SOURCE: “Pierre de Ronsard's Odes and the Law of Poetic Space,” in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. XLIV, No. 4, Winter, 1991, pp. 757-75.

[In the following essay, Ahmed argues that in the Odes Ronsard transgresses the spatial boundaries that had hitherto defined poetry.]

Et faictes que toujours j'espie
D'oeil veillant les secretz des cieulx,

(“Ode à Michel de l'Hospital”)

The Odes of 1550 and 1552 reveal Pierre de Ronsard's ambition to gain entry into the court of Henri II. In the 1550 preface to the Odes, Ronsard does not make the slightest effort to veil his literary and political objectives. He presents his Odes as a poetic challenge to Clément Marot's psalm translations of 1541 and 1543 with the discovery of an equally ancient lyric source, pagan rather than Hebraic, and he mounts an ad hominem attack on the court poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais in order to win Henri's favor. The poetry, however, places in evidence other preoccupations. The Odes describe and problematize the endless wanderings of a poetic subject who seeks to uncover the secrets not only of the ancient world but of the modern one as well.

The young Vendômois poet attempts to unify in his verse worlds fragmented by time and space. Tracing his patrons' history to ancient Greece and Rome becomes, in part, a way of creating an official place for himself in France. Within the metaphorical space of his poetry, however, he alters received spatial relationships so they will conform not to myth but to a new, higher form of reality. Ronsard's success comes from such a syncretic vision, but the legal ramifications weigh heavy upon his conscience—perhaps in light of the Sorbonne's condemnation of Marot's 1541 translation of sacred texts. Through his vernacular imitations, Ronsard relates his early modern world to an ancient poetic one that not only embraces an absolute and divine authority but also contradicts Church belief.¹

Throughout the Odes, the poet makes continual reference to a certain law of propriety as he introduces ancient pagan elements in his verse. Although he recognizes the moral sanctions against classical paganism-revived, the poetic world of the Odes continually defies them and alludes to an unlimited possibility of creation. One can observe this conflict in the discursive, the historical, and the cosmological aspects of the Odes. Though these perspectives of meaning are analogous in structure and are often presented simultaneously, for the sake of exposition I shall separate them in order to demonstrate how the Odes are bound to a novel and problematic view of spatial relationships in sixteenth-century France. Ronsard's specific comments on the difficulty of combining ancient with modern elements are directly related to a vision he is trying to describe. Although Ronsard recognizes this need for propriety both formally and contextually, I argue that he nonetheless transgresses it. In fact, he plants the seeds of a poetic philosophy of infinite space which will resonate in the works of the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno as he develops his own theory of the infinite which contributed directly to the scientific revolution at the end of the sixteenth century.²

THE LAW OF THE SONG

The “Ode à Michel de l'Hospital,” written in 1550 and published in 1552, appropriately marks the beginning of Ronsard's career as a court poet, while it recounts the origins of pagan poetry. The ode is given in recognition of l'Hospital's defense of Ronsard and his poetic reforms against the polemical attacks of Saint-Gelais. Through l'Hospital's efforts, Ronsard eventually was able to win the favor of Henri II.³ The symbolic deference paid to the “loy de la Chanson” at the end of this poem could signal Ronsard's acceptance into the court, but the significance of this law in terms of discursive order is still greater:

Mais la loy de la Chanson
Ores ores me vient dire
Que par trop en long je tire
Les repliz de sa façon.
Ore donque je ne puis
Vanter la Fleur, tant je suis
Pris d'un ardeur nompareille
D'aller chez toy pour chanter
Cest Ode, affin d'enchanter
Ton soin charmé par l'oreille.

(vv. 807-16)

(But the law of the Song / Now, now comes to tell me / That I draw out too long / The folds of its fashion. / Now I may no longer / Praise the Flower, so much am I / Seized by a passion without equal / To go to you and sing / This Ode, in order to captivate / You charmed through the ear.)

In spite of his much vaunted discovery of the ancient ode in his preface, Ronsard defines the relationship between the ode and the chanson as one between poetic innovation (“ode”), and poetic authority (“loy de la Chanson”). In search for authority, the chanson becomes the source of the ode, and the nature of poetic chronology becomes problematic, indeed reversed, in a poem that claims to uncover the pagan origin of poetry. Ronsard seems to submit his “ode” to the “loy de la Chanson” by syntactically placing it between the rhyme “chanter:enchanter” in the last verses, because the rhyme emphasizes the vernacular function of this ancient form; it “naturalizes” it. Particularly in light of Joachim Du Bellay's rejection of the term “chanson” in his Deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), the use of it in this ode on lyric origins conveys a more ambivalent attitude towards the Ancients than Du Bellay would like to concede in the Pleiade's manifesto. The movement towards the Ancients is coupled with a movement back to France and an identification with its national lyric tradition. The expression, “the law of the song,” derives from Pindar (Nemian, IV, v. 33) where the law, tethmós, refers to the just balance between a unified and yet diverse poetic discourse. Ronsard worries somewhat belatedly about transgressing this law in his most lengthy of Pindaric odes (composed of 816 verses). The poet realizes at the closing of the poem that he has surpassed the limits of this lyric form and that he can no longer develop the encomium of Marguerite (“la Fleur”), the duchess of Berry and sister of Henri II, which he started in the preceding stanzas. He has drawn out the folds of the “chanson” too far in his eagerness to praise Michel de l'Hospital—so far that he begins to praise Marguerite as well. In view of this ancient law that prescribes an enclosed poetic field of diverse elements, the poet commits an act of impropriety by encompassing too many topics and overstepping formal boundaries. Though Pindar admits to the same infraction, his digressions are not so prolix as Ronsard's.⁴

