Time
In these 12 lines, Scève reports a visit to a garden. The focus is on the garden, not on the narrator seemingly, even though he evokes personal feelings and emotions. The more impersonal the garden itself, it is definitely not an identifiable garden, it is an ideal or an idealized place. The poet merges memories he has retained and cherishes of gardens he has visited which remain familiar in his mind. Have such visits happened in the recent past, or in the more distant past?
This is not clear. Scève does not turn to this tool of French grammar, le présent de narration, the narrative present. This tense makes a description more vivid by purporting to be in the present tense. Verbs in this fragment (“embellissaient – distillait – apportait) are in the tense of the imparfait, conveying actions which occurred in the past, but not in the identifiable past, not at a given point in time. They carried on for a while, they covered segments in time, short or long we cannot tell.
But this segment of Microcosme I analyze here carries an internal clock, a clepsydra. The emphasis on fountains 21and running water is an implicit reference to the passage of time. These fountains whisper to the visitor as if confiding in him. Water flows down and, lo and behold, this is reversible, it goes up again.
This water flow is audible, its noise goes on and on, it is somewhat soporific and conducive to one’s falling asleep. Now we know what kind of a time and what kind of a vision the poem alludes to: we are in the time of a dream, the time of anamnesis, the time of the bachelardian or proustian rêverie.