[In the following essay, Yandell investigates the carpe diem theme in Ronsard's poetry and its relation to the poet's dread of aging.]

For women are as Roses, whose faire flowre
Being once displaid, doth fall that verie howre.

Orsino to Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (2:4:36-39)

The carpe diem (“pluck the day”) motif, whose onomastic origins can be traced to Horace, permeates not only classical Greek and Latin poetry but also lyric poetry from fifteenth-century Italy to sixteenth-century Spain to seventeenth-century England.¹ Few students of English literature are unfamiliar with Robert Herrick's “Corinna's Going a Maying,” John Donne's “The Anagram,” William Shakespeare's Sonnets 3 and 4, or Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress.” Similarly, in the Spanish tradition, Garcilaso de la Vega's “En tanto que de rosa y azucena,” Luis de Góngora's “Mientras por competir con tu cabello,” Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola's “Ojalà suyo así llamar pudiera,” and Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas's “A una mujer afeitada” form part of a large corpus of carpe diem poems. But it is perhaps in early modern France in general, and in the Pléiade in particular, that the carpe diem motif reaches its apogee. As Paul Laumonier humorously phrases it, “le vieux thème est dans l'air, et l'air en est satur锲 (the old theme is in the air, and the air is saturated with it). Pierre de Ronsard figures prominently in this tradition, which he both embraces and transforms.

Construed traditionally as “a compliment and an invitation” and more recently as “an instrument of seduction,” carpe diem has received much critical mention but little sustained attention.³ Perhaps this comparative dearth of scholarly scrutiny results from what appears to be a too obvious functioning of the literary motif. Even the most casual reader notes that the poet who invokes the carpe diem diem motif is attempting to convince the addressee, often through a comparison of the young girl to the ephemeral rose, that she should love him now while the time is ripe. But what is the nature of this tactic? How does it function, both rhetorically and psychologically? Is the poet's ultimate message an epicurean exhortation to “gather rosebuds while ye may,” or do other rhetorical elements in the poems obfuscate that reading? Ronsard's carpe diem poems reveal not only multiple responses to these questions but also the poet's own assumptions about time, the topos that is explicitly problematized by the motif.

Ronsard's complex and original adaptation of the carpe diem motif can perhaps best be illustrated by juxtaposing his texts with the classical sources that he sets out to imitate. When Ronsard began to adopt the carpe diem motif in the mid-sixteenth century, a number of Latin, Greek, and more contemporary models were available to him. The Greek Anthology had been published in Florence in 1494 by Janus Lascaris and reprinted several times, including one printing in Paris by Josse Bade in 1531. Johannes Stobaeus's Florilegium, from which Ronsard borrowed many erotic-bacchic fragments, was published in Venice in 1535 by Bartholomeo Zanetti Casterzagense, in 1543 in Zurich by Froschoverus, and again in Basle in 1549 by Joannes Oporinus.⁴ Horace's Opera and specifically the Carmina enjoyed a great popularity at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, with numerous editions published in Venice, Florence, and then Paris (Simon de Colines, 1528). In addition to these classical sources, the carpe diem motif experienced a rebirth in the late-fifteenth-century Italian poetry of the Petrarchisti, Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano.⁵ Ronsard also read Johannes Secundus, which led him to other neo-Latins, notably Marullus, whose Epigrammata & Hymni had been published in Florence in 1497 and in Paris in 1529.

Many subtle differences exist among the various sorts of carpe diem poems, but the most prototypical form of the genre features the older male poet, with distinctly erotic designs, exhorting the younger female addressee to take advantage of the present moment. Propertius urges Cynthia to taste of life's pleasures now, for her kisses will fall like petals from a festive garland (Elegies, II, 15). Ovid reminds a young Roman woman that years flow like water; she will regret having pushed away her lover as she lies in her solitary bed in later years. She should gather the rose before it wilts and falls of its own accord (Ars Amatoria, II, vv. 59-80). In this representative form, three constitutive elements interact within the space of the poem, all conflicting with a diametric opposite and creating a tension that the poem proposes to resolve: the rose in its withered avatar clashes with its vigorous, youthful representation; the poet in most cases expresses an explicit or implicit contention with the addressee; and the menacing future (illustrated by the projected declining, aging body of the addressee) opposes the epicurean present (incarnated in the currently glowing, youthful body of the addressee).

I will argue here that Ronsard's poet exploits these tensions in his carpe diem poems more explicitly than do his classical models and that his staging of the tensions betrays certain of the poet's attitudes toward temporality, gender, and the body. Consider as a first example the paradigmatic sonnet “Je vous envoye un bouquet que ma main” (1572) with respect to its most frequently cited model, Rufinus's “To Rhodoklea.”⁶

Here Rhodoklea
is a garland
a braid of delicate
flowers laced
by my own hands
there are lilies
roses
moist anemones
soft narcissus
dark-gleaming violets
wear it
cease to be haughty
both flowers and you
will cease one day(7)
Je vous envoye un bouquet que ma main
Vint de trier de ces fleurs épanies:
Qui ne les eust à ce vespre cuillies,
Cheutes à terre elles fussent demain.
Cela vous soit un exemple certain
Que vos beautés, bien qu'elles soient fleuries,
En peu de tems cherront toutes flétries,
Et comme fleurs periront tout soudain.
Le tems s'en va, le tems s'en va, ma Dame
Las! le tems non, mais nous nous en allons,
Et tost serons estendus sous la lame:
Et des amours desquelles nous parlons
Quand serons morts n'en sera plus nouvelle:
Pour-ce aimés moi, ce pendant qu'estes belle.

(L., 7:152; P., 1:270)⁸

(I am sending you a bouquet that my hand / Just picked among these blossoming flowers / Tomorrow they would have fallen / Had no one picked them today. / Let this be an unmistakable lesson to you: / Your beauty, although it is flourishing / In little time will be gone / And like flowers, it will suddenly perish. / Time is fleeting, time is fleeting, my Lady / Alas! Not time, but we are fleeting, / and soon we will lie under stone. And of the loves we now speak, / there will be no more news when we are dead. / Thus love me now, while you are still beautiful.)