Similar discursive improperieties recur earlier in the fifth epode of the “Ode à Michel de l'Hospital,” when Jupiter commands his daughters, the Muses, to perform “chansons” at a gathering of his divine court (V. 161 et passim). Once the Muses have gathered, they begin to tell the battle of the gods and the giants, known as the “Assaut des Geans et des Dieux.” This account occupies the center of the poem and again emulates Pindar by embedding a digressive tale in an ode. While the Muses “accord” a discordant battle, Ronsard attempts to “accord” by means of imitation his chanson not with a Pindaric ode but with Hesiod's Theogony on the battle between the Titans and the Olympians.⁵ Once the Muses have concluded their song, the poet, however, entones a discordant note:

Juppiter qui tendoit l'oreille,
La combloit d'un aize parfaict,
Ravy de la voix nompareille
Qui si bien l'avoit contrefait:
Et retourné, rid en arriere
De Mars, qui tenoit l'oiel fermé,
Ronflant sur sa lance guerriere,
Tant la Chanson l'avoit charmé.

(vv. 319-26)

(Jupiter who was offering his ear, / Filled it (his ear) with complete joy, / Ravished by a voice beyond comparison / which had so well counterfeited it (the song): / And having turned, laughed behind him / At Mars, whose eyes were closed, / Snoring on his warrior staff, / So much the Song had pleased him.)

[The songs] have been reduced to one and impersonalized by the definite article. Moreover, this one voice did not sing the chanson but imitated it or more specifically parodied or counterfeited it (“contrefait”).⁶ Isidore Silver has remarked on the originality of this stanza but nonetheless queries: “How justify the tone of the passage?”⁷ Could this be a reference to the imitator's own voice unwilling to efface itself behind the Muses, much less behind Hesiod? The battle song that causes Mars to snore (“ronflant”) delights Jupiter. Ironically, Hesiod's poem on the origin of the world gives Ronsard the opportunity to render the identity of the original maker problematic; Jupiter's acknowledgement of Ronsard's pleasing distortion creates the impression of his actual presence at the god's court where he displays his ability to enchant even the greatest of divinities. The shifts that occur among the subjects and objects truly complicate the spatial order (“trop en long je tire / Les repliz”) as Ronsard attempts to create a place for himself. From the perspective of Renaissance modes of intertextuality, one could say that Ronsard curries Henri's favor primarily through his heuristic imitations of the classical Greek poets Pindar and Hesiod.⁸ But from a purely intrinsic point of view, one can analyze the shift as the displacement of the ancient and absolute center of poetic creation from the pagan divinities (i.e., the Muses) to the poet himself, so that their other worldliness assumes a relative value for the person speaking.

Du Bellay insists in the Deffence that young French poets compose French odes based on Latin and Greek examples and do so in a “consonant” manner. Ronsard ironizes that accord in his seminal ode on poetic origins. Margaret Ferguson writes that Du Bellay does not allow in his Deffence for “the possibility of an imitation that not only changes the ancient source but plays ironically on the change.”⁹ This feature distinguishes Ronsard's practice in his odes from Du Bellay's theoretical stance. While Du Bellay seeks a unified accord with Horace, Ronsard combines the voices of many. He even manages to distinguish his own voice among the divine ones by superimposing his voice on the Muses and wins the praise of Jupiter. His singularity becomes apparent when he draws attention to his own ability to write a counter-version of pagan history—again, “la voix qui le contrefait.” He appropriates their authority in order to display his own creative power, and he identifies with the divine Ancients not as their epigone but as their equal. He rewrites their poetry, altering it, and indeed reversing the imagery in order to make a place for himself.

He transgresses the law of poetic space and propriety as he makes room for himself at the expense of his patrons, human and divine. In the opening verses of the “Ode à Michel de l'Hospital,” the theme of poetic space is foremost in Ronsard's thoughts as he wanders through fields of the Graces gathering flowers into crowns. In his travels, the first-person subject fashions a crown metaphorically by the joining verses:

Errant par les champs de la Grace
Qui peint mes vers de ses couleurs
Sus les bords Dirceans j'amasse
Le trésor des plus riches fleurs,
Affin qu'en pillant je façonne
D'une laborieuse main,
La rondeur de ceste couronne.

