SOURCE: "Ronsard's Later Poetry," in Ronsard the Poet, edited by Terence Cave, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1973, pp. 287-318.

In the essay below, de Mourgues offers a stylistic and thematic analysis of Ronsard's later work.

The first ten years in Ronsard's poetic production are so rich and so varied that they seem both to contain and to herald all the rest of his work—with perhaps the exception of his political poems and of the Franciade. Even more than being a triumphal arch opening up the succession of poetic achievements, they reveal the perspective of the long colonnade and determine its main structural features, down to the very end of the vista. I am here concerned with the western arch, the last ten years in the poet's life—that is roughly with his works published or written between 1574 and 1584—and am constantly tempted to look back to earlier poems.

Some...