SOURCE: “`Fantastiquant Mille Monstres Bossus': Poetic Incongruities, Poetic Epiphanies, and the Writerly Semiosis of Pierre de Ronsard,” in Romanic Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, March, 1993, pp. 143-62.

[In the following essay, Nash considers Ronsard's poetics of “seeing and showing” what is imagined and ineffable, as opposed to that of which is simply real.]

In his latest study on an intriguing subject that was for him both “exhilarating” and “exasperating,” Murray Krieger defines ekphrasis in these terms: “the literary representation of visual art, real or imaginary.” The kind of ekphrasis that deals with the “real” is of course the art of mimesis, what Krieger calls “enargeia I,” that is, the “sensible” or sense-oriented perception and portrayal of the mimetic real. Ekphrasis which strives to capture the “imaginary,” a writer's art of semiosis, Krieger discusses as “enargeia II,” that is, the “intelligible” or mind-oriented perception and portrayal of the semiotic imaginary.¹ My discussion of Pierre de Ronsard will consider only one side of his captivating poetic of ekphrasis, namely, his verbally semiotic presentations of the visual imaginary, his intelligible perceptions and creations of enargeia II. Other studies have already explored Ronsard's debt to the ekphrastic principle of imitation as it relates to and attempts to portray the mimetic real.² What remains is to examine this other discourse and level of meaning in Ronsard, his writerly semiosis of seeing and of showing which truly became a poetic obsession for him just as it did for Joachim Du Bellay and Maurice Scève, as I have written on elsewhere.³

Exhilarating and exasperating are indeed perfect ways to describe the writerly as well as readerly activity involved in the literary phenomenology of ekphrasis. This is especially the case when a poet is concerned with coming to terms with the imaginary real, with what another contemporary critic of Poetics, Michael Riffaterre, calls the “fictional truth” and triumph of semiosis over mimesis.⁴ The exasperating side of Ronsard's poetic project can be seen in the many failure-poems one encounters in his Amours, such as the “eye-defeating” and thus art-defeating impasse which the poet acknowledges and describes early on in Cassandre XIX. ⁵ In addition to failure in love, the familiar thematics of unrequited love, this poem is also a statement about poetic sterility and poetic failure, and it is the beloved Cassandre herself in her Trojan role as prophetess who conveys this to the poet. His rewards and legacy, she tells him in the first two stanzas, can only be an early death and unaccomplished life, lackluster writings, and scorn and ridicule by his readers in the future. In sum, as Cassandre sees it: “Tu bastiras sur l'incertain du sable, / Et vainement tu peindras dans les cieulx.” Worse still, Cassandre's dire and defeating predictions on the poet's failure and future seem to be confirmed by the ultimate sign of divine authority, as the poem's closural image “seals” the matter once and for all (i.e., the image of a lightning flash as an ill-fated omen which the poet “sees” on his “right” hand):

Ainsi disoit la Nymphe qui m'afolle,
Lors que le ciel pour séeller
sa parolle
D'un dextre esclair fut presage à
mes yeulx.

Two other early poems are also about artistic failure: Cassandre XXVIII and XXIX. The reader does not have to wait until the Marie-cycle of love poems to find confirmation of such a failure in poetic seeing and feeling and showing, contrary to what most critics, and especially Olivier Pot most recently, have argued.⁶Cassandre XXVIII is very revealing to show the poet showing the writing of mimesis as failure, or, to be more precise, to show the poet recognizing a failure in the sensible, sense-satisfying purpose of the mimetic vision and its writing. At first, the poet seems to be telling us that this ineffable beauty of Cassandre that has so enslaved him and caused his “senses” to “trouble” his reason is to be found in the many objects or entities of nature itself. This beauty the poet does see and feel through the perceiving senses of the body “painted in them”:

Je ne voy pré, fleur, antre, ny rivage,
Champ, roc, ny boys, ny flotz dedans le Loyr,
Que, peinte en eulx, il ne me semble voyr
Ceste beaulté qui me tient
en servage.

Up to this point, the mimetic vision and the writing of it are both working well for the poet. But, as the poet informs us in the poem's last tercet, when it comes to pursuing this beauty in them, he is left with the realization that Love has sent him forms that really have no substance, for they all seem to disappear (“s'enfuir”), leaving the poet with only an “empty real.” Alongside deception in love, the poet is also pointing out to the reader another deception, that of mimetic perception and its portrayal. The sensible illusion and reality afforded by ekphrasis as mimesis are indeed deceptive and parallel the despair and deception and failure in love which the poet is also describing. As the poet poignantly puts it in the last line: “Et pour le vray je ne pren que le vuide.”

This failure in the realist project, in mimetic art, that is, the inability of the poet to accept sensible perceptions or visions as real and meaningful and to turn them into adequate and self-satisfying words and images that succeed in bridging the gap between feeling and world, is also the subject of Cassandre XXIX. The first two quatrains of this sonnet also show the poet indulging an exceptionally sensible, highly sensual, even erotic fantasy, with the poet's arms imitating the intimate embrace of the vine-plant. Again, up to this point in the poem, things appear to be working well for the poet and for the reader. However, by the time we reach the end of this poem too, the poet's mimetic vision has been deconstructed and disintegrates completely, leaving him once again abandoned and dismayed:

Mais ce portraict qui nage dans mes yeulx,
Fraude tousjours ma joye entrerompuë.
Et tu me fuis au meillieu de mon bien,
Comme l'esclair qui se finist en rien,
Ou comme au vent s'esvanouit la nuë.

