaste (by no means inevitable in either poet, as we saw in discussing "The Apparition"):

Vous m'ostastes du coeur tout vulgaire penser,
Et l'esprit jusqu'au Ciel vous me fistes hausser.

If we read the same Ronsard poem thinking of "The Funeral," we shall also notice the French poet's allusions to "le fil … qui retient en mon corps l'esprit envelopé," which parallels the filaments that sustain Donne's vitality. When in "Twicknam garden" Donne wishes to become "Some senslesse peece of this place … Or a stone fountaine weeping out my yeare," we shall similarly note that according to his elegy Ronsard's heart "fut converty en rocher insensible, et mes yeux en fontaines." Scarcely one of these stylish elegies scattered among the love poems of Ronsard but offers such analogues. No one familiar with "Aire and Angels" could read the following lines without a shock of recognition:

Mon corps est plus leger que n'est l'esprit de ceux
Qui vivent en aimant grossiers et paresseux….
Je resemble au Démon qui ne se veut charger
D'un corps, ou s'il a corps ce n'est qu'un air leger….

La matiere de l'homme est pesante, et ne peut
Suivre l'esprit en hault, lors que l'esprit le veut,
Si Amour, la purgeant de sa flamme estrangere,
N'affine son mortel. Voilà, Dame, pourquoy
Je cognois par raison que n'aimez tant que moy:
Si vous aimiez autant, vous seriez plus legere.

Not only do we see the "metaphysical" imagery of angelology articulated in a secular love affair in a manner identical to Donne's (particularly in terms of "weight"), but we also find the same surprising condescension toward women's love with which Donne's poem concludes, to the bewilderment of critics and scholars. Only with the aid of Ronsard can we grasp why women's love should be so ungallantly presented as inferior to men's. For Ronsard urges the view that because women are more passive and less volatile, they are content to be solicited, and this inertia proves them to be more material: "La terre maugré moy vous attache les pas."

Such parallels, which clearly outline the hitherto unpredictable range of themes, images, and tone in Donne's verse, require that our previous estimate of Donne's creativity be suspended until an exhaustive analysis of Ronsard's bearing on the English poet has been accomplished. This complete survey is certainly not my intention here. And even less can I hope to exhaust the precedents for Shakespeare in Ronsard. For at very least, Ronsard's name must be added to the list of authors whose voluminous citation of commonplaces affords many close verbal anticipations of passages in Shakespeare. For example, Pierre Champion has noted in passing [in Ronsard et son temps, 1925] that about the time of Shakespeare's birth, Ronsard was writing in a vein which already suggested his own aptitude for the achievements of the English dramatist:

Le monde est le theatre, et les hommes acteurs,
La Fortune, qui est maistresse de la sceine,
Appreste les habits, …
En gestes differens, en differens langages,
Rois, Princes et Bergers joüent leurs personnages
Devant les yeux de tous, sur l'eschaufaut commun; …
Qui fait que nostre vie est seulement un songe,
Et que nos desseins se finissent en rien.

Shakespeare parallels this commonplace from the Zodiacae of Palingenius in Jaques's "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players," and the image reappears perhaps in Macbeth's "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more," and even later in Propero's "We are such stuff as dreams are made on."

However, the conventional resemblances are often not so narrow. Thus, Ronsard's "Les Daimons" conveniently maps out a complete system of demonology which helps to clarify ideas, images, and verbal sequences in plays as different as Romeo and Juliet (in the Queen Mab speech), Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. The roles of Ariel and Caliban, for example, correspond closely to those of two forms of demon which Ronsard describes in his elegy. The lack of a source for much of the plot of this play may encourage us to find a few of Ronsard's details suggestive:

Les uns, ayans pitié des hommes et des naux,
Esclairent sur le mast, comme des feux jumeaux
Et tirent la navire et les hommes de peine, …
Les autres, moins subtils, chargez d'un corps plus gras
Et plus materiel, habitent les lieux bas,
Et ne changent jamais de la forme qu'il tiennent,
Car point d'affections de changer ne leur viennent …
Si sont ils toutefois de meschante nature, …
Les autres, plus gaillards, habitent les montagnes,
Les taillis, les forests, les vaux et les campagnes,
Les tertres et les monts, et souvent dans un bois
Ou dans le creux d'un roc.

