Telling Time on the Body

Abstract

“Telling Time on the Body” examines carpe diem in conversation with Renaissance visual arts of death. Lyrics that once seemed merely imitative of classical tropes take on paradoxical new life when we recognize that their depictions of time, aging, and death incorporate distinctly visual strategies for representing desiccation and emptiness. These artists ekphrastically reveal the effect of Time upon matter, turning the abstraction of temporality into something rendered hauntingly in green and ochre. Early modern poets, likewise, present pictorialized “Time” as the figure that divulges hidden truths about decaying bodies. They thereby claim their own consanguinity to Time, as fellow actants upon bodily material, while also presenting decay as an event that happens predominantly to women. Yet it is not misogyny alone that motivates these sometimes-grisly figurations of the aging or postmortem female body. Rather, in decomposing the idealized beloved—rosy cheeks, pearly teeth, and all—the poet also “unmakes” the Petrarchan poetry that first invented her, demonstrating his temporal triumph over tired poetic conventions. By vividly rendering the postmortem decay of the woman’s body, that is, the poet brings “death” not just to his supposed beloved, but also to Petrarchist clichés about the red and gold and white. Carpe diem’s unforgivingly visual program of poetic representation confronts outmoded mystifications with brute empiricism, and demands that erotic verse leave behind courtly conventions and claim a new place in literary history.