(vv. 1-7)

(Wandering in the fields of the Grace / Who paints my verse with her colors / By the side of the Dircean [fountain] I collect / Treasure from the richest flowers, / So that while culling I may fashion / With a skilled hand, / The roundness of this crown.)

The repeated deviations from the triadic pattern heightened by the initial placement of the word “errant” in the first verse can be taken as an assertion by the poet of his role as the wandering discoverer. He inserts himself in the discourse at the risk of displacing his patron;¹⁰ he fashions an oddly shaped crown around himself, symbolically marking a royal space protected from the “vulgaire.” Ronsard leads the reader to believe the poet follows a pattern, but the “Ode à Michel de l'Hospital” represents a counter example to a unified discourse and provides counter histories to the ones he claims to imitate. Readers may be correct who view the poet's “errors” as ill-fashioned imitations of Pindar,¹¹ but Ronsard's deviations also articulate a novel and complex relationship—one which is not strictly an intertextual problem of imitation but more generally the quest for a poetic center in a world of unlimited diversity. The crown symbolized by the composition of the verses must be ample enough to give the poet freedom to wander endlessly and yet to define a place within the recognized bounds of the royal court. From a discursive point of view, herein lies the fundamental conflict of the Odes.

In his “Ode de la Paix,” Ronsard deprecates an abundant use of words and lauds brevity, but he will again disregard the law:

Tousjous un propos deplaist
Aus oreilles attendantes,
Si plein outre reigle il est
De parolles abondantes.
Celui qui en peu de vers
Etraint un sujet divers,
Se mét au chef la couronne:
De cette fleur que voici,
Et de celle, et celle aussi,
La mouche son miel façonne
Diversement.

(vv. 291-301)

(Always a subject is unpleasing / To the awaiting ears / If it surpasses the rule / With abundant words. / He who can contain in a few verses diverse subjects / May place the crown upon his head: /With this flower here / And there, and also there, / The bee fashions its honey / In a diverse manner.)

The plurality of voices and texts becomes central to the creation of an ode; Ronsard describes his craft ironically as that of a modest bee that “borrows” its honey from diverse sources—a theme developed in Horace's ode IV, ii, which Horace in turn borrows from Pindar's Pythia, X, vv. 53-54. The relationship between unity and diversity is central, because an overabundance of words is a transgression of the poetic law, “outre reigle,” the same “loy de la Chanson” which Ronsard claims to observe in order to preserve the song's unity. He nonetheless abandons the encomiastic pattern in a blatantly immodest way to create a new history as he simultaneously admonishes one against such transgression. In the preface to the Odes he seeks the reader's praise for having traced an unknown path, having freely surmounted territorial boundaries:

Si les hommes tant des siecles passés que du nostre, ont merité quelque louange pour avoir piqué diligentement aprés les traces de ceus qui courant par la carriere de leurs inventions, ont de bien loin franchi la borne: combien davantage doit on vanter le coureur qui galopant librement par les campaignes Attiques, & Romaines osa tracer un sentier inconnu pour aller à l'immortalité?

(If men many centuries before ours merited some praise for having spurred [their horses] diligently after the traces of those who, racing on the career of discoveries, went well beyond the border: how much must one praise the racer who, galloping freely among the Attic and Roman countryside, dared to trace an unknown path to gain immortality?)¹²

It is the spirit of the unbound traveller which he tries to capture in his poetry but which unfailingly complicates the poetic discourse.

HISTORY AND PROPHECY

When Ronsard attempts to portray Henri II, Michel de l'Hospital, Marguerite de Valois, and others according to Pindar's example, he creates anachronistic settings for his sixteenth-century patrons. He tries to superimpose a national political patron onto a foreign poetic pattern, “un patron,” and by doing so, he consciously crosses spatial boundaries. His identity becomes defined as the mediator between two worlds. To the extent that he attempts to reconcile pagan poetry with sixteenth-century court life, he resembles Marot's David who, as a divine prophet, mediates between the two spheres of heaven and earth. Moreover, as Christians uncover figures in the Old Testament to prophesy Christ's coming and to align the histories of the two peoples, Ronsard invents pagan prophesies of the founding of Paris in order to make the two worlds appear consecutive. In the preface to his translations, Marot explains David's experiences in terms of Christ. One can view Ronsard's prophetic history as an attempt to place an air of divine sanction over his verse. He regards it as venerable as the psalms. Marot establishes prophetic connections between the “Hebraïques” and the “Galliques” and between David and François I, whereas Ronsard creates an alternative history from Greece to Rome to France, from pagan gods to Henri II. To advance the parallel one more step, Ronsard wills into being concordant spiritual experiences between the pagan heros and the French through reviving ancient verse and mythologizing the birth of France as a modern and imperial state.