The so-called Elizabethan world picture of Tillyard might thus be helpfully adjusted by a full study of Ronsard's cosmology in Shakespeare's case and in many others; for Ronsard is one of those who sketches out the English writers' frame of reference most fully and poetically in such long philosophic discourses and elegies. The possibility of a direct influence in such cases is strengthened because of Ronsard's long residence in the British Isles and his popularity with both Queen Elizabeth and her rival Mary Queen of Scots, as well as among Elizabethan pedagogues, as we shall see in a moment. Few Elizabethan poets would have lacked firsthand knowledge of his works and ideas.

So far, the extent of Shakespeare's debt to Ronsard must seem far more elusive than that of Donne's for any influence is far more deeply and subtly diffused. However, unlike the case of Donne, there has already recently been a faint but increasing sense among scholars that Shakespeare does owe something to Ronsard, not only for specific allusions, but also for more general characteristics. True, T. W. Baldwin long ago quoted approvingly Collins' attack on the view held in the eighteenth century, by Dr. Richard Farmer, that Shakespeare used Ronsard's verse as a kind of classical commonplace book: "Of the very few [classical parallels] which [Farmer] is obliged to notice he disposes by assuming that Shakespeare had been raking in Ronsard, medieval homilies, and the uncouth jargon of Douglas' Virgil" [William Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 1944]. Yet Baldwin himself also provides some evidence for Farmer's contention that Shakespeare must have known and used Ronsard. Baldwin observes that "the text books of King James VI of Scotland, I of England, are of particular interest, since James was but two years younger than Shakespeare, and so shows what texts were most current for educational work in Shakespeare's day." Baldwin then goes on to quote Peter Young's notes of the works he found favored for instruction by George Buchanan (whom he assisted in tutoring the young James). These included: "various pieces of heavily moralized modern literature; La Franciade, 4°; 2 Tomes des poëmes de Ronsard, 4° … The French tongue teacher, 8°."

More recently, other scholars have also decided that Shakespeare definitely knew Ronsard's verse and demonstrably used it. In his [The Sonnets, 1967] J. Dover Wilson writes of Shakespeare's debts to specific sources: "The evidence, for example, as regards the Italian poets, even Petrarch, is so uncertain as to be virtually negative. It seems pretty conclusive, on the other hand, for Ronsard." He agrees strongly with J. B. Leishman, whose discussion of the sonnets finally led him to observe that "we have already noticed other rather surprising resemblances to passages in Ronsard, and it begins to seem unlikely that they are all accidental." Leishman even observed that Ronsard must be regarded as the general mentor of English poets like Donne and Sidney in his power to evoke a sense of subjective personality through his verse: "Ronsard, I think, was the first poet to introduce, often with splendid effectiveness, such pieces of self-dramatisation into his sonnets, and I am inclined to think that Sidney learnt the device from him."

Such a relationship may still seem rather general; but the fact remains that Ronsard's verse often appears to lie midway between Shakespeare's ultimate sources for ideas in classical treatises and the specific dramatizing use which his plays make of many of their sententiae. The bearing of Ronsard's "Hymne de la Mort" on plays like Hamlet and Measure for Measure is instructive in showing how Ronsard dramatically moved the sententiae of classical authors like Cicero and Plutarch into the orbit of Renaissance subjective awareness, in a way hitherto largely lacking in the other, less lively, contemporary recensions. Only a gifted vernacular lyric poet of the later Renaissance could have given the classics that self-dramatizing twist Leishman feels to be so uniquely Ronsard's, and very few such sources have been noted by Shakespearean scholars. Let us take the case of the most famous and typical speech of Hamlet—of "To be or not to be." Baldwin notes the precedent for some of its ideas in Plato's Apology. Speaking of immortality, Socrates is there quoted as saying: "Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain…. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, my friends and judges, can be greater than this." The same question is also debated in many other classical authors, including Stobaeus, Eusebius, and Plutarch; but the version in Cicero's Tusculan Disputations (I.97-99) seems to come closest to suggesting a formal academic discussion such as Baldwin sees in Hamlet's phrasing. Unfortunately, none of these sources is really in the least concerned with the problem that concerns Hamlet, as Baldwin admits: "Hamlet is debating the 'question' of suicide, not directly the question of whether the soul would be or not be after death of the body." Furthermore, Hamlet's whole ethical frame of reference in the speech is out of phase with the pagan terms of Cicero's discussion, for if "the framework is that of the original passage, the coloring is that of Cicero's discussion put into terms of Christian theology. Some Christian has performed quite skilfully a usual grammar school exercise on the original passage…. That someone may have been Shakespeare himself; it may have been someone else whom he is following." The latter supposition has seemed the more likely to many scholars, who have proposed various Renaissance models for Shakespeare, such as Cardan's Comfort, or De Consolatione, which is favored by Hardin Craig. To these possible intermediaries must now certainly be added Ronsard's "Hymne de la Mort," for this type of recension is one in which Ronsard excels, and the "Hymne" is one of the most impassioned Christian syntheses of the classical commonplaces about death and the afterlife.