In his “songe divin” of the mimetic real, which is the real subject and problem in this poem, the poet's vision of self as vine-plant enjoying physical intimacy with the beloved becomes ultimately a failed vision. The poet is literally left with “nothing” (“rien”), with the “self-consuming” (“s'évanouir”) and unsatisfying vision and feeling and art of non-meaning and non-presence. This failure-poem, like the ones above, does not at all confirm the much discussed and much admired Pléiade realist project and its principle of ekphrasis as mimesis, an aesthetic and writerly principle which Henri Weber (in La Création poétique …) was one of the first to praise and to explore in Ronsard's poetic texts: Ronsard's “désir fondamental de cueillir dans la réalité les sensations les plus intenses pour en tirer une délectation exaltante”; or, as Weber continues to paint the picture of Ronsard as the successful poet in harmony verbally with depicting the mimetic real: “… aux mots mêmes qui peignent le monde réel, Ronsard sait en général associer par le seul effet du rythme la joie de l'artiste qui découvre ce monde, alors la description devient poésie” (125). As we have already seen, and there are other failure-poems in Cassandre one could turn to, such notions as “la joie de l'artiste” and indeed of poetry itself as ekphrasis are totally antithetical to the message being conveyed in XIX, XXVII, and XXIX, truly poems of despair and defeat in matters of love and of art.⁷

Fortunately however, Cassandre XIX does offer a clue as how to reverse artistic sterility and failure, and how to change despair and defeat into joy and poetry. Such a reversal begins, necessarily, with poems and statements such as those considered above which acknowledge failure, ones highlighting the very impossibility or at least the tenuousness and unacceptability of the mimetic project and process, with its sense-oriented aesthetic, in coming to terms with the ineffability of the love experience. Moreover, the best textual indication that mimetic failure is not Ronsard's final position on poetic seeing and showing lies in the ambiguity afforded in the closure of Cassandre XIX: the seemingly ill-fated omen of a lightning flash (“dextre esclair”) on the poet's right hand. Can this image and sign, contrary to the view of Ronsard's various editors who have commented on it, not be interpreted differently, even in the exact opposite way as a favorable sign intended to lead the poet, and the reader, out of exasperation and failure to exhilaration and triumph? Elsewhere (LVII), the poet clearly signals that his torment and misfortune, like those of Sisyphus and Tantalus, are associated with a left hand. And in another place (CLX), perhaps even more revealing, we are told that his true potential as poet is to be found in “rightly” interpreting “intelligibly” (“dextrement”) the prophecy of his fate. Only through a more intelligible perception and presentation, Ronsard reassures himself and his reader, can he as poet envision Cassandre/the Vendômois countryside (Gastine Forest, Loire River) raised to the poetic power of the Muse Thalia/Mount Parnassus (Apollo's Laurel, Castalia Spring):

Si dextrement l'augure j'ay receu,
Et si mon oeil ne fut hyer déceu
Des doulx regardz de ma doulce Thalie,
Dorenavant poëte me ferez,
Et par la France appellez vous serez,
L'un mon laurier, l'aultre ma Castalie.

The “dextre esclair” in Cassandre XIX, as with the “dextrement” in the line above from CLX, may be a sign of melancholy, as Ronsard's various editors have presented it, but it also points to something the opposite. As pure metanoia, a change in direction of the mind and thus in poetic direction and definition, it stands as a sign of a different potential and way of writing and of showing, and of the potential success and miracle of the poet-pen-paper relationship in this different mode and aesthetic resisting and rejecting the realist aesthetic, opting instead to control its/their own destiny. This image announces the poet's receptivity to an alternative semiotic kind of writing, an other mode of discourse which the poet acknowledges might be more apt and more satisfying epistemologically and literarily. To verbalize “intelligibly” visions of the ineffable, to capture in words through pen and paper the “flashing” significance and the realities not of this world but of mind and art, these are the poetic possibilities of a semiotic consciousness being suggested in Cassandre XIX and CLX. We have actually already begun to see this semiotic of the word at work in Cassandre CLX just quoted, in the magical visionary itinery and transformation of Cassandre/Vendôme becoming Thalia/Mount Parnassus. Thanks to the symbolic images of myth and allegory that increase the distance between signifier and signified, thanks to a reduced mimetic ambition whose increased unconcern with the things of the real world can better provide the poet and the reader with visionary access to the sacred and the ineffable, Ronsard's fabulous inventions or semiotic constructs will house not real people and real things and real spaces but will give life to and find another space and place for the verbal-visual ineffable in its infinite remove from such realities. Only then can the poet claim, as he does in CLX, that thanks to such marvelous non-mimetic creations: “Dorenavant poëte me ferez.”

There is no finer poem in all of Ronsard's works to help us see and understand and appreciate this poet's belief in and performance of a writerly semiosis and the brand of ekphrasis he was truly obsessed with than the chanson, “Je veux chanter en ces vers ma tristesse,” found in the Amours de Marie.⁸ A song of melancholy and sadness turned into joyful vision and verbal presentation of this vision is precisely this poem's triumph. Ronsard's semiotic mode of presentation is what is being highlighted when the poet avows in lines 22-24 that his purpose in this poem is to “fantastiqu[er] mille monstres bossus, / Hommes, oiseaux, et Chimeres cornues.” He is telling us that his art of semiosis, and his understanding now of ekphrasis, will necessarily be involved with poetic incongruities and aberrations (“mille monstres bossus”), from where poetic epiphanies will be derived, that is, will be created. However, before discussing these incongruous yet epiphanic creations, we do need to consider a great poem in the Italian Renaissance that served as an intertext, or rather a countertext, for Ronsard. The French poet's conscious rewriting of his Italian model will be of help in understanding the semiotic constructs of “Je veux chanter.”

Ronsard's chanson is supposedly, and has been identified by all editors of Ronsard as being, an imitation of Petrarch's Rime sparse 127.⁹ Petrarch's poem is about love's ecstasy and the clear mimetic analogies between the beauties of nature and Laura, the poet's beloved. In this poem, conventional ekphrasis as enargeia I is certainly at work where language functions on the level of imitation (imitatio) itself. Petrarch's poetic images, encapsulating the art of the mimetic real, vividly and credibly portray their natural-sign objects as if in a painting. The Italian poet is creating with his verbal “images” analogues to the visual images of the painter, thereby affirming the transferability of “things” between verbal and visual systems of representation. Like Ronsard, who tells us he must sing his song of grief if only in order to alleviate it or lessen it, Petrarch had similarly acknowledged in his own sorrowful song a therapeutic function of art:

But still, however much of the story of my suffering I find written by his [Love's] very own hand, in the midst of my heart where I so often return, I shall speak out, because sighs take a truce and there is help for sorrow when one speaks. I say that although I gaze intent and fixed on a thousand different things, I see only one lady and her lovely face.