The tensions cited above generate the movement of both poems but much more obviously in the case of Ronsard. Both poems insist on the flight of time and both compare the young addressee to freshly picked flowers. Both poets highlight their own authority. Rufinus's narrator emphasizes his role of weaving together the garland, and Ronsard's speaker underscores that it is his own hand that picked the flowers in order to take advantage of their finest moment. In both cases, the poet fully intends to reap benefits from the addressee's beauty if she is so inclined. Rufinus's invitation, “wear it / cease to be haughty,” is the suggestive equivalent of Ronsard's “Pour-ce aimés moy.” In contrast to the concise idea of Rufinus's poem, however, the elaboration and development of the motif in the French sonnet create a quite different message.

The images of both poems lead to the conclusion that the lovers must act before death sets in: “both flowers and you / will cease one day,” “cheutes à terre elles fussent demain,” “comme fleurs periront tout soudain,” “tost serons estendus sous la lame.”⁹ Ronsard's speaker, unlike Rufinus's, rhetorically identifies with the lady in that both poet and addressee will someday die: “le tems s'en va, ma Dame / Las! le tems non, mais nous nous en allons.” Yet the identification of the first-person-plural pronoun extends only to death and not to the problem of aging. Given the paradigm of the older male poet/young girl, it is of course predictable that Ronsard would not conclude the sonnet with a reference to his own youth. The sonnet unfolds according to a principle of commonality, however, with one exception: both speaker and addressee will someday die, but within the rhetoric of the poem, only one of them will grow old. Five lines of the sestet proclaim the advent of death as the preeminent reason to love now, but the last line diverts the logical progression of the poem and substitutes the implication of the lady's eclipsed beauty (“while you are [still] beautiful”) for their mutual death.

In Ronsard's sonnet the poet is thus rhetorically connected to the addressee through the use of the unifying first-person pronoun and then distanced from her through the pronounced shift back to the second person singular. The subjective dynamics within the poem mirror this tension. The poet establishes a connection with the addressee both by the implicit suggestion of sexual attraction and by his evocation of their mutual destiny. A severance between the poet and the addressee takes place, however, when Ronsard's speaker evokes her youthful beauty that will soon vanish. The shift from “nous” to “vous” and from “quand serons morts” to “ce pendant qu'estes belle” is reminiscent of Tonto's quintessential “what do you mean `we,' Paleface?” By rhetorically joining the lady in their mutual expectation of death and then separating himself from her (from her loss of youth), Ronsard's poet manifests a more pronounced desire to gain mastery over both fleeting time and the lady's aging than does his classical model.¹⁰ The 1567 elegy “J'ay ce matin amassé de ma main” provides another clear example of the poet's insistence on the flower's atrophy and loss of beauty rather than its death, but this time the poet magnifies the fusion of the flower and the addressee to illustrate the lady's vanishing desirability. Thomas Greene notes in Ronsard “the tendency of a woman's body to become a landscape and conversely, of a landscape to become her body, a tendency so subtle and pervasive as almost to merit the term Joycean.”¹¹ This reciprocity develops particularly in the beginning of the elegy where the earth's bosom has produced a bouquet worthy of the lady's breast. It is doubtless not coincidental that in this elegy Ronsard's speaker temporarily loses himself in a few uncharacteristically repetitive verses: “Elle est vermeille, et vous estes vermeille. / Sa blancheur est à la vostre pareille. / Elle est d'azur, vostre esprit et vos yeux / Ont pour couleur le bel azur des cieux. / Elle a le gris pour sa parure mise, / Et vous aimez la belle couleur grise” (L., 14:148; P., 2:353), insisting upon the collapse of modifiers and artfully coalescing the woman-flower so that the human and herbaceous qualities become interchangeable:

Plus il ne reste à vous dire, maistresse,
Que tout ainsi que ceste fleur se laisse
Passer soudain, perdant grace et vigueur,
Et tombe à terre atteinte de langueur,
Sans estre plus des Amans desirée
Comme une fleur toute desfigurée,
Vostre âge ainsi verdoyant s'en-ira
Et comme fleur sans grace perira.

(L., 14:148; P., 2:354-55)

(It remains to be said, my lady, / That just as a flower fades suddenly, losing its grace and vigor, / And falls, languishing, to the ground / No longer desired by any lovers, / Like a disfigured flower, / [So] your flourishing age will flee / And like a flower will perish gracelessly.)

In this elegy it is the anthropomorphic flower, not the lady, replaced by the substantive “âge,” who languishes, becomes disfigured, and fails to attract lovers. This referential indeterminacy that humanizes the flower also serves to dehumanize the addressee who “without grace will die.” But once again, while death punctuates the poet's comparison, it is in no way the central problem posed by the elegy. There are six specific mentions of the loss of attractiveness to lovers and the deterioration of physical beauty in the elegy, whereas death (in the form of the verb “périr”) figures only once.¹² Aging appears as a threat greater than death to the addressee in several of Ronsard's models as well,¹³ but Ronsard's poet personalizes the temporal implications of the motif and accords them corporality, thus emphasizing the poet's authority in setting the clock forward. Ronsard's imitation of an epigram by Julianus from The Greek Anthology corroborates this claim:

Maria is proud; but do thou, mighty Justice, take vengeance on the hauteur of that arrogant lass,—not by death, O Queen, but on the contrary may she reach the grey hairs of age, may her hard face come to wrinkles. May the grey hairs avenge my tears: may her beauty suffer for the error of her soul, as it was the cause of it.¹⁴

Je ne veux point la mort de celle qui arreste
Mon coeur en sa prison: mais, Amour, pour venger
Mes larmes de six ans, fay ses cheveux changer,
Et seme bien espais des neiges sur sa teste.
Si tu veux, la vengeance est desja toute preste:
Tu accourcis les ans, tu les peux allonger:
Ne souffres en ton camp ton soudard outrager.
Que vieille elle devienne, ottroyant ma requeste.
Elle se glorifie en ses cheveux frisez,
En sa verde jeunesse, en ses yeux aiguisez,
Qui tirent dans les coeurs mille pointes encloses.
Pourquoy te braves-tu de cela qui n'est rien?
La beauté n'est que vent, la beauté n'est pas bien,
Les beautez en un jour s'en-vont comme les roses.

