SOURCE: An introduction to Ronsard's Sonnet Cycles: A Study in Tone and Vision, Yale University Press, 1966, pp. 3-18.

Stone is an American academic and scholar of French literature whose major works, including France in the Sixteenth Century (1969) and French Humanist Tragedy (1974), give special attention to the Renaissance period. In the following excerpt, he provides a thematic and stylistic overview of Ronsard's sonnets.

Speak of Pierre de Ronsard to any student of literature, and he will quote immediately from "Mignonne, allon voir" and "Quand vous serez bien vieille." He may also have read "Comme on voit sur la branche," but he will be familiar with little else. Anthologies have long persisted in presenting only an Epicurean Ronsard—the lover of beauty and nature, whose poetry ever laments the passing of all that is beautiful and advocates a philosophy of "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." The selections have become...