Scève’s Emblememes

Imagine this: scrolling the internet, you happen to come across a low-resolution digital image depicting the French Renaissance poet Maurice Scève at his desk, writing mottos for a stack of woodcuts he had happened to come across sometime in the 1530s or 40s and would insert into his 1544 love lyric collection, Délie. To what purpose would you put such an image? I would make it into a meme and caption it, “me making memes.”

Scève, who was working in the busy sixteenth-century humanist enclave and printing center of Lyon, was an early adopter of the craze for emblems that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; he was perhaps nudged by his friend, the publisher Jean de Tournes, to help him make Lyon the emblem-book capital of France.³ Emblems—“emblemes,” as Scève generically called his images, though they may be more like imprese or devises⁴—exploited new typographical technology to pair iconic images from myth and folklore with edifying (or, sometimes, obfuscating) text tags.⁵ The first emblem book in Europe was produced by a stroke of incidental inspiration, when Heinrich Steyner, the original (and unauthorized) Augsburg publisher of Andrea Alciato’s 1531 collection of Latin sententiae, decided to add illustrations: Alciato seems to have meant his title, Emblematum liber, to refer to the eloquently emblematic wisdom of his epigrams; Steyner thought that wisdom could use a visual aid.⁶ From their very origin, then, emblems combined pretensions to profundity with a contingent character, a slapdash supplementarity. In the seventeenth-century Dutch emblem-book author Jacob Cats’s formulation, emblems are “light” yet “weighty,” “ridiculous” yet “not without wisdom,” deriving their meaning through their use and reuse; they are “mute images, and nevertheless speaking.” Emblems are also like poetry, according to the English poet and polemicist Philip Sidney’s evocative definition: a poem, Sidney says, is “a speaking picture,” a phrase that has been repurposed from the realm of pure poetry and applied, in an act of meme-like reliteralization, as the title of more than one academic study of early modern visual culture, including emblems.⁷

All of this makes emblems sound a lot like the internet memes of the present day: mute images that nevertheless speak, that are copied, pirated, and recontextualized, that combine image and text to delight the viewer/reader and perhaps to teach. A thing about memes is that they are like a lot of other things: like advertisements, like print cartoons, like subtitled film stills, like “me,” as a common meme caption insists. They are similar to simile, mimetic of mimesis, epigonic of epigrams: plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose. Memes are also, this essay will argue, not only like Scève’s emblems but also like the short lyric poems that make up the majority of his Délie, and like the ladies that populate Renaissance lyric collections like Scève’s. The model for these collections was Petrarch’s fourteenth-century Rime sparse, a volume of 366 “scattered rhymes,” mostly sonnets, mostly lamenting his unrequited love for a woman named Laura. A series of Petrarchan sequences, each devoted to their own Laura or Lauras, emerged over the course of the sixteenth century in Italy, Spain, France, and England before the trend fizzled out in the seventeenth century, a bit before emblem books also lost their wide appeal.⁸ The Petrarchan lady, whose typically aristocratic profile is sometimes reproduced in the frontispieces to these collections, is generically singular: “Tu sola mi piaci,” Petrarch sighs to Laura⁹; “Seule je te choisi, seule aussi tu me plais,” Pierre de Ronsard sighs to Hélène (a similar tune to the one he was sighing to another lady, Cassandre, not long before)¹⁰; “Honour the shrine, where you alone are placed,” Fulke Greville proclaims, twice, of Cælica.¹¹ All these poets seem to be relying on an old trick from an old book, Ovid’s early first-century Art of Love, which instructs its reader to “choose to whom you will say: ‘You alone please me’ [tu mihi sola places],”¹² a smooth line that, as it happens, Ovid ripped off from an older book, by Propertius.¹³ What these special ladies have in common—indeed, what makes them special—is their quintessential commonness, their infinite iterability. The poet-lovers, too, are in possession of a paradoxically generalized hyperindividuality. Nothing could be more conventional than for a lover to feel like he is inventing something, even if, as any Renaissance poet trained in the rhetorical art of inventio would know, to “invent” is simply, etymologically, to find something that was already there.¹⁴

The first book-length collection of Petrarchan love lyrics to appear in France, Scève’s Délie differs from those that would appear later in the sixteenth century in part because of its relentless similarity. It is written not in the sonnets that Petrarch primarily availed himself of (along with canzoni, madrigals, ballate, and sestine) and popularized, and that became the love lyric form of the Renaissance par excellence, but rather in the quaint medieval French form of dizains, little square grids of ten ten-syllable lines that Scève stuck with, unvaryingly (after an introductory, eight-line huitain), for the entirety of the long, stubbornly unsequential poetic sequence of 449 poems he devotes to a woman named Délie (an anagram of l’idée, making a name out of a refixed idée fixe). The poems are dense, both in the sense that they feel like squished sonnets and in their commitment to stuckness, sedimenting in temporal thickness.¹⁵ Thomas Greene remarks, with a mixture of admiration, horror, and fatigue, on Scève’s magisterial achievement of an “iterative present,” an almost mechanically reproduced sense of immediacy through which “time becomes a treadmill or a trap” and “the orderly, sequential flow of the natural universe gives way to the weary, undifferentiated impulses of romantic habit.”¹⁶ Petrarch obsessively returns to the moment he first saw Laura, an obsessive return to which later Petrarchan poets obsessively returned in turn, but Scève seems never to have left the moment he first saw Délie, a death-like experience that is constantly reborn: “les mortz qu’en moy tu renovelles” is the explicit subject of the collection, announced in the prefatory poem.¹⁷ As his English translator Richard Sieburth puts it, contrasting Scève’s stasis to Petrarch’s relative variety of form and mood, Scève “commits himself to hammering the same poetic chord 449 times in succession,” making him the only Petrarchan poet to demonstrate a real commitment to “the unrelieved agony of an endlessly repeated Now.”¹⁸