(L., 17:245; P., 1:373)

(I do not wish the death of the one who holds / My heart in her prison. But Amor, to avenge / My tears of six years, change the color of her hair,/ And sow thick snow upon her head. / If you wish, vengeance is all ready./You shorten the years, you can lengthen them as well: Do not let your soldier be injured in your camp./ Make her old—grant my plea. / She glorifies in her curly locks, / In her green youth, in her sharp eyes / That pierce my heart with a thousand arrows. / Why do you play the gallant with something worthless? / Beauty is only wind, beauty is not a possession, / Beauties vanish in a day like roses.)

Ronsard's speaker, even while imploring Eros's aid, establishes his own voice from the outset (“je,” “mon coeur,” “mes larmes,” “ton soudard”), which highlights his agency in the premature aging of the lady. The sixteenth-century poet insists more than does his Greek model upon the addressee's former beauty by furnishing concrete examples of the “before” as contrasted with the “after” (“cheveux frisez,” “verde jeunesse,” and “yeux aiguisez,” which are all revealed to be ephemeral). Maintaining his authority in the physical realm, Ronsard omits the moral dimension introduced by Julianus (“May her beauty suffer for the error of her soul”). Ronsard's speaker (still the “je” introduced in the first quatrain) concludes his sonnet by evoking the transitory nature of beauty, as illustrated by two physical images: wind and roses. Thus once again Ronsard's poet rhetorically emphasizes his authority in the workings of time upon the lady and insists on her former beauty (and by extension the stakes involved in time's devastation of it) more than does the classical model.

Why, in these poems and elsewhere, is aging depicted as a fate worse than death? Why does the threat of the aging body prove to be such a prominent rhetorical strategy for Ronsard's poet, especially in comparison to his classical models? Female beauty in sixteenth-century France, as in fifteenth-century Italy, was a central preoccupation of artists and poets, to which the Blasons poétiques du corps féminin and many other works attest.¹⁵ Judging from observations of male contemporaries, beauty and youth are not dissociable in the cultural sensibilities of early modern Europe. Vives's Institution de la femme chrétienne, first published in French translation in the 1540s, cites physical considerations as important factors in man's choosing a wife, and first mentioned among those is age.¹⁶ Erasmus incites girls to marry while they are still “in the bloom of youth,” which he specifies as about seventeen years old.¹⁷ Similarly, Estienne Pasquier warns that girls should not delay marriage lest their perfect ripeness pass, and he estimates the ideal nubile age to be twenty years.¹⁸ Aging women figure prominently as the subject of derision in a number of sixteenth-century proverbs collected by Le Roux de Lincy, including “Temps pommelé, pomme ridée et femme fardée ne sont pas de longue durée” (Hazy weather, shriveled apple, and painted woman do not last long) and “Celuy qui prend la vieille femme, / Ayme l'argent plus que la dame” (He who takes an old wife loves money more than the lady).¹⁹

Thus it would appear that since youthful beauty is especially important to a woman in sixteenth-century France, at least from the perspectives cited, the threat of her losing that beauty by aging would be the most powerful of taunts. We could then agree with Henri Weber that in this poem Ronsard perhaps “a jugé que cet argument touchait plus directement l'orgueil féminin” (thought that this argument more directly touched feminine pride).²⁰ But that temptingly tidy conclusion fails to take into account the poet's terror about the future in general and about the effects of time on his own body in particular. As early as 1555 in “Quand je suis vingt ou trente mois / Sans retourner en Vandomois” (L., 7:98; P., 1:806), the poet at age thirty, to the bemusement of many twentieth-century readers, already laments that his youth is fleeting: “Mais tousjours ma jeunesse fuit, / Et la vieillesse qui me suit, / De jeune en vieillard me transforme” (my youth is continually fleeting, and old age follows me, transforming me from a young to an old man).

Ronsard's perennial consternation at the problem of aging is corroborated in Creore's Word Index, which cites over six hundred references to forms of “vieux” and over eight hundred to forms of “jeune.” The poet's anxiety about growing old translates first into his privileging the moment of youth, which finds one of its earliest expressions in “Dedans des Prés je vis une Dryade” in the first book of the Amours:

Dedans des Prez je vis une Dryade,
Qui comme fleur s'assisoyt par les fleurs,
Et mignotoyt un chappeau de couleurs,
Eschevelée, en simple verdugade.
De ce jour là ma raison fut malade,
Mon cueur pensif, mes yeulx chargez de pleurs,
Moy triste et lent: tel amas de douleurs
En ma franchise imprima son oeillade.
Là je senty dedans mes yeulx voller
Un doulx venin, qui se vint escouler
Au fond de l'ame: et depuis cest oultrage,
Comme un beau lis, au moy de Juin blessé
D'un ray trop chault, languist à chef baissée,
Je me consume au plus verd de mon age.

(L., 4:53 [1552]; P., 1:55)

(In the meadow I saw a dryad / Sitting as a flower among flowers, / Sweetly donning a colorful hat, / Tousled, in a simple dress. / From this day forward my judgment grew weak, / My heart pensive, my eyes filled with tears, / I became sorrowful and slow. / Her gaze engraved such a heavy mark upon my liberty. / I felt a sweet venom fly into my eyes, flowing into the depths of my soul. And since this shattering event, / Just as a beautiful lily wounded by scorching rays in June / Languishes with its head bowed, / [So] I am wasting away in the prime of my youth.)

