SOURCE: Voice and Vision in Ronsard's `Les Sonnets pour Helene.' New York: Peter Lang, 1993, 142 p.

In the following excerpt, Fallon interprets Ronsard's Sonnets pour Helene cycle, seeing the work's final theme as one concerning love sacrificed for poetry.

Les Sonnets pour Helene recounts a story about growth—growth that involves action and stasis, expansion and reduction, choice and chance, progress and reversal.¹ The details of a lover's loss and a poet's progress emerge in the course of the two books of sonnets as the narrator struggles to record the quests of two personas in their search to realize their ultimate goals. The lover and the poet must each grapple with his complex role of imitator and creator of something unique. The lover's complaint bears traces of the traditional at times, for these pages repeat a familiar lament; yet the unique and inventive variations on an old theme...