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- Title
La passion au miroir : les dizains spéculaires de Délie.
- Authors
FRELICK, NANCY
- Abstract
This article examines the expression and portrayal of passion in the mirror poems of Maurice Scève's Délie, object de plus haulte vertu, in light of several traditions (influenced by Ovid, Plato, Petrarch, Ficino, etc.). It analyzes the multiple uses of mirror metaphors in the text, along with symbolic networks related to conflicting desires, thoughts, and emotions brought about by the specular contemplation of the self and the love object. The mirror serves not only as a mediator of desire, through the “Cristal opaque'' (of D229, for example) that reflects the image of the beloved. It is sometimes personified, so that it may express its own cries of love and sorrow, and the paradoxical power of the Lady's eyes that can affect it in the same way as it does men (D230). Plays on the co-opposites of presence and absence, or surface and depth, are used to evoke the inaccessibility of the Lady in the “heureuse fontaine'' that hides Délies image in its sacred waters (D235). In addition, the looking glass evokes the fatal gaze of the Beloved whose face becomes a “miroir meurdrier de ma vie mourante" (D307). Mirror metaphors are also used to evoke the introspective gaze of the poet-lover who contemplates his own emotional state. Among other things, we will reconsider Jean Frappier's thesis that this specular meditation is dominated by the Platonic world of Ideas and that these poems go beyond the Narcissus myth, which he sees as "surpassed, purified" in Scève's text.
- Subjects
DELIE: Object de plus haulte vertu (Book : Sceve); SCEVE, Maurice; EMOTIONS in literature; SYMBOLISM of mirrors; FRAPPIER, Jean; NARCISSUS (Greek mythology); FICINO, Marsilio, 1433-1499
- Publication
Renaissance & Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 2015, Vol 38, Issue 3, p17
- ISSN
0034-429X
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.33137/rr.v38i3.26146