This sonnet enumerates love's melancholic effects on the poet, with a conclusion highlighting the speaker's youth. Reflections on the budding beauty of the dryad in the form of a flower immediately give way to the poet's Petrarchan introspection regarding his own state, translated by the predominance of first-person referents: “ma raison,” “mon cueur pensif, mes yeulx,” “moy triste et lent.” The first tercet, troped in an innamoramento, elaborates the poet's condition brought about by the young dryad-flower.²¹ The second tercet predictably exploits the image of the flower with its head down (recalling Virgil's description of the death of Euryalus in the Aeneid, IX, 435-37); but, quite unpredictably, the flower in the last tercet represents no longer the dryad but the poet himself, languishing as he is consumed by melancholy in his youth. This insistence on the poet's youth is certainly not a commonplace within the tradition of innamoramento poems.²² What is even more striking in the sonnet and what distinguishes Ronsard from his classical models the most clearly is this substitution of the poet for the lady as the referent of the metaphorical flower.²³

The woman-flower rhetorically metamorphosed into a man-flower within the space of the poem signals a blurring of genders as well as of identities. The substitution of one flower for the other once again stages a complex connection between poet and addresses; the Other both represents and does not represent himself, as evidenced in “Je vous envoie un bouquet” above. The Other is she who in amatory terms conquers him and whom he seeks to conquer, either by causing her aging within the poem (as in “Je ne veux point la mort”) or by seeking her affection and her favors (as in the poem under consideration here), a connection often severed within the register of his carpe diem poems. The last line of the sonnet, completely focused on the poet's inner state (underscored by the reflexive verb form), insists on his separateness and summarizes his regrets about his own premature aging; in contrast to the “flower seated among flowers” who remains stable throughout the sonnet, the poet sees the “greenness” of his youth destroyed.

The attraction of youth for Ronsard lies not only in the promise of the future for the young poet, thwarted in the preceding poem, but also in an erotic proclivity for budding female sensuality in the aging poet:

J'aime un bouton vermeil entre-esclos au matin,
Non la rose du soir, qui au Soleil se lâche:
J'aime un corps de jeunesse en son printemps fleury:
J'aime une jeune bouche, un baiser enfantin
Encore non souillé d'une rude moustache,
Et qui n'a point senty le poil blanc d'un mary.

(L., 17:326 [1569]; P., 1:453)

(I like a ruby bud half-opened in the morning / Not the rose of evening, which is weary in the sun, / I like a youthful body in its blossoming spring / I like a young mouth, a child-like kiss / Not yet sullied by a rough mustache, / And which has never felt a husband's grey beard.)

This implicit fusion of the pure, pristine young woman and the unspoiled morning rosebud recalls Les triumphes de la noble et amoureuse dame et l'art de honnestement aymer (1535) by Jean Bouchet, who espouses the theory that, like flowers, a young girl's beauty fades if she is kissed or touched too much, “car le lys representant virginité pert incontinent sa beauté par attouchemens” (because the lily representing virginity quickly loses its beauty by being handled).²⁴ While on the one hand, the poet in this context relishes the inexperienced lover, on the other, Ronsard's name has never figured among the advocates of preservation of female purity. Indeed, he chides the resisting Marie for despising nature (L., 7:254; P., 1:194) and for imagining honor “dedans son esprit sot” (L., 7:138; P., 1:273)(in her foolish mind).

The second book of the “Sonnets pour Helene” offers other examples of the poet's shunning societal strictures on sexual expression when such principles interfere with his erotic designs, as in the following 1578 sonnet:

Cest honneur, ceste loy sont noms pleins d'imposture
Que vous alleguez tant, sottement inventez
De nos peres réveurs, par lesquels vous ostez
Et forcez les presents les meilleurs de Nature,
Vous trompez votre sexe et lui faites injure. …

(L., 17:266; P., 1:460)

(This honor and this law that you ivoke so much are insidious, stupidly invented by our idle fathers. By [this honor], you abolish and constrain the best gifts of Nature, you deceive and abuse your sex. …)

Given Ronsard's unwavering adherence to orthodoxy in matters of state, as a fierce supporter of the kings he served, and religion, as a loyal Catholic, Ronsard's critique of contemporary sexual mores in this sonnet can be read as either exceptional or self-interested. I see evidence for both conclusions.

Challenging sexual mores in more comprehensive way, Ronsard launches a boutade in the Continuation des Amours, musing that if Petrarch didn't gain Laura's favors, the poet from Arezzo should never have continued his devotion to her for thirty years:

… car à voir son escrit,
Il estoit esveillé d'un trop gentil esprit
Pour estre sot trente ans, abusant sa jeunesse,
Et sa Muse, au giron d'une seule maitresse:
Ou bien il jouissoit de sa Laurette, ou bien
Il estoit un grand fat d'aymer sans avoir rien. …

(L., 7:317;P., 1:168-69)

(Judging from his work, [Petrarch] had too fine a mind to be such a fool / for thirty years, wasting his youth and his Muse, attached to the same / lady. Either he was finding physical pleasure with his little Laura, / or else he was an idiot to love without getting anything. …)

In this passage Ronsard's speaker not only challenges Petrarch's inability to secure Laura's physical affection, but he also specifically deplores the loss of Petrarch's youth because of it.

In addition to Ronsard's unmitigated passion for youth, the poet's aversion to aging and the aged is revealed in countless poems, from the more general psychological reservations, “Pource je porte en l'ame une amere tristesse, / Dequoy mon pied s'avance aux faubourgs de vieillesse” (My soul carries a bitter sadness that I am headed for the realm of old age) (L., 18:42; P., 1:442),²⁵ to the specific fear of physical debility, “tant de malheurs / Que la vieillesse apporte, entre tant de douleurs …” (so many misfortunes that old age brings, amidst so much pain …) (L., 18:265—6; P., 2:612).

Several critics of Ronsard have concluded that the poet eventually rises above the questions of the flourishing or deteriorating physical body and accedes to a higher spiritual plane.²⁶ Indeed, Ronsard's speaker's sanguine tone when addressing the older “Sinope” in the first sonnet of a series devoted to her seems initially to mark the poet's acceptance of aging and its effects:²⁷

L'an se rajeunissoit en sa verde jouvence,
Quand je m'épris de vous, ma Sinope cruelle;
Seize ans estoyent la fleur de vostre äge nouvelle,
Et vostre teint sentoit encore son enfance.
Vous aviez d'une infante encor la contenance,
La parolle, et les pas; vostre bouche estoit belle,
Vostre front, et voz mains dignes d'une immortelle
Et vostre oeil, qui me fait trespasser quand j'y pense.
Et si pour le jourd'huy voz beautez si parfaites
Ne sont comme autrefois, je n'en suis moins ravy,
Car je n'ay pas égard à cela que vous estes,
Mais au dous souvenir des beautez que je vy.