In the “Ode de la Paix,” Ronsard inserts a complex sequence of narratives in the middle of the ode; Vergil's Aeneid provides the main source of inspiration for this translatio imperii. The praise of Henri II which opens the poem leads quickly to the unfolding of a Franciade epyllion that traces a movement from the Creation to the Fall of Troy and to the founding of Paris (vv. 37-286). Issuing from this genealogical digression in an exaggerated Pindaric manner is the glorious descendant of Troy, Henri II. Ronsard justifies a place for himself at the French court, as if it were his natural right, by creating a similar place in history for his king; indeed, both were fated from the beginning of time. This victory ode marking the signing of the treaty between Henri II and Edward VI of England over France's reacquisition of Boulogne serves as a pretext for Ronsard to establish a place in France without limit for his poetic imagination.

Henri II is the prophesied heir from the Greek world. Through the voices of Cassandra and Andromache, Ronsard blends past, present, and future in an effort to surmount his historical limitations and yet to align his art with the prophetic arts of those two women.¹³ Cassandra prophesies that Astyanax will found a new Troy on the Danube from which will emerge a group of settlers to found the city of Paris,¹⁴ and Andromache foretells both of Paris becoming the eternal city, like Vergil's Rome, and of Henri's preeminence. Through these pagan prophets, Ronsard will chart a traditional “Catholic” succession of empires and letters from Greece to Rome and then to France. While the “timeless” evangelism of the psalms is preserved in Marot's reverential translation, Ronsard needs to amend mythological history to create an equally immortal image of Paris and Henri II.¹⁵

Once Ronsard has established the connection between Francus and Henri II and between Troy and Paris, he breaks the narrative line and banishes Francus from his ode:

Fui donc Troien, toi et ta bande,
Si ton Neveu me le commande
J'irai bien tost pour te trouver.

(vv. 284-86)

(Take flight Trojan, you and your troops, / If your Nephew commissions me [to write the epic] / I will come soon to find you.)

Again, as he did in the “Ode à Michel de l'Hospital,” the poet intervenes in the world which he is trying to represent. He exerts his influence over the descendants of Francus and in doing so advertises his ability to write a French epic for which he seeks Henri's commission: “Si ton Neveu me le commande.”¹⁶ Similar to the ode to l'Hospital, the center comes to represent the place of flight, an open space that can only be circumscribed by Henri's patronage. This divine history of Henri whose closure is alluded to remains nonetheless incomplete. This history is constructed in the ode through the infraction of the poetic law of unity which would be guaranteed, in this context, by the verisimilitude of events; yet the more diverse the events become, the less plausible they appear. The lyric subject unites the two peoples through a fictionalized account that he attempts to pass off as prophecy. Moreover, he hopes that his reader will accept this history as revealed truth. But later, in the “Epistre au lecteur” to his incomplete epic the Franciade (1572), Ronsard will criticize Ariosto for departing too far from the law of verisimilitude and for creating marvelous fables in the Orlando Furioso. Ronsard falls victim to his own judgment both in the “Ode de la Paix” and the Franciade as his efforts to posit unity between historically diverse cultures prove to be an impossibility.¹⁷

Adherence to this law of unity or verisimilitude has strong moral foundations. In the epyllion, Ronsard disregards the moral statement he makes at the opening of the ode as if it does not apply to him. There he observes, following Pindar's example, how aimlessness stems from royal pride (vv. 4-5, “De son heur outrecuidée / Court vague, sans estre guidée”; “From his proud happiness / He wanders, without being guided.” Cf. Pindar Pythia V, str. 1). Morality is defined in spatial terms. Realizing toward the end of the ode that this poetic history has led himself astray, he invokes the Muse in a Pindaric manner to keep him from going farther adrift:

Muse, repren l'aviron,
Et racle la prochaine onde
Qui nous baigne à l'environ
Sans estre ainsi vagabonde.

(vv. 287-90)

(Muse, resume the oar / And scrape the next wave / Which bathes our sides / Without thus being vagabond.)

Again, does the poet consider himself above moral reproach for his lack of proportion? In these verses the poet explains that his course is not self-determined but governed by a divine force, the Muse. Although he violates his own injunction against human pride—pride being an unsanctioned and indeed unlimited exploration of space—he looks to the Muse to authorize such a lofty undertaking. This problem of closure is recurrent; rather than seek this infinite space away from the court, he does so from the very center, as if again shaping a royal crown that gains him recognition as an epic poet and that sanctions his endless wandering among diverse topics. While the poetic and political crowns symbolically impose spatial order, the tethmós, they embody as well a prophecy of vast expansion for both Henri's empire and Ronsard's imagination. One can see at this point that the Odes both discursively and historically surpass the law of unity and tend to the realm of the marvelous as they attempt to encompass a myriad of seemingly disjointed concerns—be it the “Ode à Michel de l'Hospital” with topics ranging from the Battle of the Gods and the Giants to the genealogy of poets and the praise of too many patrons or the “Ode de la Paix” with the diverse and illustrious genealogy of Henri II. This same acceptance of the marvelous precedes a poetic belief in a world of infinite dimension.¹⁸

POETIC FLIGHT

Ronsard opens the Quatre premiers livres des odes in a work entitled “Au Roi” wherein he requests patronage from Henri in a twenty-verse prologue. If Henri gratifies Ronsard's mundane interests, the poet will place the king at the center of the ever-expanding poetic universe:

L'aiant pour ma guide, sire,
Autre bien je ne desire,
Que d'apparoistre à tes yeux
Le saint Harpeur de ta gloire,
Et l'archer de ta memoire
Pour la tirer dans les cieus.

