¹ On myth making in Ronsard's discursive poetry before the Sonnets pour Hélène, see esp. Francis M. Higman, “Ronsard's Political and Polemical Poetry,” in Terence Cave, éd., Ronsard the Poet (London: Me-thuen, 1973), pp. 241–85. Ronsard's relation to the court has been variously noted; two points of departure are Marcel Françon, “Ronsard panégyriste de la cour,” Convivium, NS (1954), pp. 556–64, and Fernand De-sonay, Ronsard, poète de l'amour (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1959), esp. Bk. m, Ch. vii-x, and the conclusion.

² Passerat, Poésies françaises, ed. Prosper Blanche-main (Paris: Lemerre, 1880), n, 2.

³ Desportes, Diverses Amours, ed. Victor Grahame (Geneva: Droz, 1963), p. 163. Grahame would have Desportes's sonnet written before Ronsard's volume was in print; Henri and Catherine Weber, in their edition of the Amours (Paris: Gamier, 1963), p. 795, suggest Desportes followed Ronsard's lead. On the precise position of Hélène de Surgères in the court, see esp. Jacques Lavaud, Un Poète de cour au temps des derniers Valois: Philippe Desportes (Paris: Droz, 1936), pp. 72–107, and L. Clark Keating, Studies in the Literary Salon in France, 1550–1615 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 103–25 et passim.

⁴ Françon discusses the use of court code names in the essay cited in n. 1.

⁵ This and all subsequent references to the Sonnets pour Hélène (given parenthetically in the text, by book and poem number) are to the 1584 edition, ed. Jacques Lavaud (Paris: Droz, 1947). This text is much augmented over the first edition of 1578; the final, posthumous edition of 1587 suffers from stylistic revisions of dubious value and has few structural revisions. For a tabulation of editions, see Appendix. The Webers print first editions of all the collections for reasons of practical convenience; Laumonier's versions of later editions are schematic and can be hard to use.

In his study Ronsard's Sonnet Cycles (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), Donald Stone finds “the omissions [of certain poems from the 1578 text] were also meant to prevent a thematic monotony” and does not consider that the additions might have supplemental bearing on thematic structures. He dismisses the poem “Au milieu de la guerre, en un siècle sans foy” as “excessive, either in terms of the crude reality of the poet's desire or the crude reality of the affair” and thus “incompatible with the vision of 1578” (pp. 233–34). His argument against moral presuppositions and his plea for examining changes in the editions (pp. 22729) are welcome; the position I am arguing, however, views thematic complexity, ironic structure, and genre as composing a major issue where Stone sees none. For a defense of the 1584 and 1587 texts, see Isidore Silver, The Intellectual Evolution of Ronsard (St. Louis: Washington Univ. Press, 1974), II, 281–312.

⁶ The pose of inferiority before the patron is formulaic, but with the death of Charles ix and the succession of the less sympathetic Henri in, Ronsard's status was more uncertain. See, for example, the poems exchanged by Charles and Ronsard near the time of the king's death, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Paul Lau-monier et al., 20 vols. (Paris: Droz, 1937–75), xvn, 45–48. (Subsequent citations of works other than the Sonnets pour Hélène are identified in the text by OC, volume, and page number.) The quatrain printed on the verso of the last page of the 1578 Franciade is also pertinent: “Si le Roy Charles eust vescu / J'eusse achevé ce long ouvrage: / Si tost que la Mort l'eut vaincu / Sa mort me veinquit le courage” (xvi, 330). The analogy between Charles ix and Christ appears, among other places, in an “Elégie du Roy” (xiv, 133–45).

⁷ For a theoretical discussion of irony in relation to allegory, although the argument is cast in a history of the romantics' practice, see Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 173–209. De Man specifically argues that “difference now resides in the subject, whereas time is reduced to one single moment” in the irony of Wordsworth's “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” (p. 207). Also see Roland Barthes's remarks on the irony of refusing to claim privilege, in S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 145. Robert M. Durling's discussion of the rejection, in Petrarch, of figural-allegorical conjunctions of events in history in favor of ironic disjunctions (“The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux and the Crisis of Allegory,” Italian Quarterly, 18 [Summer 1974], 7–28) is to the point from a historical perspective.

⁸ Castor and Pollux, born to Leda, were either brothers or half brothers to Helen and Clytemnestra. See Boccaccio, De Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, Bk. xi Ch. viii, and Lelio Gregorio Giraldi, De Deis Gentium (Lyons, 1565), Syntagma v. A detailed examination of the pertinence of the dioscuri in Ron-sard's works is another topic, but some incidentals are suggestive: Giraldi repeats Isidore's claim that they originated circus games; that they raped Phoebe and Ilaira, priestesses of Minerva and Diana; that Castor was the mortal son of Tyndareus, Pollux the immortal son of Jove; and that at Castor's death Pollux persuaded Jove to allow them to alternate in life and death. Giraldi also repeats the more common traditions that they are signs or guarantors of good weather for navigators and generally stand, in contrast to Helen, for good auguries. They figured especially prominently in the royal Entrée of 1571, in allusions to their role as guardians of classical Rome.