(L., 10:87; P., 1:277)

(The year was renewed in its fresh youth when I was taken with you, my cruel Sinope. Sixteen years were the flower of your new age, and your countenance seemed still in its childhood. You still had the look, the speech and the step of a royal daughter. Your forehead, your hands (worthy of an immortal) and your eyes make me die just thinking about them. … And if today your perfect beauties are no longer as they were before, I am none the less thrilled, for I do not heed what you are, but rather the sweet memory of the beauties I saw.)

The poet disconcerts the reader by the pointe of the last line, however, rejecting any stoic acceptance of the effects of age. Diverting the question of Sinope's diminishing beauty, the speaker retains instead the image of her more alluring youth. Sinope's current, faded incarnation is emphatically supplanted by the memory of her younger avatar. The poet thus in no way transcends the loss of the young woman's beauty in favor of loftier considerations. On the contrary, he freezes in his mind the image of her former pulchritude by winding backward Mnemosyne's clock.

Here, as is so often the case in Ronsard's love lyrics, behind the problem of the Other looms the larger, more consuming question of the self. The fourth “Sonnet à Sinope,” which appears in the cycle shortly after “L'an se rajeunissoit,” sheds considerable light on the poet's regrets about his own aging and his jealousy of a younger suitor:

Or de vostre inconstance accuser je me doy,
Vous fournissant d'amy qui fut plus beau que moy,
Plus jeune et plus dispos, mais non d'amour si forte.

(L., 10:89; P., 1:278)

(Now I must blame myself for your inconstancy, / Furnishing you with a lover more handsome, / Younger and nimbler than I, but whose love is less strong.)

The poet consecrates the remaining sonnets to his loss of Sinope, culminating in the final poem where he renounces his quest: “C'est trop aymé, pauvre Ronsard, delaisse / D'estre plus sot, et le temps despendu / A prochasser l'amour d'une maistresse …” (L., 10:100; P., 1:278) (You have loved too much, poor Ronsard, cease / Being a fool and wasting time chasing after a mistress's love). Thus in light of the concluding sonnets of the cycle, the speaker's insistence on Sinope's declining beauty in the first sonnet can be glossed as a mask, a deflection, a substitute for the poet's discouragement about his own aging and his inveterate sense of loss.

What, then, is the relationship between Ronsard's apparent obsession with youth discernible throughout his work and the carpe diem poems? It seems clear from the preceding examples that the poet temporarily circumvents the question of his own aging (and of the alterity it represents) by projecting it onto the Other, incarnated textually in the female addressee.²⁸ The specific functioning of this projection is particularly apparent in Ronsard's 1550 “A Janne impitoyable,” which imitates Horace's ode “Ad Ligurinum” (IV, 10).²⁹ The odes of both Ronsard and his model are concerned with time's control over physical as well as psychological human destiny. They address, both rhetorically and psychologically, the dimension of aging that divides the self from itself, a phenomenon that Montaigne describes succinctly: “moy à cette heure et moy tantost sommes bien deux.”³⁰ A commonplace in literary depictions of aging holds that the speaker does not recognize in the mirror his or her old face, which bears little resemblance to the “authentic” younger self. Horace's poet employs this image very convincingly when addressing the young Ligurinus:

O crudelis adhuc et Veneris muneribus potens
insperata tuae cum veniet pluma superbiae
et, quae nunc umeris involitant, deciderint comae,
nunc et qui color est puniceae flore prior rosae
mutatus, Ligurine, in faciem verterit hispidam,
dices “heu,” quotiens te speculo
videris alterum,
“quae mens est hodie, cur eadem non puero fuit,
vel cur his animis incolumes non redeunt genae?”

(Ah, how cruel you are while you are still master of Venus' Gifts! / When your cheek of disdain comes to be plumed with an unwelcome down, / When cascades of your hair, falling in full waves to your shoulders now, Start to thin and shed, when into rose-damask of fleshly tint / Harshness comes and a changed roughness of face, then, Ligurinus, then, / As your mirror reflects someone unknown, you will protest: “Alas!, / What I now understand, why did I not see as a lad? Or else, / May I not have again cheeks unimpaired, suiting what I know now?”³¹

Ronsard's ode threatens Janne with a similar fate:

Jeune beauté, mais trop outrecuidée
Des presens de Venus,
Quand tu voirras ta peau estre ridée
Et tes cheveux chenus,
Contre le temps et contre toy rebelle
Diras en te tançant:
“Que ne pensois-je alors que j'estois belle
Ce que je vais pensant?
Ou bien pourquoi à mon desir pareille
Ne suis-je maintenant?
La beauté semble à la rose vermeille
Qui meurt incontinent.”
—Voilà les vers tragiques et la plainte
Qu'au ciel tu envoyras,
Incontinent que ta face dépainte
Par le temps tu voirras.
Tu sçais combien ardemment je t'adore,
Indocile à pitié,
Et tu me fuis, et tu ne veux encore
Te joindre à ta moitié.
O de Paphos et de Cypre regente,
Deesse aux noirs sourcis!
Plustost encor que le temps, sois vengente
Et du brandon dont les coeurs tu enflames
Des jumens tout autour,
Brusle-la moy, à fin que de ses flames
Je me rie à mon tour.

(L., 2:33-35; P., 1:761-62)

(Young beauty, too proud of Venus's gifts, when you see your wrinkled skin and grey hair rebellious against time and you, you'll chide yourself, saying “Why didn't I think what I do now when I was beautiful? Or why am I not as I wish now? Beauty, like the crimson rose, dies suddenly.”—You'll exclaim these tragic jeremiads to the heavens, as you see your face quickly worn by time. You know how ardently I love you, [but] obstinate and unmerciful, you escape me, not wishing to join your other half. O queen of Paphos and Cyprus, goddess with black eyebrows! Even more than time, take revenge and with the torch you use to ignite young girls' hearts, fire her up for me, so that I can have my turn to laugh.)