(vv. 15-20)

(Having you for my guide, Sir / I desire no other good / Than to appear before your eyes / As the holy Harpist of your glory / And the archer of your memory / In order to launch it into the heavens.)

Ronsard informs Henri II in this liminal ode that he, as poet, can perpetuate his king's memory as if he had the power to deify mortals, “Pour la tirer dans les cieus.” Since the genealogy he creates for Henri is fictitious, glory is not equated with real acts but with the conservation of one's name for posterity, as suggested by the rhyme “gloire:memoire.” If Henri II consents to be Ronsard's patron “ma guide” and secure for him a place as court poet, Ronsard will preserve the Valois king's name in the heavens. Memory becomes an explicit function of politics.

As Ronsard proceeds, he reveals a sense of poetic strength that appears to flourish quite independently of his king. The poet turns to his Muse and deliberates over whom he will glorify:

Muse, bande ton arc dous,
Muse ma douce esperance,
Quel Prince fraperons nous,
L'enfonçant parmi la France?
Sera-ce pas nostre roi,
Duquel la divine oreille
Humera cette merveille
Qui n'obeist qu'à ma loi?

(vv. 21-28)

(Muse, arm your sweet bow / Muse my sweet hope / Which Prince will we strike / Sending him throughout France? / Will it not be our king, / Whose divine ear / Will drink up this marvel / Which only obeys my law?)

Ronsard describes his ability to glorify his king in an imperious manner because he views divine poetry as a sovereign would his kingdom: “Cette merveille / Qui n'obeist qu'à ma loi.”¹⁹ This “merveille” is the poetic space where familiarity is lost among objects of superhuman proportion. Here Ronsard explicitly abandons Pindar's law of poetic proportion. One can sense the poet's attempt to articulate this new law of poetry through his infractions of spatial. and moral codes. Marsilio Ficino, in his commentary on Plato's Phaedrus, considers poetry to be ruled by one of the four divine madnesses in which the poet, as he composes, undergoes a state of rapture or alienation and holds a position outside the “customs of men”—a claim that Ronsard makes repeatedly for himself.²⁰ This alienated state is not only mirrored in the endlessly digressive form of the verses but can be understood only by one equally outside the law of mortals as the rhyme “divine oreille:merveille” suggests.

It is noteworthy that a sixteenth-century definition of the “merveille” in terms of spatial law can be found in the writings of Michel de Montaigne. When writing about the divine nature of Vergil's poetry, Montaigne states that the “merveille” transcends the laws of human space:

Au dernier [à Vergile], premier de quelque espace, mais laquelle espace il [un étudiant de poésie] jurera ne pouvoir estre remplie par nul espirit humain, il s'estonnera, il se transira. … Voicy merveille … la bonne, l'excessive, la divine [qui] est au dessus des regles et de la raison.

(Regarding the latter [Vergil]—who is first by quite a distance, by a space that our student will swear no human mind can fill—he will be stunned and speechless. … Here is a wonder … the good, the supreme, the divine [which] is above rules and reason.)²¹

As Todorov observes in a recent work on the marvelous: “The function of the supernatural is to remove the text from the action of law and by the same token to transgress the very law.”²² Todorov uses the word “law” here also to mean the rule of verisimilitude. This rule is applicable to Ronsard's poetics in the Odes with the exception that this poet wants nonetheless to remain within the legal bounds of the royal court. Ronsard elevates his patron into the celestial orb through the transgression of the received laws of nature and of poetic history. The poet alone can transport Henri to the heavens with his winged words conveyed later in the rhyme “vers:univers” (vv. 53 and 56). He even justifies the extremity of his position in the preface (p. 48): “C'est le vrai but d'un poete Liriq de celebrer jusques à l'extremité celui qu'il entreprend de louer” (“It is the true goal of a lyric poet to celebrate in extremis the one he undertakes to praise”). In the second strophe, Ronsard thus passes from Henri II's glorification to his apotheosis:

De Jupiter les antiques
Leurs ecris embellissoient,
Par lui leurs chants poetiques
Commencoient, et finnissoient,
Prenant plaisir d'ouir dire
Ses louanges à la lire:
Mais Henri sera le Dieu
Qui commencera mon mettre
Et que j'ai voué de mettre
A la fin et au meilieu.