To the Renaissance, Ronsard's poem was one of the most celebrated and authoritative pieces of moralizing on the inescapable nature of man's death, for it views human inadequacies with the same relentless scepticism of the Duke of Vienna's speech "Be absolute for death," the speech directed to the supposedly doomed Claudio in Measure for Measure (III.i.4 ff). In fact, Ronsard's somber meditation achieved enhanced currency in Britain as a result of its conspicuous use on an even more melodramatic occasion than that in the play. Rather like Ronsard himself, who had twenty years earlier spent two or more years in Britain on a somewhat similar embassy, a young French aristocrat named Chastelard had accompanied Mary Queen of Scots back to her own country after the death of her husband Francis II, King of France. Chastelard was so attracted to the queen that he concealed himself one night in her bedroom, but he was discovered, tried, and condemned to death in 1563. On the scaffold he chose to console himself by reading Ronsard's vivid reflections on the hopelessness of the human lot on earth, whose gloomy spirit is recaptured by the Duke's sermon to the condemned Claudio, a young man also doomed for sexual excess. Indeed, Claudio's despairing sentiments about the nature of life after death (III.i.118-132) are also phrased in terms closely analogous to some of Ronsard's semidramatic exchanges in his "Hymne":

Tu me diras encor que tu trembles de crainte
D'un batelier Charon, …
Et tout cela qu'ont feint les Poëtes là-bas
Nous attendre aux Enfers après nostre trespas….
En quelque corps nouveau, ou bien se transformant
En estoile, ou vagant par l'air en les nuages,
Ou voletant çà-bas dans les deserts sauvages
Comme beaucoup ont creu.

It is precisely these anxious thoughts, the question of "in that sleep of death what dreams may come," which Hamlet also realizes can "make Calamity of so long life." Ronsard indeed shows how old men in their most miserable decline share the sentiments of Achilles (and Claudio) and "voudroyent, s'ils pouvoyent, leur trespas différer" on any terms, because of their "dread of something after death."

So far it has only been suggested that Ronsard's "Hymne" is one of the most celebrated and imposing (yet also the most vigorous and colloquial) of the Renaissance accumulations of medieval and classical commonplaces about human mutability—the "Hymne" serving perhaps only to clarify Shakespeare's thought, as I have shown in my 1962 article in Shakespeare Quarterly. But we must be particularly struck by some turns of phrase and thought when we read such lines as these:

Tant nous sommes chetifs et pauvres journaliers,
Recevans sans repos maux sur maux, à milliers, …
Lors la mer des ennuis se desborde sur nous,
Qui de nostre raison demanche à tous les coups
Le gouvernai, veincu de l'onde renversée,
En diverses façons troublant nostre pensée.
L'un veut suivre la guerre et tenir ne s'y peut; …
Cestui-ci veut l'honneur, estui-là le sçavoir,
Cestuy aime les champs, cestui-là se fait voir
Le premier au Palais, et sue à toute peine
Pour avoir la faveur du peuple, qui est vaine.
Mais ils ont beau courir, car Vieillesse les suit,
Laquelle, en moins d'un jour, envieuse, destruit
La Jeunesse, et contraint que leur vigueur s'en-aille
Se consommant en l'air ainsi qu'un feu de paille.