Already in the first dizain, the present moment feels endless:

The first word—“L’Oeil”—stares us down and holds its gaze as we learn it has been spinning at random like a weathercock (“girouettait”) until arrested by the suddenness of presence: “Voicy.” Here enters a basilisk, the mythical creature that kills by its look. The basilisk’s effect does not have the finality of death; it sounds more like paralysis, keeping the body alive (“vivant le Corps”) while killing (“desvie”) its animating force, suspending the speaker in the perpetual presence (“au conspect”) of his “Idole.” The opening dizain is an idol of presence in a metapoetic sense as well, serving as a microcosmic mirror for some of the sequence’s key figures: Délie, the lady/killer herself, is nearly verbally reconstituted in the soul-killing “desvie”; the “Oeil,” detached from any body, reflects our own readerly gaze; “l’Ame de mon Ame” redoubles the soul in a mise en abyme; and the poem’s main characters (the weathercock, the basilisk) play starring roles in the emblems to come, as does a rooster, a cock that gets out from under the weather. All these figures, here or when they reappear in emblematic form or both, remain locked in staring contests: dévie vs. Délie, eye vs. eye, weathercock vs. its own spinning self, basilisk vs. mirror, soul vs. soul. The treadmill of time might be more like a Möbius strip.

Scève’s use of emblems is the more obvious characteristic that sets Délie apart from other love lyric collections, and it’s a characteristic intimately related to the unrelieved agony of its endlessly repeated Now. The fifty emblems appear at regular intervals, after the fifth and then after every ninth dizain.²⁰ Unlike the engravings in more straightforward emblem books, the “emblemes” in Délie do not offer clear moral guidance²¹; this is one reason some scholars are reluctant to term them “emblems.” The images themselves are also none too clear: each woodcut is small, with thick lines and relatively crude detailing. “Not very pretty,” one scholar judges their look in the first edition of 1544.²² (They were redone for the 1564 edition, by a more technically adept engraver.²³) They are perhaps not quite “poor images” in Hito Steyerl’s sense, but they differ starkly from the fine engravings by highly skilled workers that had been circulating in the high-end illustrated book market ever since Albrecht Dürer’s innovations had revolutionized woodcut technology at the turn of the sixteenth century.²⁴ They seem to be, basically, stock images, pulled somewhat indiscriminately from whatever the printer had available.²⁵ This was not uncommon for more traditional emblem books, some of the images for which were shamelessly pirated.²⁶

Like a modern-day digital image-macro, each of Scève’s emblems embeds text within image (fig. 1). A pithy motto (a devise or inscriptio, depending on what school of emblematics you subscribe to) encircles the image within an elaborate border. The role of epigram, or subscriptio—in a traditional emblem, this is the versified moral that follows the image and its superimposed text—is played by what Scève called his “si durs Epigrammes”: the dizains following the engravings.²⁷ Sometimes the dizain can be easily construed as an expansion of, or riff on, the motto, but not always; some Scève scholars assert that the poetry bears no relation to the images at all. Even those who make ingenious claims about the subtle work the dizain performs upon the emblem, or vice versa, acknowledge that clarification is not the name of the game: the inscriptio is more often, as one Scève editor puts it, “réinscrite” in the ensuing poem rather than explained by it, doubling rather than dispelling its inscrutability.²⁸ There is no light bulb that goes off when the riddle is solved, no “aha” moment, no sensation of self-satisfaction like that afforded to the average amateur Renaissance emblem-solver evoked in Rosemary Freeman’s classic work, who, having “successfully followed an emblem writer through his exposition of the connection between a symbol and its significance, was left with the same pleasant assurance that his reason had not been allowed to fust in him unused as is the man who to-day follows the oblique approach of an advertiser to his subject or guesses a clue in a crossword puzzle.”²⁹ To the consternation of such wits as these, the relationship in Délie between emblem and poem, and sometimes between image and text within the emblem, is often, to use the favorite word of Scève scholars, haters, and admirers alike, “obscure.”³⁰