(7-14)

But with the last idea just quoted from Petrarch, there is something new and very different from what Ronsard will write. Petrarch is already affirming for him the inseparability and the intense satisfaction of vision, focused on nature, on external reality, and the beloved object. His song will be concerned with the mimetic union and unity of “a thousand different things” on which the poet “gaze[s] intent and fixed” and where he “see[s] only one lady and her lovely face.” The remainder of the poem is a description of these sensibly-felt “things” of the mimetic real that is Laura/Nature, that is, Laura as natural-sign objects. Her presence and absence parallel the luminous rising and dark setting of the sun:

If I see the sun rise, I sense the approach of the light that enamors me; if setting at evening, I seem to see her when she departs, leaving all in darkness behind her.

(66-70)

The sense-illuminating art of mimesis is, as Petrarch tells us, his principal poetic purpose in this poem, as it appears to be in the whole of the Rime sparse:

… when the strange idea came to me to tell in so few pages in how many places the flower of all beauties, remaining in herself, has scattered her light.

(87-90)

This is why the poet can believe that Laura as “light,” as “the flower of all beauties,” can bring him to see in and through her the perfected excellence of nature itself. Whether he is “gazing at leaves on a branch or violets on the ground” (29-30), or viewing “from afar new snow on the hills” (43-44), or seeing “white with crimson roses in a vase of gold” (71-72), it is always the mimetic vision that permits him to see “the face of her who excels all other wonders with the three excellences gathered in her” (74-76), that is, the floral white, crimson, and gold above. This Italian poet has been conveying supernal beauty through the sensibly-signifying art of mimesis. He has been relying on a conventional sign system, one operating exclusively through the senses to connect signifier and signified, in order to portray the excellence and the pleasure derived from the mimetic picture.

As Ronsard's and indeed the Pléiade's acknowledged most eminent model poet, Petrarch was a master poet of mimesis, of ekphrasis as sense-oriented enargeia I. For him, the “veil” enclosing the ineffable beloved object and separating the poet from clear vision and representation of his vision of the ineffable is very thin indeed, so thin that the poet, through his sensible perceptions, is given access. In fact, for Petrarch this clear transparency between the human and the divine, between nature and the ineffable love object, is precisely what allows this sublimely mimetic poet the possibilities of aesthetic penetration. The writing of this mimetic potential is of course exquisite, full of sensory wonder and delight:

I never saw after nocturnal rain the wandering stars going through the clear air and flaming between the dew and the frost, that I did not have before me her lovely eyes where leans my weary life, such as I saw them in the shadow of a lovely veil.

(57-62)

Again, with Petrarch, the reader is witnessing what I have been referring to in Krieger as enargeia I, a “thinly-veiled mimesis” as opposed to the “opaque semiosis” of enargeia II. In his seminal and central Chapter 4, “The Verbal Emblem: The Renaissance,” Krieger, turning to the Renaissance writer and critic Jacopo Mazzoni and from him to Longinus for aesthetic and writerly notions, gives us one of his best definitions of enargeia I, which we have been exploring above in Petrarch, and of enargeia II, which we shall turn to shortly in Ronsard:

And if, as I have traced it, this distinction [between rhetoric and poetry in Mazzoni and Longinus] is projected into a distinction between … the mimetic dependence on an object outside the text and the text's independence of everything except the human mind that creates it, then it is a projection also of what I have claimed to be the distinction between enargeia I and enargeia II, between vivid (i.e., transparently clear) representation and vivid (i.e., intensely empathy-provoking) presentation.

(126)

Following in the footsteps of Petrarch, Ronsard too is at times, as any reader of his poems must appreciate, a master poet of mimesis. This cannot be denied. In fact, his critical legacy hinges largely on his successes with imitation. He too is often able to “see” in external nature and in the “things” of this world (Petrarch) ineffable analogues in which to contain and through which to convey his “vision” of the beloved. This is the mimetically transcendent essence of Hélène III (Weber 420). Through transparent mimesis, the poet closes the gap between text and world, between signifier and signified. His universe depicted here is the same one painted earlier by Petrarch: the love vision, with the imperative “voy” being used five times to reinforce our understanding of this vision, finding a home, rest, and delight “en ce monde si ample,” in the same worldly divine illumination that Petrarch took refuge in: Hélène as the morning sun, her eyes as stars shining like a bright lantern in a temple, or the warm beam of her eyes bringing forth an eternal springtime, in a word, and controlling image, her “love radiance” (“ses flames amoureuses”) embellishing the earth and enchanting the heavens. Hélène in this picture is, in the ultimate mimetic analysis, “des beautez le portrait & l'exemple” of the here-and-now “en ce monde si ample.” She is mimesis personified.¹⁰

However, there is another, a totally different side to Ronsard, as I have been suggesting, one which can best be seen and appreciated by juxtaposing it with the poet's, and Petrarch's, mimetic side discussed above. This other side to Ronsard is, I believe, the artistic consequence of his doubts and questionings of mimetic portrayal, which we analyzed at some length at the beginning of this study. In his “different” creations, Ronsard will no longer be concerned with the mimetic art of representation, but with the semiotic art of presentation. Both poetic perspective and literary ontology are now radically different from what we have just observed in Ronsard and in Petrarch. This new verbal-visual writerly semiosis as ekphrasis is obsessed not with poetic similarities and unity but with poetic dissimilarities and incongruities, even with monsters and monstrosities and other aberrations of reality. This can all be seen in his poem-song, “Je veux chanter en ces vers ma tristesse,” one of his finest portrayals of poetic incongruities, and poetic epiphanies. As indicated earlier, this marvelous song is supposedly an imitation of Petrarch's Song 127. However, in Ronsard's version, the poet is deliberately subverting the mimetic value of Petrarch's pre-text to highlight and emphasize another, perhaps more captivating process of signifying. As we shall see, he is clearly opting in for a semiotic mode of writing as both a resistance and a response to reality, and to mimetic representations of reality.¹¹

The genesis of “Je veux chanter” is identical to that of Rime sparse 127. In the “absence” of Marie the beloved object (3: “Veu que je suis absent de ma maistresse”; 6: “Pour le départ de ma maistresse absente”), the only thing left for the poet to do is to sing his song of sorrow (5: “Pour ne mourir il faut donc que je chante”). Here there are obviously two meanings contained in the notion of absence. As with Petrarch, Ronsard's poet is separated from the beloved, thus, a physical absence. Unlike in Petrarch, for Ronsard's poet the beloved is also absent around him: she is an object “absented.” Thus, the poet can only construct, through mental and poetic images, the presentation of an absent reality. This reality is certainly not to be, and cannot be, found around him, for he cannot “see” it with the “body's eye” anywhere he looks. The sensible world, and the sensory instrument par excellence of perceiving this world—the poet's very eyes—will not lead the poet this time to transcendent seeing and showing, to ekphrasis and to epiphany. As the poet acknowledges once again his all-too-familiar impasse in sensible perception: “Tant par les yeux nos esprits sont deceus” (24).