Not only do we find Hamlet's "sea of troubles" (which is not in the Plutarchan prototype) and "thousand shocks" but also a sense of the fallibility of human reason and resolution—indeed, later, a whole survey of motivations like those of Claudius and Fortinbras, as well as Hamlet, many of whose other reflections on them echo words here. For it remains Hamlet's distinctive attitudes which one recalls in reading the "Hymne," whether it be the shared theme of skulls like Yorick's or arguments about whether to endure suffering or seek an easy death by violence:

Pource l'homme est bien sot, ainçois bien malheureux,
Qui a peur de mourir, et mesmement à l'heure
Qu'il ne peut résister que soudain il ne meure.
Se mocqueroit-on pas de quelque combatant,
Qui, dans le camp entré, s'iroit espouvantant,
Ayant, sans coup ruer, le coeur plus froid que glace,
Voyant tant seulement de l'ennemi la face?
Puis qu'il faut au marchant sur la mer voyager.
Est-ce pas le meilleur, san suivre le danger,
Retourner en sa terre et revoir son rivage?
Puis qu'on est resolu d'accomplir un voyage,
Est-ce pas le meilleur de bien-tost mettre fin
Pour regaigner l'hostel, aux labeurs du chemin,
De ce chemin mondain, qui est dur et penible,
Espineux, raboteux et fascheux au possible,
Maintenant large et long et maintenant estroit,
Où celuy de la Mort est un chemin tout droit,
Si certain à tenir, que ceux qui ne voyent goute,
Sans fourvoyer d'un pas, n'en faillent point la route?

Apart from the fact that (as with Donne's fourteenth Holy Sonnet) Ronsard's fuller exposition usually clarifies the almost dislocating compression of Shakespeare's imagery and thought, one would be hard put to find quite such intense and sustained reasoning about death as Ronsard's anywhere else in contemporary lyric verse known to the Elizabethans. In the "Hymne" Shakespeare would find compressed into 350 lines of surging verse the full sweep of traditional sentiments about death, fiercely yet lucidly restated by a contemporary poet sensitive to the same pressures as himself. And probably from such a uniquely emphatic restatement of Western thought Shakespeare could best have distilled the intensely subjective speculations of a Hamlet or a Claudio. In these characters Shakespeare seems to carry over the lyric verve of Ronsard into a new theatrical format largely denied to Ronsard, just as Ronsard himself had transmuted lengthy works like Plutarch's Consolation to Apollonius on the death of his son from labored prosy moralizings into incandescent personal rhetoric. Not even such a model for the "Hymne" as Laumonier proposes [in Oeuvres complètes, 1966]—Clémont Marot's "Deploration sur la mort de Florimond Robertet"—completely anticipates Ronsard's subjective immediacy and range of tone. Despite its classical models, the "Hymne" is thus unique to some extent, as Ronsard himself claimed in writing it. Only a Shakespeare could have found a way to surpass the achievements of such a masterpiece, by giving them a fuller, dramatic setting.

For, of course, the juxtaposition of Ronsard and Shakespeare does nothing to diminish the originality of Shakespeare; rather, it clarifies and enhances our sense of his genius. Ronsard's reader is not confronted with the ultimate test of total despair which often seems to threaten Shakespeare's heroes. Ronsard had himself transformed his Plutarchan and Lucretian commonplaces, sharpening their horror because in the end he knew he could depend on the confident expectation of Christian salvation and immortality. Ronsard's men may be "chargez du fardeau / D'orgeuil," but he confidently hopes that they will switch from this burden by finding the "courage / Pour porter nostre croix, fardeau leger et doux." Shakespeare allows his heroes no such overt consolation. They must endure the working-out of their salvation without the aid of recognizable Christian grace. Any resolution of suffering that Shakespeare allows (and surely he does allow it) is thus more universal, less doctrinaire and sectarian, than Ronsard's; but Shakespeare certainly does favor a postpagan sense of potential redemption for all men, which is nearer to Ronsard's ultimate hopefulness than to classical, aristocratic stoicism. Such a resolution of human suffering as Shakespeare's therefore differs from Ronsard's chiefly in that it rises out of an intensely secular vision of experience, instead of being imposed on classical sententiae by the clerical orthodoxy of a Catholic poet in minor orders. It is this subtle superiority in Shakespeare which can emerge clearly when we lay his verse parallel to such a prototype for it as Ronsard's "Hymne".