(vv. 29-38)

(With Jupiter, the ancients / Used to adorn their writings, / With him their poetic chants / They used to begin and finish, / Reaping pleasure from hearing / His praises sung on the lyre: / But Henri will be the God / Who will begin my meter / And who I vow to place / At the end and in the middle.)

Henri's deification is modeled on the invocation of Jupiter in ancient songs; Henri's presence in Ronsard's collection of songs offers a modern variation on this ancient formula. Ronsard needs to surpass the Ancients; whereas Jupiter occupies the beginning and the end, Henri will appear even in the middle. The poet controls the presence of his king in his verse and enables Henri to excel even Jupiter. The poet not only memorializes his patron but also deifies him. The poetic image of deification recurs throughout the odes and reinforces the idea of a place beyond spatial and temporal measure.

The process of deification is Ronsard's innovation and an explicit deviation from Pindar.²³ In fact, Pindar emphasizes the difference between mortals and immortals and admonishes humans to respect their place. In Pythia III, v. 59f, he states: “With our mortal minds we should seek from the gods that which becomes us, knowing where we belong, and what lies before our feet. Dear soul of mine, never urge a life beyond mortality.” Propriety is again based upon human measure. The pervasive attitude both in pagan and Christian morality prior to the scientific revolution was that the gods were the sole beings to partake in the infinite. Ronsard opposes the law of unity governed by verisimilitude only to uncover a higher law, like the one Montaigne conceived for Vergil. As Ronsard states in his address to Henri's deceased brother, Charles de Valois (II, iii, vv. 25-26): “Et nouvelles lois lui imposes / Nouveau citoien de là haut” (“And new laws you place upon him [Henri] / New citizen of the heavens”). Different rules apply in the marvelous space of the heavens—new rules that Ronsard tries to voice in his Odes. Though the gods may embody the infinite, the poet, according to Ronsard also can find himself in a world of infinite proportions—the experience of which he attempts to share.

When Henri made his entry into Paris in June, 1549, he was portrayed as Hercules by the humanist organizers, Jean Martin and Thomas Sebillet. Moreover, the organizing committee (which did not include any members from the Brigade or early Pléiade poets) focused on Hercules' divinization upon his death.²⁴ Shortly after the entry, Ronsard portrays the king as Jupiter, a living divinity, rather than as the apotheosized mortal; he creates a setting for the king more colossal than the streets of Paris.

Ronsard's desire to explore the unknown remains steadfast in the Odes, and it is voiced most defiantly in an ode to Joachim Du Bellay (I,ix) where he asserts that human nature has not limited his poetic flight. Although Horace claims in his celebrated ode IV,ii, “Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari,” that anyone who attempts to imitate Pindar will share the fate of Icarus, Ronsard responds:

Par une cheute subite
Encor je n'ai fait nommer
Du nom de Ronsard la mer
Bien que Pindare j'imite.

(vv. 165-168)

(With a sudden fall / Still I have not given the name / Ronsard to the sea / Although I imitate Pindar.)

The imitation of Pindar loses its literal, intertextual significance in the Odes and comes to mean for Ronsard to attempt the marvelous—hence, his defiance of Horace's caveat. Ronsard's vulgarization of Pindar demystifies the claims of this ancient lyricist without having to reduce himself to a humble creature; he writes a version of Icarus' success story, implying a new confidence in human powers which enables him to ascend to the heavens where truth is uncovered paradoxically through the “sins” of pagan hubris or Christian pride. In the later part of the century, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) developed his revolutionary, metaphysical theory of infinite space which profoundly influenced the thinking of both philosophers and astronomers of the scientific revolution. At the century's midpoint, one can see such concepts trying to find an earlier poetic expression in Ronsard's odes. Ernst Cassirer notes that Bruno's belief in the infinite receives its strongest formulation in a sonnet inspired by Luigi Tansillo (1510-68) which Bruno rewrites in his third dialogue of his Degl'eroici furori (1585) in order to have Tansillo recite it as a personage of the dialogue. Like Ronsard, Bruno assumes a defiant Icarian stance:

Poi che spiegat'ho l'ali al bel desio
Quanto piu sott'il pie l'aria mi scorgo,
Piu le veloci penne al vento porgo,
E spreggio il mondo, e verso il ciel m'invio.
Ne del figliuol di Dedalo il fin rio
Fa che giu pieghi, anzi via piu risorgo.

