Rich Rhyme: Acoustic Allusions in Ronsard's Amours

Allusion is a form of wordplay that literary criticism has begun to take seriously especially in reference to Pléiade poetry. The activity inscribed in the verb alludo enables poets to perpetuate lyric tradition while experimenting with words, sounds, and ideas in new configurations. Allusion need not be a silent gesture, for poetry can signal acoustic as well as rhetorical or thematic affinities for prior texts through rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and other verbal echoes. This paper will try to detect the role of echo and allusion in Ronsard's Amours of 1552-53 as they exploit the sounds of lyric subjectivity from Ovid to Petrarch and beyond.

Allusion occupies a somewhat unstable place in the range of intertextual practices defined by literary scholarship. In his study of Renaissance imitation, The Light in Troy, Thomas Greene draws a distinction, which he himself acknowledges to be a slippery one, between "allusions, usages of earlier texts that the reader must recognize in order to read competently," and "repetitions, whose provenience may be obscure or irrelevant and matters little for the reading of the poem." ¹ For instance Joachim Du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome allude to Virgil's Aeneid while the Olive repeats some of the obscure contemporary Italian poets of Gabriel Giolito's anthology. In this respect allusion serves to confirm the humanist culture shared by author and audience and to link reading and writing in the same creative process. Greene draws a further distinction "between echoes so brief or peripheral as to be insignificant and a determinate subtext that plays a constitutive role in a poem's meaning" (50). In this usage, literary echoes are an almost involuntary phenomenon that cannot be traced to a definite source. Finally, following James Hutton, Greene reminds us of the terms used in humanist pedagogy to classify the different ways to adapt a classical text, including translation (translatio), replies (responsa), imitation (imitatio), and allusion (allusio). ² On this scale allusion represents the greatest degree of independence toward the classical model.

Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani has studied the status of allusion in Ronsard's love poetry in the light of Marc Antoine de Muret's commentary written for the 1553 edition of the Amours. ³ Muret frequently iden- tifies passages from the Amours as allusions or borrowings with the formulae "c'est une allusion à" or "cela est pris de." On this basis Mathieu-Castellani proposes a typology of intertextuality ranging from citation and borrowing to allusion or allegation. Of all these types allusion is the most enigmatic and suggestive. Allusion is an echo: "c'est une voix sans corps" (31). Like the myth of Echo and Narcissus, literary allusion explores the dialectic of possession and alienation and accentuates the problem of poetic identity. As we shall see Ronsard explores these problems in part through acoustic allusions to Ovid's original account of Echo.

John Hollander has written the most extensive essay on echo as a mode of allusion in poetry. ⁴ He proposes a rhetorical hierarchy of three different allusive modes: quotation, allusion, and echo. Allusion is less explicit than quotation but more intentional than echo. Since allusion depends on the complicity of readers and writers, when the reading public forgets the background to a text, allusions can be demoted to echoes while scholarly research, by recovering textual background, can promote echoes to allusions (65-66). Hollander detects both modes in Virgil's tenth eclogue as it signals its affinity for Theocritus's first idyll. To Hollander's ear, the Latin phrase "tua cura Lycoris" from verse 22 echoes Theocritus's word kora (girl) in a way that is more personal and creative than the "public allusiveness of adaptation, imitation and paraphrase" (67). It is to such acoustic allusions and to their implications for tradition and originality that we will be attentive in our study of Ronsard's Amours de Cassandre.

Readers have been sensitive to the insistence of certain sound patterns in Ronsard's first Amours. In...