Since the poet cannot see in anything real the beauty he looks for, he is forced to turn away from ordinary vision of the external world and to turn inward—to the inner eye, the “unreal” eye (“oeillade trompée”) of the “mind-soul,” as he calls it—for another source of vision. Mental imaging is clearly being made the prerequisite to poetic imaging, the mind's ability to conceive and produce pictures:

Ainsi je vois d'une oeillade trompée
Cette beauté dont je suis dépravé,
Qui par les yeux dedans l'âme frappée,
M'a vivement son portrait engravé.

(29-32)

It is no longer the bodily, mimetic eye of “raison” connecting sight to actual presence, but the inner eye of “une fausse et vaine illusion” bestowing the creative insight of a presence-in-absence that the poet must now rely on for revelation and portrayal and meaning. Semiotic negation replaces logocentric affirmation as a poetic principle. Here is another of Ronsard's recognitions of this intriguing kind of semiotic seeing, which will lead the poet to showing in words the illusions of mind and art:

Mais ma raison est si bien corrompue
Par une fausse et vaine illusion,
Que nuit et jour je la porte en la vue,
Et sans la voir j'en ai la vision.

(17-20)

His newly-acquired “deviant” kind of vision, as with its ineffable object, in frustrating and negating “reason” and normal or conventional sight is therefore called “une fausse et vaine illusion” (“une faulce imagination” as it is called in earlier editions), which permits the poet day and night to have “imaginings,” that is, to visualize and verbalize both her and itself. Of course, the imaginings or creations of the poet's “fausse et vaine illusion” have nothing to do with the real world, hence the incongruous yet very apt wording Ronsard uses in designating his faculty of the imagination. They, and it, actually function to re-think and re-create this world. The contemplative and creative activity of the poet now is like the sailors who row with the “perception” of a broken oar (26-27: “En haute mer, à puissance de bras / Tirent la rame, ils l'imaginent torte”) or, as the reader is also encouraged to see this impossible activity, like the sky-gazer “qui contemple les nues, / Fantastiquant mille monstres bossus, / Hommes, oiseaux et Chimeres cornues” (21-23). Needless to say, the reader is a very long way now from Petrarch's “flower of all beauties” in Song 127 and the “jardin” in Hélène III.

This highly incongruous, even monstrous, ineffable beauty to be perceived and portrayed so vividly by the “eye of the mind-soul” (29-32) is what the poet focuses on and pursues in the last two-thirds of this remarkable poem. Whether climbing in the mountains or walking in the woods alongside a stream, he avows how “tousjours à l'oeil ce beau portrait me suit” (36), that is, the “image” of this beauty of Marie as “beauté amère” which the poet's “unreal eye” has made in its moments of sublime derangement (29-32).¹² The verbal constructions “j'apperçoy” and “je pense voir,” used eleven times to reinforce and give credibility to the workings of the poet's other, inner eye, introduce or dominate virtually every stanza that follows. “To perceive” is the same for Ronsard as “to think in order to see.” Seeing as thinking precedes words as mental image precedes poetic image. Imagination is what turns mental image into poetic image. The creations of the poet's imagination are pure constructs of mind and art, of a writerly semiosis, which are now strangely yet credibly non-mimetic. This is why Ronsard refers to his faculty of imagination as “illusion,” and as “fausse.” This faculty is not at all real, but incredible, to the world, yet very real, credible, to the poet, for it satisfies and makes possible his own different and unique view of things. The poet's deviant imagination in the process of conceiving mental-verbal-visual monstrosities just may, in its unexpected and mimetically meaning-negating inventions, offer a better means of signifying the beauty of the ineffable. And it is not as much in Ronsard to visualize the verbal as it is to verbalize the visual (to turn thought and words into images). Which is to say that he is a poet intent on creating an other world more than he is a painter interested in depicting this world. To borrow the insightful words of John Berger which this writer-critic uses to indicate “another” (intelligible, mind-oriented) way of seeing, for Ronsard too “seeing [thought as imaging] comes before words.” Ronsard now writes, not what he can see, but what he is capable of thinking and imagining.¹³ This is really why Ronsard tells us so repeatedly in his chanson: “Je pense voir. …” Simply put, he turns to the mind, not to nature or external reality, for vision and creation.

Poetic incongruities of enargeia II are the products of this mental and linguistic operation and aberration, of Ronsard's other way of seeing and of writing. The reader's ability to participate in the poet's thoughts, even the most incongruous and outrageous and seemingly impossible, is crucial to Ronsard's writerly semiosis. This reader must share with the poet the challenge of the semiotic relationship between signs and referents, words, and things. One of Ronsard's favorite images and metaphors which the reader encounters in so many of his poems is of course the rose in its resplendent and ephemeral beauty, to which the poet mimetically equates the beauty of the beloved, usually with an ulterior motive in mind. In “Je veux chanter” however, the natural-sign status of the rose is not one of similarity but of difference. The kind of rose that Ronsard sees this time in Marie does not conform to the real-life cycle of the rose in nature, with its fragile beauty and brief life span justifying the poet's plea of carpe diem. She/it never fades in the poet's mind, or imagination:

Quand j'aperçois la rose sur l'épine,
Je pense voir de ses lèvres le teint;
La rose au soir de sa couleur décline,
L'autre couleur jamais ne se déteint.