On a first reading, the poems appear to be identical in the relationship between poet and addressee. Each poet desires the young addressee, who has not reciprocated his love, and both poets taunt the young object of desire, threatening old age and regret. But significant differences in the poems arise in the poets' rhetorical strategies, and some of these differences are attributable to the fact that Horace's addressee is male whereas Ronsard's is female. Voltaire, in his epistle to Horace, “n'a pas osé lui parler de son Ligurinus,” and Laumonier, speaking of Horace in Ronsard, poète lyrique, expresses the same reservation.³² Though the distinctions between the homoerotic lyric in Horace and the heterosexual lyric in Ronsard would be compelling to pursue, they extend beyond the scope of the present study. What is of particular interest to us in this context are the techniques by which Ronsard's poet once again establishes a semblance of connection with the addressee, only to replace it with a more detached stance, thus highlighting the sixteenth-century poet's mastery of the addressee and her time.³³

The structure of the odes initially appears similar, in that both poems are predicated on an axis of when/then: When all these physical changes befall you, both poets stipulate, then you will see the light. Both addressees are made to speak of their moment of alienation followed by cognition. As the poems progress, however, a significant structural difference between the two poems emerges. In the Horatian ode, the paternal speaker willingly relinquishes the power of speech to his son/ lover so that youth articulates his own belated discovery. Ligurinus thus has the last word. In contrast, Ronsard's speaker frames the lady's words (almost identical to Ligurinus's) within his own discourse, providing an exegesis and an elaboration such that the concluding message remains the poet's own. The poet's voice further enters the ode more explicitly in the form of a monologue to the addressee in line 17, “Tu sçais bien combien ardemment je t'adore,” and the speaker's voice continues to dominate the remainder of the poem. The psychological underpinning of this form of carpe diem, the rhetorical aging of a lover who spurns the poet, functions similarly in the two poems in that both poets seek retribution for love refused. But Ronsard's ode far surpasses the Horatian ode in its depiction of difference and conflict. In the Horatian ode, the speaker details Ligurinus's present beauty in concrete terms, evoking his “cascades of … hair, falling in full waves” and his “rosedamask of fleshly tint,” whereas Ronsard's speaker, apparently unwilling in this context to concede any semblance of complimentary language, describes the lady's beauty simply as “outrecuidée” (proud, haughty). In “Ad Ligurinum,” the relationship between the speaker and the addressee remains implicit, since the speaker is nowhere present in the poem, and the only concrete indication of the speaker's position emerges in the first words of the ode: “O crudelis. …” The mirror image in line 6 of the Horatian ode evinces a relationship in which both identity and alterity are suggested and where, it could be argued, the alter (“different one”) resembles the aged speaker more than he resembles the youthful Ligurinus.

Ronsard's speaker, unlike Horace's, enters fully into the poem beginning in line 17, proclaiming his ardor, chastising Janne explicitly for fleeing his advances, and invoking Venus's vengeance upon her. Whereas in Horace, the conflict between narrator and narratee remains implicit, in Ronsard, the poem becomes a battlefield in which the speaker general triumphs, reserving for himself the last laugh. This last laugh adds a temporal dimension as well, since it transports the sonnet from the register of a future perspective of the present (the regrets of the young woman) back to the present (“Tu sçais combien ardemment je t'adore”) and again the implied future of the imperative (“Brusle-la moy”), thus insisting even more on the tensions provoked by time's linear progression. Horace's ode, on the other hand, despite its insistence on fleeting time, remains rhetorically situated in the future. The Ronsardian ode thus stages the temporal tensions more dynamically both by its shift in time and by the intervention of the narrator. The sixteenth-century poet once again establishes his personal complicity with time and its powers more forcefully than does his classical model.

The tone Horace's poet adopts when directing a carpe diem poem to a male other than an elusive lover is, not surprisingly, even more complicitous than in his ode to Ligurinus. In the well-known “Aequam memento rebus in arduis,” (“Remember, when life's path is steep,” II, 3), addressed to Dellius, the tone of the ode suggests a vital connection between poet and addressee as the first counsels the second to partake of wines and perfumes “while Fortune and youth allow.”

Several of Ronsard's poems on the subject of savoring the present moment, replete with wilting roses, are also addressed to men (as friends and colleagues, ostensibly, not as elusive lovers like Ligurinus), and in those odes and sonnets the poet establishes a tone of camaraderie, as in “Verson ces roses en ce vin,” dedicated to Aubert:

La belle Rose du printemps,
Aubert, admoneste les hommes
Passer joyeusement le temps,
Et pendant que jeunes nous sommes,
Esbattre la fleur de nos ans. …

(L.,7:190; P., 1:841)

(The beautiful spring rose, Aubert, incites men to pass the time joyously, and while we are young, to relish the flower of our years. …)

The explicit identification of the poet with the addressee predicates a kind of shared history that nullifies the conflict present in the motif when the addressee is a spurning female lover. Predictably, in this context Ronsard's menacing depictions of old age vanish and his epicurean urgings become egalitarian and untainted by spite.

Does Ronsard's speaker ever identify with a female addressee when he writes of the ravages of time? To a limited degree, yes. In “Comme une belle fleur assise entre les fleurs,” for example, the poet deplores “l'importune vieillesse [qui] nous suit,” and the tone reveals the poet's indisputable complicity with the female addressee. Yet it is “le coup d'Amour” and not the human body that withers and grows old in this poem: “Amour et les fleurs ne durent qu'un Printemps” (L., 17: 224; P., 1:364). In the 1550 ode “Nimphe aus beaus yeus,” also, Ronsard's poet allies himself with Cassandre by the first-person plural pronoun: “Incontinent nous mourrons … / Donc cependant que l'âge nous convie / De nous esbattre, esgayon nostre vie. / Ne vois-tu le temps qui s'enfuit, / Et la vieillesse qui nous suit” (L., 2:127-28; P., 1:807-8) (Suddenly we will die … / So while our age still bids us / To dally, let's make our lives more mirthful. / Don't you see that time is fleeing, / And old age follows us). In both of these examples, however, time's devastation remains abstract; the reader will note the absence of references to the aging poet's own body in the context of his exhortation to pluck the day.