(vv. 1-6)

(Now that I have given wings to that beautiful desire / the more I see the air under my feet / the more do I set my speedy feathers to the wind / and, disdaining the world, move toward the heavens. / Nor does the cruel end of the son of Daedalus / induce me to come down; in fact I climb higher.)²⁵

Giordano Bruno posits in 1584 a theory of an unlimited corporeal universe in his metaphysical dialogue La Cena de le ceneri.²⁶ Resembling Ronsard's poetic world of unlimited space occupied by man himself, Bruno develops his notion of infinite space from a principle of plenitude. He uses the term “copia” not so much as a sixteenth-century generative principle of writing, as Terence Cave has demonstrated, but rather as a fundamental rule of cosmology.²⁷ Referring directly to Democritus and Epicurus, Bruno expresses his conviction in De l'infinito, universo et mondi (1584):

Non sono fini, termini, margini, muraglia che ne defrodino e suttragano la infinita copia de la cose. Indi feconde e la terra ed il suo mare; indi perpetuo è il vampo del sole, summinstrandosi eternamente esca a gli voraci fuochi ed umori a gli attenuati mari; perche dall'infinito sempre nova copia di materia sottonasce.

(There are no ends, boundaries, limits or walls which can defraud or decrease the infinite copia of things. Therefore the earth and the ocean are fecund; therefore the sun's blaze is perpetual, so that eternally there is fuel for the voracious fires, and moisture for the attenuated sea. For from infinity an ever new copia of matter is born.)²⁸

Both Koyré and Cassirer see the foundations of Bruno's infinite in poetics and not in mathematics or astronomy; yet his beliefs influenced modern science and philosophy as the works of Galileo and Descartes attest.²⁹ The notion of the poet's unlimited flight conveyed by the defiant Icarus represents a fundamental shift in world view; humankind should test the limits of its condition. Bruno's belief that the marvels of the infinite were not exclusive to the Christian God led to his burning at the stake in Rome in 1600; the Church found the idea too dangerous, once the poetic veil was lifted.³⁰

Unlike Bruno, Ronsard safely returns from celestial space to address mundane matters—namely, to reformulate the concept of human love. In a potent ode to Cassandre, he writes: “Amour n'a point de loi, / A sa grand' deité / Convient l'infinité” (II,v, vv. 10-12). (“Love has no longer any law / For her great divinity / Is suited the infinite.”) The subsequent collections of Amours are suggestive of Bruno's copia, of a love without end and without a fixed perspective; they describe a universe where the poet no longer invests his beloved with an absolute value but rather a relative, transferrable one. Ronsard rejects the petrarchan mode to become the protean lyric subject who undergoes metamorphoses ad infinitum as he discovers new beloveds.³¹ The relative and ever-changing status of Janne, Cassandre, Marie, and Hélène replaces the unequivocal position of Laura. Ronsard the poet inaugurates the modern age not only with novel forms of discourse, historical consciousness, world view, but also with a new poetics of amorous relations.

When Henri II finally accepted Ronsard into his court, Henri tacitly granted a privilege for the publication of a theory of infinite space which was not founded on astronomy but on poetry. Within the walls of the Louvre, Ronsard could become truly a marvelous poet and question the laws of nature sine fine.

Notes

1. Particularly in the Ode à Michel de l'Hospital, one reads of the ancient pagan poets being invested with the same divine authority as prophets. Inspired by Plato and Pindar, Ronsard portrays Jupiter as saying “Que les vers viennent de Dieu, / Non de l'humaine puissance” (vv. 475-76); Ronsard 3: 145. In the Ode, Ronsard then proceeds to invoke the Muses in a prayer to help him learn the secrets of the heavens (vv. 511-18). Also see his Abbregé de l'art poëtique (1565), where he defines this ancient period as a “theologie allegoricque”: “La Poësie n'estoit au premier aage qu'un Theologie allegoricque, pour faire entrer au cervau des hommes grossiers par fables plaisantes et colorées les secretz qu'ilz ne pouvoyent comprendre, quand trop ouvertement on leur descouvroit la verité” (Ronsard 14: 4). The first editions (1550 and 1552) of Ronsard's odes will be cited; references to later editions will be used wherever it seems pertinent.

2. Koyré, 39, and passim.

3. For historical details of this event, see Nolhac, 178-87.

4. Ronsard, 1:44: “Des le méme tens que Clément Marot (seulle lumiere en ses ans de la vulgaire poësie) se travailloit à la poursuite de son Psautier, et osai le premier des nostres, enricher ma langue de ce nom Ode … affin que nul ne s'atribue ce que la verité commande estre à moi” (“At the same time that Clément Marot [the only light in these years of vernacular poetry] was working diligently on his psalter, I dared to be the first among our people to enrich my language with this word Ode … such that none may attribute to himself what truth shows to belong to me”).

5. Du Bellay, 112-13, writes: “Chante moy ces odes incongnues encor' de la Muse Francoyse, d'un luc, bien accordé au son de la lyre Greque et Romaine.”

6. Huguet defines “contrefaire” as to imitate; Huguet, 2: 497. Cotgrave, however, not only sees it as meaning to imitate but also to disfigure and to adulterate—that is, to alter.

7. Silver, 1937, 55.

8. Greene, 40, writes: “Heuristic imitations come to us advertising their derivation from the subtexts they carry with them, but having done that, they proceed to distance themselves from the subtexts and force us to recognize the poetic distance traversed. … The informed reader notes the allusion but he notes simultaneously the gulf in language, in sensibility, in cultural context, in world view, and in moral style.” (The italics are mine.)