(49-52)

Marie is indeed portrayed not through the transparently clear, sense-satisfying representation of mimesis but through the intensely empathy-provoking, intelligible presentation of the poet's semiotic consciousness. As an object existing in and being portrayed by mind, she is presented to the reader's mind not in an all resplendent and reassuring light but in the uneasy identification of her with intelligible, phantastic entities, such as the curved side of the Moon, that is, a bow and arrow ready to strike:

Si le Croissant au premier mois j'avise,
Je pense voir son sourcil ressemblant
A l'arc d'un Turc qui la sagette a mise
Dedans la coche et menace le blanc.

(41-44)

In order to come to terms with and to depict the chanson's overriding theme of presence-in-absence, the poet will also turn to the allegorical figure of “Cérès la blétière, / Ayant le front orné de son présent” to sustain him in the real absence around him of Marie (9-10). Or, he sees and portrays the beauty of Marie in the fantastic form and image of this ripening wheat whose frizzled blades as the result of plowing become the beloved's silk hair full of curls blowing in the wind:

Si j'aperçois quelque champ qui blondoie
D'épis frisés au travers des sillons,
Je pense voir ses beaux cheveaux de soie
Epars au vent en mille crépillons.

(37-40)

Ronsard too, like William Blake later, was able to see a “Heaven” in, of all things, a wild flower, in Marie as one of these “fleurs en quelque prée”:

Quand j'aperçois les fleurs en quelque prée
Ouvrir leur robe au lever du Soleil,
Je pense voir de sa face pourprée
S'épanouir le beau lustre vermeil.

(53-56)

And the wording “en quelque prée” is quite significant. It is just as meaningfully and intentionally indefinite as similar wording is later in another marvelous writer of semiosis, in Stéphane Mallarmé: “Je dis: une fleur!” For Mallarmé as for Ronsard, this imaginary or intelligible kind of flower as “l'absente de tous bouquets” is “la notion pure,” that is, “idée même et suave.”¹⁴ In both poets, words are being used to call forth an intelligible reality of the imaginary as opposed to the sensible specific of the real: wild flowers in some meadow, those contained in a “meadow” within the mind of the poet, as opposed to actual flowers in one of the real world. Like Mallarmé's “absented” flower in all bouquets (i.e., in no real bouquet), which is this writer's mental-verbal image of “idea itself and sweet,” Ronsard's own “images” of the verbally ineffable are also pure constructs of mind and art created to convey their own special world of a writerly semiosis. They do this by reducing mimetic fidelity and precision in order to capture the more indirect semiotic power of the aesthetic sign.

As such, Ronsard was also able to see, and to translate, his vision of the ineffable Marie in a wild oak tree:

Si j'aperçois quelque chêne sauvage,
Qui jusqu'au ciel élève ses rameaux
Je pense voir sa taille et son corsage,
Ses pieds, sa greve et ses jumeaux.

(57-60)

Another semiotic re-creation of vision and of world can be seen in the “splashing noise” which the poet describes next as coming from a “clear” stream:

Si j'entends bruire une fontaine claire,
Je pense ouïr sa voix dessus le bord,
Qui se plaignant de ma triste misère,
M'appelle à soi pour me donner confort.

(61-64)

In the very next stanza, the poet explains the real reason for all of these strange poetic and mental incongruities, his phantasms, his fantastic forms. They are the products of joyful melancholy:

Voilà comment, pour être
fantastique,
En cent façons ses beautés j'aperçoi,
Et m'éjouis d'être mélancolique,
Pour recevoir tant de formes en moi.

(65-68)

The recovery of semiotic vision from the melancholy associated with a perceived failure in mimetic perception and creation, of insight from sight, and the joyful portrayal of that new-found vision and order are Ronsard's ultimate triumph in “Je veux chanter.” The poet is creating his own self-standing and self-satisfying universe in which he is now able to take utmost delight. Love for him is indeed the fury of a deranged and dissonant fantasy: “Nommant ce mal fureur de fantaisie” (71). There is no real cure for this melancholic disease of the poet's amourous pains, or at least no conventional cure for this “maladie” which “les médecins … savent bien juger” but “qui ne se peut par herbes soulager” (69-70, 72). His fate, like that of a few other committed love poets, is to suffer the happiness he can create from it, the happiness of his amorous pains in their state of unhappiness, these “amoureuses peines, / Dont le bonheur n'est sinon que malheur” (75-76).

But, as we have already seen, it is through this very sickness that health can be restored, through this unhappiness that happiness is possible, in the passage from an old (poetic) order and its failed expectations to creatively-renewed life, one in which the poet can loudly and defiantly proclaim: “Et m`éjouis d'être mélancolique”! The poet's melancholy is ultimately a positive, not negative, sign and a necessary and redeeming condition for semiotic production, for seeing and showing “dextrement” (Cassandre CLX: “intelligibly,” “differently”). With this understanding, the poet's incongruities and aberrations, his chanson, are not really for him, as he hopes for his reader, so illusory or outlandish or unreal as they might appear at first. As the poet takes pains to reassure Marie on this crucial point, we read in the poem's last stanza: “ce n'est tromperie / Des visions que je raconte ici” (78-79). She and they—the poet's “amorous care”—are very real for him, and are even his epiphanies, for the poet carries them night and day in his mind (80). Giving new life and new meaning and new forms to the “black ink of melancholy” is truly Ronsard's triumph in this chanson, just as it was for Shakespeare in his own melancholic love lyrics, as Jean Starobinski has shown in his analysis of Sonnet 114. Ronsard too was able to transform the black ink of despair (Starobinski: “les désordres de l'esprit”) into something of great human worth and value in the redemptive and liberating reality of art:

Le fond ténébreux comporte la chance de l'éclat, si on lui superpose une matière lisse. Shakespeare le devine, en évoquant le miracle d'un amour qui resplendit, sauvé des ravages universels du Temps, dans l'encre noire du poème. … La mélancolie devenue encre devient enfin le tain grâce auquel l'image rayonne.¹⁵

And here is how Krieger describes the same triumph in Shakespeare, which, as I have been arguing, I also believe to have been Ronsard's. He too is concerned with, and quotes from, Shakespeare's Sonnet 114, a poem very close in semiotic perspective and mode to Ronsard's intriguing chanson: “To make of monsters and things indigest / Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble.” He then will explain how, in Shakespeare as in other writers who share and develop the same deviant kind of perspective, such “strangely incongruous, dreamlike—if sometimes nightmarish—equivalences [can] abound in the redemption produced by monstrosity” and how “all readings [can] end in an identity—despite the great discrepancy—between sign and referent” (137). Sonnet 114's illusory metamorphosis of “monsters” and “things indigest” into “cherubins,” in a word, its “magic semiotic,” is achieved through the semiotic possibilities of the verbally intelligible image: “Through the alembic of his words the poet achieves his function as alchemist. … What the poet's eye sees has been transformed by the mind's power to superimpose its own seeing upon it, under the power of love that teaches the eye `this alchemy'” (140).

