A distinctive voice
One should be wary of affixing anachronistic values to our perception of past literary productions. The obvious trap here would be to downgrade Scève’s poem for what it is extremely foreign to, the Romantic outpouring of a soul.
It has to be considered on its own merits, personal elements admixed with the all-important adherence to tradition. That the 12 lines under consideration ring here and there (herbes … fleurs) with a distinctly Petrarchan tone, that this description of (a/the) garden echoes that by Boccaccio, these elements are not unexpected. Such givens have considerable merit if we hold them for what they stood for, an obligatory exercise together with an homage to those Italian predecessors.
Moreover, let us recall that as a whole Microcosme attempts to encapsulate in words the whole world, not only as the poet knew it in his own time but also in its history. Synchronic and diachronic elements are married. Hence, it should come as no surprise if the poet, in his description of gardens, merged the late medieval gardens which Petrarch and Boccaccio immortalized with the more contemporary gardens he knew from his own time, the Renaissance.
Scève is well known and enjoys a well-deserved reputation, which singles him out among French poets of the Renaissance, for having found very early on his own voice, a highly distinctive and personal tone. Consider the second line (31) in the extract, Les jardins agencer en maints lieux tournoyés. It bears Scève’s imprint in the intricacies in both form and meaning, which imbue this particular line with the opaqueness and with the polysemy that mark great poetry.
Intricacies in form: assonances such as jardins-maints, mediated by the more open and also nasal phoneme agencer; or that from the final vowel in agencer and tournoyer; not to mention the soft consonant carried from jardin into agencer. Intricacies in meaning: from the verb tournoyer predominantly. It turns an otherwise straightforward sentence into a rich line. What exactly have minutely designed gardens (Les jardins agencer en maints lieux) to do with the rounding process deno-ted by this verb? I understand this line to convey the abundance of unspecified circular elements—such as lawns, parterres, a knot garden, fountains, …—in the minutely designed garden. Scève’s voice is characteristic for such frequent moves into generalization and abstraction.