Ronsard's Sonnet: A Seduction Strategy

Extract

[...] and 10 align monosyllables that resonate like the blows of fate: the march of time - proclaimed twice in verse 9 - is not just a general truth - 'time goes away' - from which the poet and his 'lady' could be spared. On the contrary, verse 10 underlines its realization in the fate of future lovers with a negation followed by a rectification placed at the hemistich: 'not time, but we are going away'. The repetition of words and sound echoes leave no escape. [...]

[...] flowering' of verse 6 in a subtle transformation of the noun into an adjective. However, the correspondence between the woman and the flowers is not only the occasion for the poet to offer a gallant compliment: their fatal destiny is announced from the start. The second quatrain, built like the first with embracing rhymes, makes 'flowering' and 'withered' succeed each other. The alliteration in of the paronyms highlights the sudden but natural shift that occurs between the blooming of beauty and its disappearance: the two terms form an antithesis for the meaning but produce sounds close to each other that seem to imitate the sound of falling petals. [...]

[...] The adverbs 'tomorrow' and 'suddenly', highlighted at the rhyme, emphasize the acceleration of time that juxtaposes in a striking way the present youth and the coming death. The poem resembles a vanitas, a pictorial genre that proposes a meditation on death by associating the symbols of beauty, youth (including flowers) and those of the destructive time and death. The fatal progression gains in intensity as the poem advances: the first quatrain marks the decline with the past participle 'falls' highlighted at the beginning of the verse before its auxiliary 'were'; however, it was only a hypothesis and the flowers were saved by the poet. [...]

[...] The sonnet, written in decasyllables, presents itself as a note that accompanies a bouquet of flowers: the words like the bouquet sing the love of their recipient and call them to make the most of the present time. Our study will analyze how the lyrical motifs of love and time serve Ronsard's seduction strategy. We will first see how the sonnet weaves an analogy between the woman and the flowers, then we will see to what extent the poem resonates as a warning about the flight of time, and finally we will show that the poem is an invitation to love. [...]

[...] This surprising confession may be the ultimate pledge that the poet makes to love, which alone must triumph. With the sonnet send you a bouquet', Ronsard reprises traditional motifs of love poetry and gives his invitation to love an elegiac tone. The call to 'Carpe diem' is accompanied by a meditation on the inexorable flight of time that leads all beauty to its disappearance. Ronsard will propose a variation on the same theme in his famous poem 'When you will be very old' addressed to Hélène, celebrating this time the immortality of poetry. [...]