What we have been discussing is of course the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the poetic text, the poem as ultimate intelligible image and universe, and its hermeneutic independence from everything but itself, and especially from the “real” world. This is exactly what Ronsard intends us to understand in his chanson when he acknowledges his own obsession with “fantastiquant mille monstres bossus, / Hommes, oiseaux, et Chimères cornues,” that is, when he equates the beloved ineffable Marie with an ominous configuration of “le Croissant,” with “Cérès la blétière,” with “quelque champ qui blondoie / D'épis frisés au travers des sillons,” with one of these “fleurs en quelque prée,” with “quelque chêne sauvage,” and so forth. These are the products of the mind's eye, of the poet's intelligible imagination (his “fausse et vaine illusion” or “faulce imagination” or “fureur de fantaisie”). Ronsard pushes poetic language and imagery and vision up to and at times beyond their usual referential intelligibility for meaning and value. This semiotic consciousness is what gives him vision of the absented Marie: “Et sans la voir [with `sans l'avoir' also surely intended by Ronsard] j'en ai la vision.” It is also what provides him with the forms in which to present his vision: “Pour recevoir tant de formes en moi.”¹⁶

These forms of fantasy truly abound in Ronsard's oeuvre, his semiotic constructs which affirm their own charm of being and of not being. They are not limited to his love lyrics, though the latter are especially suited to his writerly semiosis. In “La Lyre,” for example, mind alone as creative intelligence is viewed as responsible for translating vision and constructing text:

Quant à Pallas qui sort de la cervelle,
C'est de l'esprit l'oeuvre toute nouvelle
Que le penser luy [Jupiter] a fait concevoir.(17)

Ronsard is aligning himself here on the subject of poetic conception and creation with the most intelligible of all mythic figures and their accomplishments, with Jupiter and Minerva. Ronsard will also indicate what kind of lyric writing he is really intrigued by. The poet will affirm once again the necessity of his “fureur de fantaisie” so crucial, as we saw, to “Je veux chanter,” that is, his melancholic condition and inspiration for lyric writing:

Quand la fureur me laisse, tout soudain
Plume et papier me tombent de la main.

(323)

He will specifically ask himself what kind of writing will best serve his purpose, will best translate the melancholic disposition of both Jean Belot, to whom “La Lyre,” is dedicated, and himself:

Par quel escrit faut-il que je commence
Pour envoyer des Muses la semence,
J'enten mes vers, par toute Europe, à fin
Que ton renom survive apres ta fin?

(325)

Ronsard will give us the answer. Poetry aspiring to excellence and to permanence begins and ends in the mind of its author-reader, and above all else must speak to and captivate this mind with strange and novel creations. Invoking the inward-outward dichotomy and duality of Socrates as an apt image of Belot, and of himself, to convey this idea (“Lors de ta voix distile l'eloquence / Un vray Socrate,” 326), Ronsard is obviously fascinated, as he hopes Belot and his reader will be, by this Socrates-image. For, as Ronsard sees it, its grotesque and highly incongruous exterior (“En front severe, en oeil melancolique,” 325) does conceal an inner linguistic and creative charm capable of conceiving “dix mille odeurs estranges et nouvelles / … / Par la vertu de ta langue qui pousse / Un hameçon aux coeurs, tant elle est douce” (327). As is obvious by now, the poet is addressing himself as much as he is his friend and benefactor Belot in this poem, for the real subject of “La Lyre,” has to do with the aesthetics of a writerly semiosis, with Ronsard's own semiotically enticing “odeurs estranges et nouvelles.”

Monstrously strange and novel images are also the subject of Folastrie VIII, which offers the reader another application or “writing” by Ronsard of enargeia II, of the intelligible operation of mind and art. This poem, like important sections of “Je veux chanter,” has to do with clouds, and a state of verbal-visual drunkenness and blindness:

Je voy deçà, je voy delà,
Je voy mille bestes cornues,
Mille marmotz dedans les nues.

(761)

Voyci deux nuages tous plains
De Mores, qui n'ont point de mains,
Ny de corps, et ont les visages
Semblables à des chatz sauvages.

(762)

Once again, the poet is on the semiotic path toward the epiphanic re-creation and redemption found in, created through, verbal-visual monstrosity. Through his intentionally “strange” images, the poet is also presenting a view of “drunkenness” as a textual reflection upon the creation of signs. Seen from a semiotic perspective, this view translates his awareness of the arbitrariness of signs and language, with one fictional, self-referential process of imaging (the seeing and showing here in clouds of “mille bestes cornues,” of “mille marmotz”) at work within another (the seeing and showing there in clouds of “Mores,” of “chatz sauvages”). It is not too unreal to see here that Ronsard has constructed a semiotic mise en abyme. As self-referential fiction, this text is, I believe, calling into question the representational function of writing by emphasizing the ability of the poetic imagination to turn in upon itself and away from the real world. What the poet “sees” and shows in Folastrie VIII is, once again, the unique signifying creations of the poem, not conventional earthly objects.

Nowhere in Ronsard, finally, is his writerly semiosis, his intelligible art of mind over (mimetic) sense, so captivatingly shown and seen than in his painting-poem, “L'Ombre du cheval” (373), which I have saved for discussion last. This poem is a superb and magical embodiment of ekphrasis as enargeia II and the writing of the two principal features that define this kind of ekphrasis: “the literary depiction of a painting and also the figurative use of such a depiction” (Riffaterre 127), a definition we have been applying to Ronsard's texts throughout this study. It is written again to his friend Belot, ostensibly to thank him for a painting of a horse, but which Ronsard the poet prefers to read as a verbal emblem:

Amy Belot, que l'honneur accompagne,
Tu m'as donné non un cheval d'Espagne,
Mais l'ombre vain d'un cheval par escrit,
Que je comprens seulement en esprit.
Je ne le puis ny par les yeux comprendre
Ny par la main; il ne se laisse prendre,
Chose invisible, et fantôme me suit,
Ainsi qu'on voit en nos songes de nuit
Se presenter je ne sçay quels images
Sans corps, sans mains, sans bras et sans visages.