While Ronsard's influence on Milton is as subtle and widely diffused as that which he had on Shakespeare, his bearing on seventeenth-century verse is more neatly illustrated through the lesser scope of Marvell's poetry, which readily suggests further leads into the epic achievements of his fellow Puritan and friend, John Milton. We should not be surprised to find Ronsard the countryman providing a model for Marvell's "Mower against Gardens" when he writes:

Les chesnes ombrageux, que sans art la Nature
Par les hautes forests nourrist a l'avanture,
Sont plus doux aux troupeaux, et plus frais aux bergers
Que les arbres entez d'artifice és vergers; …
Et la source d'une eau saillante d'un rocher
Est plus douce au passant pour la soif estancher
Quand sans art elle coule en sa rive rustique,
Que n'est une fontaine en marbre magnifique,
Jallissant par effort en un tuyau doré
Au milieu de la cour d'un palais honoré.

Marvell closely echoes Ronsard's attack on man's sterilization of nature by cunning crossbreeds and artificial patterns. His Mower prefers his nature to be "most plain and pure," dispensing to all "a wild and fragrant innocence"; he detests geometrical gardens, grafting, and engineers' fountains: "'tis all enforc'd." It is ironic that two authors supposedly as artificial in their different ways as Ronsard and Marvell should be united in formulating fluent attacks on Renaissance formal gardens. Indeed, it is Ronsard who leads the way toward this new aesthetic in which the medieval "hortus conclusus" is rejected in favor of a more modern landscape, sweeping and varied:

Je m'en vais promener tantost parmy la plaine,
Tantost en un village, et tantost en un bois,
Et tantost par les lieux solitaires et cois:
J'aime fort les jardins qui sentent le sauvage,
J'aime le flot de l'eau qui gazouille au rivage.

Clearly, for Ronsard as for Marvell the well-farmed countryside of his native land is practically a garden in itself. His salute to the Bellerie spring conjures up a scene as intimate and relaxed as any in Marvell's "The Garden" or "Appleton House":

Escoute moy, Fontaine vive,
En qui j'ay rebeu si souvent
Couché tout plat dessur ta rive,
Oisif à la fraischeur du vent;
Quand l'Esté mesnager moissonne
Le sein de Cerés dévestu,
Et l'aire par compas resonne
Gemissant sous le blé batu.

The spiritual release that Marvell displays in such surroundings is also anticipated in a similar ode, "A la Forest de Gastine":

The scene that such passages conjure up reappears memorably in such verses as these from Marvell's country walk in "Upon Appleton House":

Then languishing with ease, I toss
On Pallets swoln of Velvet Moss;
While the Wind, cooling through the Boughs,
Flatters with Air my panting Brows,
Thanks for my Rest ye Mossy Banks,
And unto you cool Zephyrs Thanks,
Who, as my Hair, my Thoughts too shed,
And winnow from the Chaff my Head.
How safe, methinks, and strong, behind
These Trees have I incamp'd my Mind.

As we found with Shakespeare, the juxtaposition of the prototypes in Ronsard for these lines of Marvell clarifies their compressed imagery and paradoxical meanings. We see here exactly how Marvell has advanced the theme: he has economically selected practical details like the threshing and heightened their subjective meaning and intellectual coherence, so that Ronsard's winnowing wind becomes a figure for the mental sifting which Ronsard had also incidentally described. And of course he notes such picturesque phrases as "ombrages vers" for use in "The Garden."

In that poem it appears that Marvell does not always need to intensify the already considerable eccentricity of thought and emotional pitch of his French model. The passionate love of nature which attains a sexual intensity in Marvell finds its nearest precedent in Ronsard, who writes of trees as if they were truly responsive and as if their human attributes were not primarily the product of allegorical fancies of the kind favored by Ovid in telling the story of Apollo and Daphne (Metamorphoses, I.553-559) or of Petrarch's punning on Laura and laurel (Canzoniere, 142, 227, etc.). Unlike these precedents Ronsard's affections seem to lose all sense of the mistress, Genévre, in redirecting themselves to the plant, the juniper, which bears her name in French:

Or-sus! embrasse moy, ou bien que je t'embrasse,
Abaisse un peu ta cyme, afin que j'entrelasse
Mes bras à tes rameaux et que cent mille fois
Je baise ton escorce, et embrasse ton bois….
Genévre bien-aimé, certes je te resemble,
Avec toy le Destin sympathizant m'assemble.
Ta cyme est toute verte, et mes pensers tous vers
Ne meurissent jamais.

