“THE WORLD HAS NOT GROWN OLD YET, HAVING COME TO ITS ENDˮ: A PERSPECTIVE OF THE FUTURE IN THE POETRY OF PIERRE DE RONSARD BEFORE AND AFTER 1562

Ronsard's historical consciousness included an optimistic vision of the future. This vision was resistant to the disastrous events of the Religious wars in France. Both before and after the beginning of the wars in 1562, Ronsard rejected the idea of “the world grown oldˮ, on which the popular apocalyptic interpretation of the contemporaneity was based. He insisted that the disasters and moral decline of religious wars are not something unprecedented, testifying to the hopelessness of the world and its imminent destruction. The course of history is cyclical; decline and disasters must be followed by appeasement and prosperity under an eminent ruler. Ronsard’s belief in the positive dynamics of history served a compensatory function, allowing him to endure the “horror of historyˮ

‘When is a meadow not a meadow?’ : Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry

In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned with the ravaged body of the physical landscape in an array of arresting ecological images. By tracing a web of profoundly imbricated commonplaces and analogies concerning fields, bodies, and entrails in particular, this chapter investigates the ways in which the verse of Pierre de Ronsard and Agrippa d’Aubigné both rehearses and decries the unnatural twists and turns of that ‘intestine’ conflict. Both poets revive ancient expressions of ecological anxiety that disrupt what Timothy Morton has termed ‘agrilogistic thought’; but I argue that in their distinctive and sometimes challenging styles, their verse presents (and through syntactic violence, uncannily performs) a still more radical vision of human enmeshment in nature.

AN EVENT AT THE DAWN OF MODERN KOREAN POETRY: KIM SOWOL’S “AZALEAS”

Kim Sowol is one of the Korean poets who opened the horizon of modern poetry in Korea. His poem, “Azaleas”(1925) has been known as a masterpiece which Korean people love most to recite as “To Cassandra” of Pierre de Ronsard in France. Nevertheless, this poem has been taken for the highest expression of the traditional sentiment without being appreciated for the quality of the modern poetry as follows: Koreans have sung for a long time the sorrow from the parting with the lover. In “Azaleas”, any reader can see easily the repeat of the same situation and same feeling. In this article I analyzed the attitude and the intention of the speaker of this poem and reinterpret the theme of poem. In doing so, I found the clever strategy of the speaker in front of the irreversible situation to press secretly the reflection of the lover about his departure. This strategy is the invention of the modern [wo]man which can appropriate the crisis. So, I defined the modern characteristic of this poem and proved that this poem is not a repeated expression of the traditional feeling of the Koreans, but the de/re-construction of that.

‘Cet universel naufrage du monde’

This chapter marks the transition from portent to actuality, addressing the prospect of political shipwreck in the troubled latter part of the sixteenth century by considering not only incarnations and reconfigurations of the suave mari magno commonplace but also shipwrecks that are narrated from the inside. It explores the distinction between the struggling ship in Lucretius and the eagerly spectated shipwreck of a political enemy in Cicero’s letters, taking account of the model of the ship of state as elaborated in Plato, Cicero, and medieval sources. It argues that the role of the spectator is most often not at a safe distance, and that the ethical relationship between the spectator and those on board is significantly developed from that in Lucretius. Through the work of three writers (Michel de L’Hospital, Pierre de Ronsard and Michel de Montaigne), it shows that the powerful metaphor of the ship of state struggling on troubled waters is itself articulated in a variety of ways during the political storm of the late sixteenth century—ways that, ethically speaking, variously implicate or exonerate the politician, poet or author. This chapter poses a series of questions concerning the difference between public and private spheres, the unique moral implications of civil war, and the author or poet’s own position, be it personal, political, or philosophical—or all three—with relation to what Montaigne calls ‘cet universel naufrage du monde’.

Terre's Brilliant Mines

This chapter turns to a mid-sixteenth-century poetic text, the “Hymne de l’or” (Hymn to Gold) by French author Pierre de Ronsard. The poem is read here—recuperating in particular its “vision” of Terre that generations of critics have written off as a mere aside—as a poem ever conscious about gold’s exterranean origins and as a kind of poetic counterpart to nonpoetic texts about mining such as Georgius Agricola’s Bermannus (1500) and Vannoccio Biringuccio’s metallurgical treatise De la Pirotechnia (1540). After analyzing the “vision” of Terre in some detail, especially the way that Terre is described as always already containing not just gold, but mines, the chapter explores how Ronsard juxtaposes (in somewhat problematic ways) specific sites of extraction.