In his extensive study of time in Ronsard, Malcolm D. Quainton concludes that for Ronsard, “human happiness and wisdom are seen to reside in a submission to the rhythmic variety of time and in a stoical acceptance of man's inevitable transience in the name of cosmic harmony.”³⁴ But the poet writes in a multiplicity of registers.³⁵ I have argued that Ronsard's lyric poetry reveals an adamant attachment to youth and a pronounced terror of aging, neither of which is convincingly assuaged even in the Derniers vers. These attachments and fears, embodied in various corporal images throughout Ronsard's poetic corpus, find their most powerful expression in the carpe diem motif, which represents the poet's ultimate attempt to triumph over time and the aging body. Neither explicitly succumbing to Chronos's devastation of his own body nor stoically accepting it, as the above examples have illustrated, Ronsard's speaker in the carpe diem motif rhetorically masters the lady's time, ravishing her body by the ravaging of old age. Cassandre, Janne, and Hélène, all consigned at some point to a shriveled future within the poet's verses, function for Ronsard's speaker as his doubles whose bodies enact the aging the poet so forcefully dreads for himself elsewhere in his work.³⁶

These physical projections into the future also reveal a paradoxical functioning of carpe diem in Ronsard's poetic corpus. While the motif's didactic message incites readers to relish the present moment, to round out, as it were, time's advancement, the repeated images contrasting youthful and aging bodies unfold in a mercilessly linear time frame. In Physics, Aristotle asserts that time is no more made up of instants than a line is made of points. But as points can be established on a line, so Ronsard's employment of the carpe diem motif freezes in time fixed images of corporeal flowering and withering. Seizing textually not the moment but the human body, Ronsard's poet, rhetorically if not epistemologically, takes time into his hands and makes it his own.

Notes

1. From the ode to Leuconoë: “Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” (Reap the harvest of today, putting as little trust as may be in the morrow!), The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett, Loeb Classical Library, 33 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1968), Ode I, 11, 32-33.

2. Paul Laumonier, Ronsard, poète lyrique: Étude historique et littéraire (Paris: Hachette, 1923; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1972), 587.

3. Donald Stone, Ronsard's Sonnet Cycles: A Study in Tone and Vision (New Haven: Yale UP, 1966), 6; Elizabeth Berg, “Iconoclastic Moments: Reading the Sonnets for Helene, Writing the Portuguese Letters,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 208. In their monumental studies of Ronsard and sixteenth-century poets, both Laumonier, Ronsard, poète lyrique, 560-634, esp. 581-91; and Henri Weber, La création poétique au seizième siècle en France (Paris: Nizet, 1955), 333-56, each devote a section to the carpe diem motif in the Amours. Stone, Ronsard's Sonnet Cycles, 6ff., treats the question briefly; and more recently Elizabeth Berg has given a feminist reading of the Sonnets pour Helene with some attention to the motif. Ricardo Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1972), is an excellent study that refers to carpe diem as an exhortation never to waste time, but there is no consideration of the motif as a rhetorical device. Richard Glasser, Time in French Life and Thought, trans. C. G. Pearson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1972), 143, mentions carpe diem as an indication of the changing attitudes toward time and as the antidote to Ronsard's philosophy of the eternal: “Only that which resisted time was valuable and genuine,” Glasser, Time, 168. See also Yvonne Bellenger, “Le vocabulaire de la journée et des moments dans la poésie du XVIe siècle,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire 5 (1977): 760-84; Tom Conley, The Graphic Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 106ff.; and Malcolm D. Quainton, Ronsard's Ordered Chaos: Visions of Flux and Stability in the Poetry of Pierre de Ronsard (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1980), 121-26.

4. For further development of these borrowings, see Laumonier, Ronsard, poète lyrique, 596-98; and Henri Chamard, Histoire de la Pléiade (Paris: Didier, 1939-1940), 70.

5. Lorenzo de Medici, Poesie volgari (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1554); Poliziano, Agnolo, and Lorenzo de Medici, Canzone (Florence: Giunti, 1568).

6. A number of other influences can be cited: Petrarch's “I'mi vivea” and more generally erotic epigrams from Asclepiades, Agathias, and Rufinus; see Laumonier, Ronsard, poète lyrique, 585-91; James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1946), 350-74; and Weber, La création poétique, 341-50. In most cases, Ronsard does not imitate a single, indisputable work but rather conflates several sources. In this study I have chosen to work with the most obvious models, which lend themselves best to close readings when juxtaposed with the Ronsardian texts. But other classical sources that I have consulted also support the theses I advance here. For a very interesting study of the phenomenon of multiple sources in Ronsard, see Edwin Duval, “Ronsard's Conflation of Classical Texts,” Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 4 (1981): 255-66.

7. Anthologia Palatina, 5.74, in The Greek Anthology, trans. Alan Marshfield, ed. Peter Jay (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), 306.

8. The first of these (L.) refers to Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1914-1975); and the second (P.) to Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, 45-46, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1993-1994).

9. Quainton, Ronsard's Ordered Chaos, 122, shows the progression of rhyming words of the octet and its depiction of the destruction wrought by time and the movement from life to death: “epanie, demain, fleuries, flétries, soudain.”

10. Compare also the 1569 “Dame au gros coeur, pourquoy t'espargnes-tu?” (L., 15:121; P., 2:885) which Hutton, Greek Anthology, 361, calls a “mere translation” of an epigram by Asclepiades (5.85). Indeed, the idea of the two poems is identical except that Ronsard adds a dimension of physical aging absent from the original (“cependant que tu es jeune et belle”). Compare also “Douce beauté, meurdriere de ma vie” (L., 6: 219; P., 1:92).

11. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 205. See also François Rigolot, “Rhétorique de la métamorphose chez Ronsard,” in Textes et Intertextes: Études sur le seizième siècle pour Alfred Glauser, ed. Floyd Grey and Marcel Tetel (Paris: Nizet, 1979), 152, who notes in the ode “Mignonne, allons voir” the alternation between the woman as rose and the rose as woman. See also Oeuvres complètes de Ronsard, ed. Gustave Cohen, Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 1:1081; and Husserl, cited by M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 203.

12. However, as Leonard Johnson deftly points out, “with death once is enough” (note on the manuscript).

13. See Horace, Carmina, IV, x; Propertius, Elegies, III, xxv; Meleager's “Garland”; Hutton, Greek Anthology, 155.

14. Anthologia Palatina, 5.298, Hutton, Greek Anthology, 372.

15. See Elizabeth Cropper, “The Beauty of Women: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1986), 175-90; Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1956 and 1978), 136-209; Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1976): 265-79; Alison Saunders, The Sixteenth-Century Blason Poétique (Berne: Peter Lang, 1981); Cathy Yandell, “A la recherche du corps perdu: A Capstone of the Renaissance blasons anatomiques,” Romance Notes 26(1986): 135-42.

