(1524-1585) poet
The day after his birth to Louis de Ronsard and Jeanne de Chaudrier in the Vendomois of France, the infant Pierre was dropped while being carried to the church for christening. The story goes that the flowers caught him gently, and that moment established his affinity with the natural world that would emerge so skillfully in his poetry. Son to a knight of the king, Pierre de Ronsard became a page to the French court in 1536 and, in 1539, entered the Royal Riding School in Paris for the sons of noblemen. At college in Paris he studied Greek and Latin, which exposed him to the myths and characters of classical antiquity. While recovering from bouts of fever that left him partially deaf, the adolescent Ronsard began composing poetry. Several successful early publications brought him to court, where he had various important patrons but was most dear to Charles IX, for whom he became court poet. After the death of the king, he retired to the priories or church domains that had been granted to him and continued to compose, revise, and publish successive editions of his work. Following prolonged bouts of illness, Ronsard died in 1585, having earned an enduring reputation as “the prince of poets.”
Ronsard’s combined poetic endeavors constitute nearly 20 volumes of work. His first Odes, published in 1550, marked a turning point in the history of French poetry. Ronsard scorned the traditions that treated poetry as a mere craft and instead advocated a return to the ideals of the Greco-Roman age in which poetry was inspired by the muses and poets were considered prophets, seers, and interpreters of the divine mystery of the universe. Ronsard, who modeled his Odes on Pindar and Horace, was often criticized for using this artificial and ancient form to capture and describe contemporary events. But the Odes exhibit the familiarity with metaphor and myth as well as the control of poetic feeling and technique that established his fame.
In 1552 Ronsard published his first collection of sonnets, a form he borrowed from petrarch. The abundance of classical allusions in these poems can strike readers as being excessive or even tedious, but the topics and language show the Ron-sard who is best remembered as a sensitive lover of nature, mourning for beauty that inevitably fades. He frequently incorporated the theme of carpe diem, to seize the delights of life before they pass, and skillfully refreshed conventional images of nature, adding a poignant touch, as in these lines translated by Nicholas Kilmer:
Fall chases summer, And the harsh raging of wind Falls after storm. But the pain Of love’s grieving Stays constant in me And will not falter.
Though best remembered for his lyric poetry, much of which was set to music during his lifetime, Ronsard tried his hand at a variety of forms, among them elegies and occasional verse. Two books of Hymns were published in 1555 and 1556. His poems from the period 1559-74 show the consequences of being court poet in a climate of civil-religious wars, in which Ronsard took the side of the Catholics against the Protestants. These poems have a patriotic tone and contain pleas for peace, moderation, and loyalty to king and church.
After he withdrew from court following Charles’s death in 1574, Ronsard wrote poems that often contain a personal touch and a mature consciousness, best reflected in the Sonnets to Helene (1578). Here the conventional themes and restrained form of the sonnet clash with the poet’s disillusionment with love and convey, in some cases, a note of irony or, as in these lines, hopelessness:
The wound is to the bone. I am no longer the man I was.
I see my death abandoned to despair. Patience is cast off….
As he aged, Ronsard turned more and more to the great themes of the ancients: the changeability of fortune and the vanity of human wishes. His last poems, published the year of his death, are elegiac in tone, full of philosophical speculation.
Despite popularity in his lifetime, fashions in French poetry changed, and Ronsard was forgotten until the 1830s. While critical opinion still varies on Ronsard’s depth and complexity as a poet, he represents the humanist spirit of the French Renaissance and is remembered as one of the greatest and most influential lyric poets ever to compose in that language.
English Versions of Works by Pierre de Ronsard
Poems of Pierre de Ronsard. Translated and edited by Nicholas Kilmer. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979. Pierre de Ronsard: Selected Poems. Translated by Malcolm Quainton and Elizabeth Vinestock. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
A Work about Pierre de Ronsard
Jones, K. R. W. Pierre de Ronsard. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970.
