SOURCE: "Dancing Forms," in Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 209-41.

McGowan is an English academic and scholar who has published works on Michel de Montaigne's Essays, Jean Racine's dramas, and the ballet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. Below, she explores the role of dance and music in Ronsard's poetry.

Ronsard had discovered in his triumphal odes that his reader's feelings could be most sharply affected by verse that conveyed a sense of images in motion; his poems in praise of the human form demonstrate a similar awareness. Let us consider for a moment the song of farewell that Ronsard wrote on the departure to Savoy in 1559 of the beautiful and talented sister of Henri II, the princess Marguerite. The poem is cast in a pastoral mode, and its opening lines paint a natural scene whose simplicity is consciously contrasted with the...