An encyclopaedic poem.
Microcosme is an epic in verse of 3003 lines. This very number calls attention to Dante’s Divine Comedy which itself adhered to a numerology. Scève wrote it in alexandrine (dodecasyllabic) lines, at a time when this verse form enjoyed a blooming among French poets.
Maurice Scève wrote this long poem during the years 1555-1560. 4 Microcosme seems to have been completed by 1559 5 but the poet differed its publication until 1562. He died in or about 1564, a possible victim of the plague.
The context, for French poetry, was at that time that of a powerful urge for freedom, freedom of all types, not excluding the erotic and even the obscene. Henri II was King of France. In 1552, Ronsard’s Les amours de Cassandre was accompanied by an unusual musical supplement, provided by Pierre Certon, Clément Janequin, Claude Goudimel et Marc-Antoine Muret. Ronsard aimed for all his sonnets to be sung. The same Ronsard and his friends (the “Brigade”) in 1553 sacrificed a he-goat to Bacchus and then celebrated with numerous drunken libations. This was the time also for the waning of the decasyllabic line, replaced by the alexandrine and other versifications, often borrowed from Greek and Latin models. A friend of Ronsard, Marc-Antoine Muret, who had exceeded the legal limits of the increased tolerance for unusual personal behavior was convicted of sodomy, and sentenced to death in 1553 (he escaped from jail). Ronsard’s erotic collection of poems, Livret de Folastries (published anonymously in 1553) was deemed blasphemous and was burned. Ronsard had used it as a manifest against the neo-Petrarchan poetry then in much fashion.
The Microcosme poem fits this libertarian urge, and the contemporary impatience with the constraints of religion and conventionality. It ought to be read as a pean to Homo faber, to man the maker, the inventor and the creative spirit. Man creates his own future. 6 It is an epic, Aeneid-like, of our quest for knowledge, knowledge of any kind. Human curiosity is what motivates our quest for knowledge. Its publication date, 1562, places it in-between a late medieval encyclopaedic didactic treatise such as Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica, first published in 1505, and Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning, published in 1605 and deemed as heralding the era of experimental science. Microcosme can indeed be described as looking both to the past and to the future. To the past, with its very title alluding to the medieval notion of a deep-seated correspondence between man (the microcosm) and the cosmos (the macrocosm), as part of the Christian apologetic. To the future, Microcosme is not only a scientific poem, is carries often also a utopian tone.
Microcosme is divided in three parts, consisting each of 1,000 lines. The first book narrates divine Creation and Original Sin. The second book takes the form of a dream by Adam, where he predicts the progresses to come in the sciences and in the arts. The third book continues in the same vein, under the guise of a speech Adam addresses to Eve. An hymn to human freedom and creativity, Microcosme testifies to the optimism so typical of the first Renaissance.
The segment I will comment here occurs towards the end of Book Three of the poem (lines 2830-2842).