Marvell neatly juxtaposes these "green thoughts" with the "green shades" that Ronsard mentions elsewhere—but the pursuit of such eccentric moods so characteristic of Stuart poets like Herrick and Marvell finds an apt precedent in Ronsard. It is he who first transposes Ovidian fancies to a lyric, subjective format, transforming allegory to psychology (here close to pathological in the attitude displayed). Ronsard's neoclassical animism also leads the way for Marvell's.

Even the subtlest and most philosophical points in Marvell can often be traced back through Ronsard's startlingly realistic recensions of neoclassical motifs. Thus in his "Elegie à Hélène" Ronsard vividly recaptures Virgil's delight in "rerum cognoscere causas":

Puis du livre ennuyé, je regardois les fleurs,
Feuilles, tiges, rameaux, especes et couleurs,
Et l'entrecoupement de leurs formes diverses,
Peintes de cent façons, jaunes, rouges et perses,
Ne me pouvant saouler, ainsi qu'en un tableau,
D'admirer la Nature, et ce qu'elle a de beau,
Et de dire en parlant aux fleurettes escloses:
Celuy est presque Dieu qui cognoist toutes choses….

With the possible exception of Milton in "II Penseroso," few significant Renaissance poets show quite this high esteem for meticulous, even scientific, attention to nature while using it as a major theme in long lyrical poems, until Marvell picks up the thread in "Upon Appleton House," and in this passage in particular:

Thus I, easie Philosopher,
Among the Birds and Trees confer: …
No Leaf does tremble in the Wind
Which I returning cannot find.
Out of these scatter'd Sibyls Leaves
Strange Prophecies my Phancy weaves:
And in one History consumes,
Like Mexique Paintings, all the Plumes.
What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said
I in this light Mosaick read.
Thrice happy he who, not mistook,
Hath read in Natures mystick Book.

Ronsard had already dramatized this idea of nature as a source of divine revelation in his lyric elegy, even if it is Marvell who follows only to exceed him, in substituting natural philosophy for the Bible itself—a daring and characteristic English secularization, comparable to what we have seen to be Shakespeare's tendencies, which Ronsard's Catholic orthodoxy would scarcely allow him.

We could continue endlessly, exploring ways in which Ronsard's nature poetry affords specific models for Marvell's yet more eccentric intelligence to elaborate or intensify. But it is now surely clear that Ronsard provides Marvell with distinctive precedents for his landscape themes, while he seems likely to have provided Shakespeare with useful examples for subjectified philosophic systems, and certainly to have furnished Donne with bizarre passions both amatory and religious. And Ronsard also afforded many other English authors from Spenser to Milton a comparable range of resources. To them and many other English poets, his verse was demonstrably a great encyclopedia of Renaissance poetical resources. More than that, however, it was crammed with the intuitions and agonized subjective discoveries of genius wrestling with the awareness born of a new age. Ronsard's personality was complex yet not disorderly, intensely speculative yet disciplined by suave neoclassical ideals, deeply traditional yet realistically responsive to the moods rising from his personal experience and above all from his love of the provincial French countryside. The later English Renaissance poets grasped all this and more, as we must recognize if we are to understand their art fully. They heightened the wit and paradox in Ronsard's quaint and fanciful observations; they intensified his subjectivity and dramatic rhetoric; they emphasized his provincial realism and played down his sometimes intrusive neoclassicism. But without him they would have remained nearer to earlier poets like Googe and Gascoigne, Tusser and Turberville—authors who largely lacked the resources Ronsard afforded to the later writers. The result of his influence in England was not simply neoclassical pastorals; it was also a vigorous, eccentric, and picturesque kind of lyric and dramatic poetry, highly individual and thus surprisingly realistic despite its surface wit and artifice. Of course, the English poets did not merely duplicate Ronsard, nor did they depend on him in any exclusive sense, but without his example their work would surely have been less assured, less stylish, and less profound. Their creative devotion to his example requires a far more extensive study than it has yet received.