⁹ See also, in OC, “Les Parques” (xviii, 237), “A tres-illustre et magnanime Prince, Henry de Lorraine, Pair de France, & Duc de Guise” (xviii, 242), “Discours a Monsieur de Cheverny” (xviii, 100), and “Cartel pour les chevaliers celestes” (xviii, 112–13). The fact that Castor and Pollux occur in references to figures other than Charles and Henri indicates how common the structure of earthly and divine guardians was in the court aesthetic.

¹⁰ The love-war figure was established for Renaissance poets at least as early as Terence's Eunuchus, Act i, 5161. The figure appears frequently in Petrarch; see. for example, the Rime: “Mille fiate. ? dolce mia guerrera” (21), “Più di me lieta non si vede a terra” (26), “Io temo si de' begli occhi l'assalto” (39), and “Que' che 'n Tesaglia ebbe le man si pronte” (44). Brooks Otis, in Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), p. 15, notes the convention within classical elegy of playing off erotic lyric against epic and elaborating the role of lover as “enlisted in love's army … busier than a real soldier.” In the Sonnets pour Hélène, Ronsard portrays the lover as “du camp d'Amour pratique Chevalier” (i.xiii), praises and blames Hélène as a guerrière (i.xi, for example), and judges that “Les Guerres et l'Amour se semblent d'une chose: / Le veinqueur bien souvent du veincu est batu” (t.viii). The figure shows how the military aspect of the Iliad has been absorbed into metaphorics: “Mon maistre Amour m'envoye à grands coups de carquois, / R'assie-ger Ilion pour conquérir Hélène” (II.X). Other examples compound the figure: “vous en auriez pitié, / Et aux cendres d'un mort vous ne feriez la guerre” (il.xvi); “Venus … / Tu me laisses toymesme esclave emprisonner / Es mains d'une cruelle ou il faut que je meure” (ii.xxxiii).

¹¹ Hélène de Surgères appears to have addressed Ronsard as “Homère” in a sonnet, printed in Lavaud, Appendix ii, pp. 517–18, along with what Lavaud proposes to be Ronsard's reply. Other evidence includes a couplet in Belleforest's “Cosmographie universelle”: “Ou bien Homère grec écrivant Ronsardise, / Ou que Ronsard françois en chantant Homerise” (Marcel Raymond, L'Influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française (1550–1585), 2nd ed. [Geneva: Droz, 1965], ii, 10). See also the inscription on a portrait in Pierre de l'Estoile's Mémoires-journaux, cited in R. A. Katz, Ronsard's French Critics (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 27: “Pierre de Ronsard, Gentilhomme Vendosmois, l'Homère ou le Virgile de France et le Pere des Poètes françois. ...”

¹² In the preface to the Franciade, Ronsard reaffirmed the superiority of epic by ranking Vergil first among the Latin poets: “Au reste, les autres Poètes Latins ne sont que naquets de ce brave Virgile, premier Capitaine des Muses, non pas Horace mesme … ny Catulle, Tibulle, & Properce, encore qu'ils soient tresexcellents en leur mestier: si ce n'est Catulle en son A this, & aux Nopces de Peleus ...” (OC, xvi, 338). The prime Catullian example of the epyllion genre, or short epic, toward which the Sonnets pour Hélène tends in developing Homeric topics and touching upon epic perspectives is “Peleus and Thetis” (lxiv). Catullus' poem lxviiia is also interesting, for much like the Sonnets pour Hélène it recapitulates part of the Trojan legend, tells of Catullus' own love, and is offered as a gift in gratitude to a friend.

¹³ Noémi Hepp, Homère en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1968), p. 63; see also her Homère en France au XVIe siècle, in Atti dell'Ac-cademia delle Scienze di Torino: II. Classe di scienze morali, storiche, e filologiche, 96 (1961–62), 49.

¹⁴ Stone ignores Charles ix and apparently considers the last poem of little importance: “Ronsard transcends the dichotomy of reality and ideal love and extracts from the experience another ideal [immortality] which carries the cycle beyond the equation of Love and Death which ends the final sonnets” (p. 178). In Ron-sard the Poet contrast Cave's Preface, esp. p. 5, and Grahame Castor's chapter “Petrarchism and the Quest for Beauty in the Amours of Cassandre and the Sonets [sic] pour Hélène,” pp. 79–120. Etienne Pasquier succinctly represents a view that places Ronsard within literary conventions, as a master of multiple genres and subjects, and he contrasts Ronsard with Petrarch: “Pétrarque n'escrivit qu'en un subject, et cestuy en une infinité. Il [Ronsard] a en nostre langue représenté uns Homère, Pindare, Theocrite, Virgile, Catulle, Horace, Pétrarque, et par mesme moyen diversifie son style, en autant de manières qu'il luy a pieu, ores d'un ton haut, ores moyen, ores bas” (Recherches de la France [1723], cited in Katz, p. 27).

¹⁵ See also OC, xviii, 37, Il. 10–16.

¹⁶ Ronsard compares himself to Telephesus, contrasts Achilles (i.lxii), and claims he is neither Paris nor Jason (ii.lxxv).

¹⁷ De Man, p. 203. I take it that “unreachable” would not have exactly the same meaning in medieval and Renaissance allegory, for example, in the Coin-media, as it does in romantic allegory. I rely also on the challenging position developed by Isabel G. MacCaffrey in Spenser's Allegory (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), esp. her discussion of “analytical allegory,” pp. 33–59.