Comparative literature
With my morning coffee I had just reread the poem by Pierre Corneille « Stances à Marquise » (1658). In it, the immense French playwright warns his young lover that she will also one day grow old, doomed to lose her charms, but that with the art of his poetry he holds the power to render her immortal.
The same afternoon, today, I found myself before this stunning masterpiece by Gustav Doré, designed in 1879 as a gift and memorial to his mistress (we’re in France), the Parisian “courtisane” Alice Ozy. The clock shows by metaphor how Father Time can devastate and eventually sweep away even the most enjoyable of life’s pleasures. Yet the magnificent, gilded bronze clock remains.
Shakespeare of course gave us the Sonnet 55, which is also rather appropriate to the subject:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time…
…Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the Judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