We have already seen this “horse,” this mental monster, depicted above in the many verbal-visual constructs of Ronsard's ekphrasis as enargeia II. This time, the writerly ineffable is not a horse at all but “l'ombre vain d'un cheval par escrit,” which can only be understood in the place where it was created, and where it must be read and interpreted—in the poet's and the reader's mind (“Que je comprens seulement en esprit”). As a “chose invisible, et fantôme,” the horse in question cannot be comprehended by the eyes of the body (“Je ne le puis ny par les yeux comprendre”), nor through the sense of touch (“Ny par la main.”) It is totally resistant to sensible perception. This horse must be visualized by the mind's eye just as one encounters “images” in a dream, that is, through intelligible perceptions totally lacking in sensible features (i.e., through images “sans corps, sans mains, sans bras et sans visages”). Of course, it is not a question in this poem of picturing a real horse at all, but of verbally conceiving “the imaging of the horse,” the very title of the poem. This must take place at moments totally removed from reality, moments when mind and art are liberated from sensible reality, such as those of “drunkenness” or “blindness” (as we saw above in other poems), or those of sleep or the dream state, as the picture is being presented to us now:

Ton cheval …
Que seulement en dormant j'apperçoy;
Car autrement ton cheval je ne voy.
Plus en songeant ton cheval je me donne.

(373)

The horse in the poem, and to be correct one needs to say “as the poem,” is distanced in every conceivable way from a real horse. This one does not gallop: “Mais ton cheval, fantôme, ne chemine” (374). But it does do other marvelous things, which a real horse cannot do:

Il vole en l'air, boit en l'air, d'air se paist;
C'est un corps d'air, l'air seulement luy plaist
Et la fumée et le vent et le songe,
Et dedans l'air seulement il s'allonge.

(374)

As with “Je veux chanter,” “L'Ombre du cheval” is a captivating and convincing demonstration that the realist project is inherently incompatible with a view of the poetic text as a self-conscious and self-contained artifice. The ineffable existence or “world” of the “horse” portrayed so exquisitely in the above lines serves no other purpose than to affirm the ontological status of this “world” in the text, and the power of language to create the illusion that this “world” is “real.” For in the final analysis, all that can really be said about this horse is that it is like these

… jumens qui en tournant l'entrée
De leur nature au vent Zephyrien,
Sur le Printemps, vont concevant de rien.

(375)

“To go about conceiving nothing” as a principle and preoccupation of literary perception and discourse has been the real subject of this study of Ronsard's ekphrastic art. At the end of “L'Ombre du cheval,” Ronsard specifically calls this art of “nothing” his “vers raillards” (375). His is an art that is monstrously and incongruously “playful” or “witty” (“raillard”), an art which at its best is a playful statement on and performance of the autonomy of language itself. But this art of “nothing” should not be construed as trivial. Ronsard's writing of “rien” in “vers raillards” is always being related by the poet and owes its very existence to the poet's coming to terms with the Renaissance theoretical issue of literary re/presentation, with what today we view to be the tension between critical emphases on mimesis and metafictionality, on referentiality and self-referentiality. As we have seen in so many ways and forms, Ronsard's verbal-visual ineffable as “nothing,” his writing of the “fantastic,” requires a highly intelligible, incongruous, non-mimetic mode of presentation that replaces, as Todorov argues throughout his book on this subject, the mimetic credible as real with the semiotic fantastic as real.¹⁸ This art of the fantastic is, to quote Krieger on this same point, one “that shifts the burden of the poem from its dependence on external objects of imitation and places it on the verbal inventions that respond to the visions produced by the poet's `wit'” (127). For a poet like Ronsard, as in the case of a poet like Mallarmé and his visions and constructs of “Rien” (Mondor/Jean-Aubry 27), this creative wit that is the ekphrastic mode of semiosis—the writerly brilliance of Ronsard's “vers raillards,” or of his “dextre esclair” as we saw it presented at the beginning of this study—this wit is quite possibly the ultimate source of epiphany, of revelatory meaning.

In the end, however, it is up to the reader to assess the meaning and value of ekphrasis in Ronsard's texts. This reader will need to figure out in particular what Ronsard meant when he wrote, in qualifying his poetic creations and fictions: “ce n'est que Poësie” (Weber 318). The statement can best be understood, I believe, as poetry as pure invention of the mind and as reflector of its own self-contained system. Ronsard's fictitious mimesis thrives on the symbolic, visual malleability of the verbal image, on all these “ombre[s] vain[s] … par escrit” that are the writerly constructs of his opaque semiosis: Marie as the curved side of the Moon, the aesthetics of “La Lyre” ushering forth “dix mille odeurs estranges et nouvelles,” the imaging of “mille monstres bossus” or of “mille bestes cornues,” a pictured horse intelligibly depicted verbally, and so forth. Ronsard has only one word for all these strange but epiphanic creations. He calls them “Poësie.”¹⁹

Notes

1. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) 67ff., 93ff. Krieger's Ekphrasis is nothing less than seminal and has been very helpful in my own work on this subject in Renaissance poetry and poetics. We will be returning to him later in this essay. All italics in this study are mine, unless otherwise indicated, as are all translations into English.

2. See, among many others one could cite, the following representative studies: Henri Weber, La Création poétique au XVI^esiècle en France (Paris: Nizet, 1955), especially 235-396 (wherein Ronsard figures prominently in the discussion of the love themes and imagery in the Pléiade production); Roberto E. Campo, “A Poem to A Painter: The Elégie à Janet and Ronsard's Dilemma of Ambivalence,” French Forum 12 (1987): 273-87; Margaret M. McGowan, Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Donald Stone, Jr., Ronsard's Sonnet Cycles: A Study in Tone and Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Elaine Limbrick, “L'Oeil du poète: vision et perspective dans la poésie française de la Renaissance,” Etudes littéraires 20 (1987): 13-26. The essay by Limbrick comes the closest to the aesthetic views on Ronsard which the present essay will develop. This critic is not, however, interested in the theoretical implications of ekphrasis, which I believe can be of great help in understanding a heretofore neglected side (critical and poetic: semiotic) of this Renaissance prince of poets.