9. Ferguson, 285.

10. As Cave, 230-31, mentions, Ronsard paradoxically displaces Pindar and Michel de l'Hospital in order to portray himself as the wandering poet: “In a single syntactical movement, the initial metaphor of flower gathering (the figure of how the poem is made) is elaborated by successive layers of metonymy and periphrasis, introducing by allusion first the model-poet and then the patron. Neither is named. Pindar is displaced so that the poetic je can appropriate his topoi. … L'Hospital is the pretext, an empty place to be skirted by myths, narrations, and incrustations of elocutio.”

11. Silver's thesis attempts to show Ronsard's emulation of Pindar to be an utter failure. Silver, 1937.

12. Ronsard borrows this topos of the poet-wanderer directly from Horace (Epist. I, xix, 21-22). See also I, iii, vv. 1-12, addressed to Marguerite de Valois, where Ronsard explains that he has to wander in order to find a new way to sing of her virtue which has been tainted by the Marotiques. For further study of this formulation, see Ahmed, 587-96.

13. See also ode I, xvi, where Ronsard explicitly considers himself and his poet friends: “Comme profettes des dieus” (v. 2).

14. In all subsequent editions of the ode and in the Franciade, Francus himself founds Paris, and not his descendants.

15. The Franciade epyllion functions as a means of founding a different literary tradition under Henri II. The epic that Ronsard was to write under Charles IX was intended to give a unified history to a France rent asunder by religious strife, while here the epyllion must be seen a contrario to widen those differences of spiritual and poetic identity between Marot and his school on the one hand and the young Ronsard on the other. The same story functions in opposing manners at two different historical moments. See Ménager, 277 and passim.

16. See Laumonier, 146-50, for background literary history of Ronsard's literary epic the Franciade.

17. Ronsard borrows Aristotle's distinction between the historian and the poet; the former tells things as they are, and the latter relates them as they could be. Ronsard cautions against poetic excess in the preface to the Franciade, 16: 4, though he is slow to heed his own advice: “J'ose seulement dire (si mon opinion a quelque poix) que le Poëte qui escrit les choses comme elles sont ne merite tant que celuy qui les feint et se recule le plus qu'il luy est possible de l'historien: non toutefois pour feindre une Poësie fantastique comme celle de l'Ariosto” (“I dare say only—if my opinion carries any weight—that the Poet who writes about things as they are does not merit so much as one who fictionalizes them and removes himself as far as possible from the historian: not so much, however, to create a Poetry so fantastic as Ariosto”).

18. Cf. Hathaway, 160-61, who writes: “Many Renaissance writers were willing to say that the masterful solving of artistic problems was one of the chief sources of admiration or the marvelous. Hence they also stressed unity, or the reconciliation of unity and variety as a cause of the marvelous.” For Ronsard, it is precisely the unsolved problem of unity and diversity which leads him to a poetic conception of infinite space.

19. It is perhaps noteworthy that the poet's law comes into direct conflict with the power of the king whom Ronsard describes in the opening stanza as “Le plus grand Roi qui se treuve, / Soit en armes ou en lois” (vv. 9-10). Under the pretense of serving his patron, Ronsard feels that his poetic strength is even greater than its former self.

20. Allen cites Ficino's Commentarium in Phedrum (Florence, 1496), chap. 4, iii: “Quicumque numine quomodolibet occupatur … et mores humanos excedit. Itaque occupatio hec sive raptus furor quidam et alienatio non iniuria nominatur” (italics mine).

21. Montaigne, “Du Jeune Caton,” 1: 289-90; Frame, 1: 171.

22. Todorov, 167.

23. Joukovsky, 207, explains how Ronsard uses Pindaric imagery to deify mortals. However, Ronsard transforms Pindar's “foreign” images to create apotheotic scenes, and Pindar makes no explicit claims to possess deifying powers.

24. McFarlane, 58.

25. Cited in Cassirer, 189-90.

26. “Non è possibile giamai di trovar raggione semiprobabile per la quale sia margine di questo universo corporale; e per conseguenza ancora li astri che nel suo spacio si contengono, siino di numero finito” (“It is never possible to find a half-probable reason, why there may be a limit to this corporeal universe, and still by consequence, why the stars which are contained in its space, may be of finite number”); Bruno, 150.

27. Different from Bruno, who sees only the positive side of the infinite as a plenitude, Cave, 223-70, notes Ronsard's awareness of an emptiness undermining this everexpanding plenitude.

28. Cave, 361.

29. Koyré, 54; Cassirer, 188-91.

30. See Hathaway, 133-51, for debate with Church authorities on the usage of pagan marvels in Renaissance Italy.

31. For an explication of this continually altering subjectivity in Ronsard's Amours, see Rigolot, 187.

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