‘When is a meadow not a meadow?’ : Dark Ecology and Fields of Conflict in French Renaissance Poetry

Abstract

In poetic responses to the French civil wars, the wounded political body of France is aligned with the ravaged body of the physical landscape in an array of arresting ecological images. By tracing a web of profoundly imbricated commonplaces and analogies concerning fields, bodies, and entrails in particular, this chapter investigates the ways in which the verse of Pierre de Ronsard and Agrippa d’Aubigné both rehearses and decries the unnatural twists and turns of that ‘intestine’ conflict. Both poets revive ancient expressions of ecological anxiety that disrupt what Timothy Morton has termed ‘agrilogistic thought’; but I argue that in their distinctive and sometimes challenging styles, their verse presents (and through syntactic violence, uncannily performs) a still more radical vision of human enmeshment in nature.