3. The interest in and performance of a writerly semiosis, as opposed to a writerly mimesis, by Scève and Du Bellay are subjects explored in my book, The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Scève: Poetry and Struggle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and my essay, “The Poetics of Seeing and Showing: Du Bellay's Love Lyrics,” in Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry C. Nash, editors, Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays for Donald Stone, Jr. (Lexington: French Forum, 1991) 45-59.

4. This is the very title of Riffaterre's book, as well as the subject he treats therein: Fictional Truth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). More later from Riffaterre.

5. Les Amours, Henri and Catherine Weber, editors (Paris: Garnier, 1985).

6. This critical notion of Ronsard's constructive epistemology of inspiration (the idealism of Neo-Platonism) located in Cassandre, yielding to skeptical epistemology and artistic failure in Marie (mannerism), is a major structuring principle in Pot's discussion of Ronsard's love lyrics. See his Inspiration et mélancolie: l'épistémologie poétique dans les Amours de Ronsard (Geneva: Droz, 1990). I do not believe that evolution and sequentiality fully explain Ronsard's failure-poems. These surface throughout his love cycles and are connected to a perceived, and demonstrated, artistic failure in the realist project, to mimesis itself failing the poet, as much as they are to any notion of cyclical-epistemological evolution. This point will become more apparent as the present essay unfolds.

7. For other approaches to writerly impasses in other poems of Ronsard, see Terence Cave, “Enargeia: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century,” L'Esprit Créateur 16 (1976): 5-19; and also Claude-Gilbert Dubois, “Itinéraire et impasses de la `Vive Représentation' au XVI^e siècle,” in La Littérature de la Renaissance: Mélanges d'histoire et de critique littéraires offerts à Henri Weber, Marguerite Soulié and Robert Aulotte, editors (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984) 405-425.

8. I will be using here the edition by Albert-Marie Schmidt for quoting this chanson (80 lines, 20 quatrains) since it, unlike the Weber edition, gives the latest, and very important, emendations of this poem made by Ronsard himself in 1578-87. Les Amours (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Since I quote from this poem so extensively, and since line numbers are not given by Schmidt, I am providing them to facilitate referencing.

9. Robert M. Durling, editor and translator, Petrarch's Lyric Poems (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976) 248-55.

10. This is the kind of interpretation presented so well by Stone 207-10.

11. Ronsard's writerly semiosis as enargeia II will also lend support to the view of more involvement by him in Renaissance Neo-Platonism than has been generally allowed by critics. As Krieger has argued and shown, enargeia II is the literary essence in the Renaissance of an ekphrastic, verbally art-defining Neo-Platonism. Through it, the “extravagant metaphysical demands of Christian Neo-Platonism” were met, precisely in observing the fundamental distinction between the sensible reality of the profane, portrayed transparently as the mimetic real by the painter, or by a painterly-oriented poet, and the intelligible reality of the sacred and ineffable, presented opaquely as the verbal emblem by the writer: “For Renaissance Neo-Platonists, moved by a desire to save poetry and make it an instrument for our salvation, the potential object of imitation was, in the main, to vary with the art: a sensible object for the visual arts and an intelligible object for the verbal arts” (142).

12. Though he does not consider Ronsard, Jean-Michel Rabaté examines the aesthetics of “beauté amère” in his exciting book, La Beauté amère: Fragments d'esthétiques (Seyssel: Editions du Champ Vallon, 1986).

13. Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972) 7.

14. Crise de vers, Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, editors, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) 368.

15. “L'Encre de la mélancolie,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 123 (1963): 423.

16. Ronsard's recognitions of his receptivity to the “forms” of the “mind's eye” clearly underscore his involvement in a writerly semiosis. As Riffaterre has shown (in Fictional Truth), this mode of seeing and of writing is always “opposed to referentiality, the assumed relationship between a sign and noverbal objects taken to be reality” (130). This is why “form, being obviously contrived [thus Ronsard's recognition of his `faulce imagination'], betrays the hand of its maker and signals fictionality [the `dextre esclair' of Ronsard's `fausse et vaine illusion']” (63). It should also be clear by now that I have altered the representational itinerary that Pot in his book argues to be Ronsard's. He interprets Cassandre in Neo-Platonic accents as all light and mimesis, and Marie as darkness and failure, whose “maniérisme … prend le parti inverse: l'enjeu, c'est simplement le jeu” (283, Pot's italics). He does however, at the end of his study, suggest that semiosis just may play a larger role in Ronsard's art than has been allowed (458). This notion is precisely what I have wished to explore in the present study, and to give to Marie, and to “Je veux chanter” in particular, a more positive assessment, as well as to other of Ronsard's less valued or less acclaimed texts, those that do not participate in the poet's project and triumph of mimesis.

17. Gustave Cohen, editor, Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) II 324. The lines within poems in the Cohen edition are not numbered. My references are to page numbers. This edition and volume will be used for the remainder of Ronsard's poems, unless otherwise indicated.

18. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970). Though more interested in the social role and implications of the fantastic, Todorov does offer many useful observations on the purely literary implications of the fantastic, such as we have been studying them in Ronsard. One is that “le fantastique permet de franchir certaines limites [of the mind, of mental and verbal perception] inaccessibles tant qu'on n'a pas recours à lui” (166). It does this through its compatibility with a writerly semiosis and its incompatibility with mimetic representation, through its “métaphysique du réel et de l'imaginaire” (176), through its “antithèse entre le verbal et le transverbal, entre le réel et l'irréel” (183).

19. Ronsard's writerly semiosis is also the kind of writing Hans Robert Jauss has in mind when he speaks of this “other, more essential world [which] opens up to us in and through the lyric experience.” Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, Michael Shaw, translator (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) 259. For Jauss too, as for Krieger, giving life and meaning to this “world” of mind and art is the objective and the challenge of both writing and reading.