16. Juan Luis Vives, Institution de la femme chrétienne, trans. Pierre de Changy (Lyon: S. Sabon, n.d.), 225. This passage is also reproduced in Guillerm, Le miroir des femmes (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983), 86.

17. The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1975), 104.

18. Letter 10 of book 22, in Lettres familières, ed. Dorothy Thickett (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 408. Compare also Francesco Barbaro, Deux livres de l'estat du mariage, trans. Claude Joly (Paris: Guillaume de Luyne, 1567), 29, who recommends choosing a young wife because a younger woman will more willingly accept instructions. For further treatment of the question of age and marriageability in sixteenth-century Paris, see Barbara Diefendorf, Paris City Councillors in the Sixteenth Century: The Politics of Patrimony (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), 179ff.

19. Le Roux de Lincy, Le Livre des proverbes français et leur emploi dans la littérature du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance (Paris: A. Delahays, 1859), 1:133, 220. For other examples of this phenomenon, see Jacques Bailbé, “Le thème de la vieille femme dans la poésie satirique du 16e siècle et début du 17e siècle,” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 26 (1964): 98-119.

20. Laumonier, La création poétique, 347. Compare also his similar conclusion in Laumonier, Ronsard poète lyrique, 579.

21. Compare also Petrarch's Rime Sparse, CLIX, in Petrarch's Lyric Poems, ed. Robert Durling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976), 304.

22. Compare, for example, Petrarch, Rime Sparse, 1-3, pp. 36-39, 61, 138-39; Maurice Scève, Delie, I-XXX, in Poètes du Seizième Siècle, ed. Albert-Marie Schmidt (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 75-85.

23. Weber, La création poétique, 248, notes simply that the lily referring to the poet joins and completes the evocation of spring flowers in the first quatrain. The sonnet “En vain pour vous ce bouquet je compose” (L., 15:212; P., 1:243-44) also includes a final image of the pining poet as wilting flower: “Comme je suis fany pour l'amour d'elle” (I am wilted out of love for her), whereas the epigram by Meleager on which it is based (5.143) limits the flower image to the addressee Heliodora. A comparison between the poet and the rose carries a different meaning in “Pren ceste rose aimable comme toy” (L., 15: 204; P., 1:72-73), where the poet's life of suffering, unlike that of the rose, is seen to have no end.

24. Jean Bouchet, Les Triumphes de la noble et amoureuse dame, et l'art de honnestement aymer (Paris: Galliot du Pré, 1535), 21.

25. Other passages are far too numerous to develop here. See, for example, “Epitaphe de Feu Monseigneur d'Annebault” (L., 13:182-83; P., 2:917); “Celuy qui est mort aujourdhuy” (L., 7:281; P., 1:785); and “Voicy le temps, Hurault, qui joyeux nous convie” (L., 17:380; P., 2:340). Gilbert Gadoffre, Les Quatre saisons de Ronsard, 13, 15, notes Ronsard's early obsession with death, but he also concludes that “Ronsard est un grand anxieux,” which he attributes in large part to the tumultuous political and cultural environment of the second half of Ronsard's life. Compare also “Joyeuse suy ton nom qui joyeux te convie,” verse 61, “Car l'age le meilleur s'enfuit dés la jeunesse” (For the best age already begins to escape us beginning in childhood) (L., 18:119; P., 2:298).

26. See, for example, Isidore Silver, Ronsard and the Grecian Lyre, vol. 3 (Geneva: Droz, 1987), 164; Quainton, Ronsard's Ordered Chaos, 110-15; Yvonne Bellenger, “Temps mythique et mythes du temps dans les Hymnes de Ronsard (Hymnes de 1555-56 et de 1563),” in Le Temps et la durée dans la littérature au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris: Nizet, 1986), 179-92.

27. Yvonne Bellenger, “Temps mythique,” 178, in fact reads this poem as a confirmation of Ronsard's privileging love over beauty.

28. See Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis's definition of “projection,” in Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, ed. Roland Chemama (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 345: “the subject attributes to another the tendencies, desires, etc., that he repudiates in himself” (my translation).

29. Compare also Horace, Carmina, I, 25, vv. 9-19 and III, 26.

30. Essais, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 2:403 (III, 9). For a contemporary psychoanalytic reading of this question, see Kathleen Woodward, “The Mirror Stage of Old Age,” in Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis, ed. Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986).

31. Ode IV, 10, in Odes and Epodes, trans. Bennett, 324. The English translation is by Charles E. Passage, The Complete Works of Horace (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), my emphasis.

32. Laumonier, Ronsard, poète lyrique, 581.

33. Compare also Horace's “Ode to Lyce” (Carmina, IV, 13), a post-carpe diem apostrophe addressed to the now aged former lover. Here the poet is distanced from the female addressee throughout the ode, and the speaker's presence in the text is limited to two first-person references: “Audiuere, Lyce, di mea uota” (The gods, O Lyce, have heard my imprecations) and “Quid habes illius, illius, / quae spirabat amores, / quae me surpuerat mihi” (What remains now of that beauty that our love breathed, that overtook me … . On the poet's distance from himself and his own youth, see Michael C. Putnam, Artifices of Eternity: Horace's Fourth Book of Odes (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), 227.

34. Quainton, Ronsard's Ordered Chaos, 127.

35. In the editors' introduction to the Pléiade reedition of Ronsard's works, they note Ronsard's ability to “se multiplier,” in this case by his borrowing from other authors without engaging in servile imitation; Oeuvres complètes, ed. Céard, Ménager, and Simonin, 1:xxvi.

36. In a different context, Michel Simonin, “Hélène avant Surgères: pour une lecture humaniste des Sonnets pour Hélène,” in Sur des vers de Ronsard, 1585-1985: Actes du colloque international, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1990), 127-43, has ably demonstrated the importance of the notions of la gémellité (“twinship”) and of the double in the Sonnets pour Hélenè.