Internal connexions
The rhymes also feature prominently the nasal, in four out of the 12 lines (35-36 & 39-40). That the word jardin also has such an ending perhaps is no accident.
Lines 31-32 have the –oyer rhyme. This particular suffix carries with it a notion, precisely, of repetition, frequency, permanence, the same idea expressed in the words toujours continuel (40). Lines 33-34 end with a rhyme in –ive, feminine in gender. This adjectival suffix in French usually denotes a property, a relation. The word “satif, sative” has the meaning “having been sown or planted.” Hence a discreet contrast between the –oyer and the –ive rhymes, the former points to repeti-tion, where the latter denotes permanence.
The next rhyme (35-36) –ante(s) denotes the present participle, by which a verb (décorer, murmurer) has been turned into an adjective (murmurantes, décorantes). The same syntactic feature recurs in the first half of the -lent rhyme (39-40), with somnolent, from the verb somnoler (“to doze off”). Paul Verlaine, in his poem “Allégorie” made use of the same (lent, somnolent) rhyming. The following rhyme is the naked vowel o devoid of any consonant, which, needless to say, draws attention to the word eau.
The last rhyme in the segment (41-42) is the suffix –ice, which is relatively unfrequent in French. I will content myself with pointing its importance: in position, it closes the segment; in function, it reminds us of the key word artifice (37). Mo-reover, the three words artifice, office and service—they exist in English with identical meanings—belong to the same semantic category of human or anthropomorphic activities or productions. This rhyme is also how the poet’s given name (Maurice) ends. Could a psychoanalyst resist making the connexion between his name and not only office and service, but artifice too?
Which brings up the assonances in this segment from Microcosme. They involve predominantly sibilants (sillons (30) – berceaux (32) – semées (34) – satives (34) – assidu (41)) the related k consonant (couleurs (34) – canaux (35) – continuel (40)) and the vowel o (berceaux (32) – canaux (35) – beau (37) – eau (38)).
Beyond sound effects, the poem is also replete with repeated words, with pairs of lexical items sharing the same meaning, with redundancies in a word. Examples include semée (30) and satives (33), décorantes (35)-embellissaient (36), en maints lieux (31)-en maints endroits (41), and plaisamment (36)-plaisance (42).
One might construe all such repetitions of phonemes and redundancies in meaning as the trace in the poem of the actual symmetries 24present in the ideal or idealized Renaissance garden it describes.
This segment from Microcosme thus strikes the listener with its insistent tone of voice. What is it insisting upon? What does the poet wish for, what does he want? Scève is trying to achieve the saturation of a landscape by its description in words. The task is impossible. Yet the poet achieves a measure of success. He conveys the spirit of the place. Which indeed is the original, the etymological meaning of the Latin verb, insistere, “to place oneself upon, to set on a given location.”