That obscurity can be funny, as if the intractable situations these emblems often portray were reflections of our own indefinitely stalled interpretive apparatuses when we attempt to make sense of the often involuted dizains that make up the world the emblems inhabit. Scève’s contemporary Estienne Pasquier joked that Délie was so shadowy and obscure (“ténébreux & obscur”) that, reading it, he was very glad not to understand it, because Scève so clearly did not wish to be understood³¹—a more cheerful version of the kinds of symmetrical standoffs that get rendered in Scève’s emblems as hopeless aporia. Instead of charting a clear path out of ethical dilemmas and moral failings, or even presenting a clear picture of what not to do, as many emblems of the time did, Scève’s dramatize how we inevitably get in our way, how we desire obstacles to our own thriving, and how we get stuck there—in tragically unrequited love, but also in its prosaic and ridiculous analogs. “Their cumulative force,” as Greene puts it, “suggests a Kafkaesque bafflement of the will and a perpetual cruelty toward a misled victim,” which is perhaps more like love than we like to think.³² There are slapstick visual jokes of chairs pulled out from under unsuspecting marks; the grim Beckettian comedy of a donkey thinking he is about to turn a corner only to realize he is still on the same old grind at the mill; or that classic situation, one we can all relate to, of frantically trying to extinguish a rooster that has somehow been set on fire but ending up only fanning its flames (figs. 2–4).

Looking at some of Scève’s emblems—like the unicorn scared of its own reflection, the basilisk in the unending process of getting murdered by a mirror, Narcissus wasting away poolside (figs. 5–7)—inspires an almost literal reflection on meme aesthetics. We might think of the meme of the corgi reflecting on his life as his image is reflected in a pond (fig. 8), or the meme Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man, which I once made a version of and tweeted with the caption “memesis” (fig. 9). (In the meme’s original context, a 1960s Spider-Man cartoon, the true hero is confronting a copycat villain; on the internet, moral difference can be elided along with context, so that the only joke is that the two figures are indistinguishable.) Pointing at the emblem with the pleasure of recognition, I recognize in myself what Marta Figlerowicz has identified, in her metonymic theory of the meme, as the particular desire memes awake in us, the desire to say: “it me.”³³ A meme can give us a feeling not unlike the feeling a love lyric can give us: that we have dissolved our particularity in some kind of universal figure, the all-seeing single “L’Oeil” itself, wholly if only momentarily identified with a generic subject. Meme theorists—like lovers, like love poets, like anyone who thinks they have invented something—speak in quotations, and we can read Figlerowicz as echoing the same idea as Aria Dean, who, in her influential essay on memes and blackness, claims that the memetic dialectic “sustains an appearance of individuality (‘it me’) while being wholly deindividuated (‘same’).”³⁴

The grammar of “it me” works to produce something like the synchronic repetition of Scève’s poems and the emblems that obliquely, ambiguously punctuate them, like semicolons or ellipses. As Figlerowicz points out, the double pronoun and lack of verb in “it me” create an atemporal feeling of a closed loop, inspiring a kind of “immediate, self-objectifying identification” she compares to “childlike, exuberant finger-pointing,” like Spider-Man recognizing himself.³⁵ Scève’s mottoes usually have verbs, but they are often (sometimes repetitively) reflexive, canceled out or kept in suspension by other grammatical figures, keeping us—or, rather, the odd couple of “it” and “me”—stuck in a perpetual mirror stage, often literally. If we double back to figure 5, we will see the self-regarding, self-frightening unicorn’s triple first-person pronoun in the motto of Emblem 26, “de moy je m’espovante” (literally, “of myself I frighten myself”); in figure 6, the second person cleaves down the middle of the first-person basilisk’s reflection in the motto “mon regard par toy me tue [my look, by you, kills me].” Then there is the syntactical symmetry of the many mottos with a “plus…plus…” structure, mirroring the visual symmetry of the circular border the words form around the image. Flipping forward to figure 10, “Plus l’amollis, plus l’endurcis [the more I soften it the more it hardens],” we find a dairymaid trapped in a churn-off against her barrel of butter; in figure 11, “plus l’attire plus m’entraîne [the more I draw him in the more he pulls away]” is the thought bubble assigned to a tug-of-warring cowherd who can’t go on but will go on, nonplussed by the twin “plus” signs that eternally hem him in. The closed loop of the mirror is echoed, too, in the palindromic epigram with which Délie begins and which repeats after the final poem, visible in figure 12: “Souffrir non souffrir.” Here, “suffering” is not so much obviated by “not suffering” as answered by the second “suffering,” as if life were a suffering sandwich with only a brief negation as filling.

The “telegraphic, kinetic clarity” that Figlerowicz identifies in “it me” is like the radical temporal and semantic condensation that readers of lyric in general, and of Scève in particular, have long loved to get lost in, a clarity that electrifies rather than brightens obscurity. In Figlerowicz’s most emblematic example (fig. 13), positioned as a screenshot at the top of her essay and left as a speaking picture in itself, without any explicit commentary, the Twitter user Rachel Syme quote-tweets a tweet that reads “literally sitting here witnessing a girl take selfies of herself every three or four times she says ‘huzzah’ quietly,” atop which Syme adds, “it me.” Like the reader recognizing herself in the images of the unicorn and Narcissus contemplating their own watery images, Syme sees herself in a girl seeing herself (or does she see herself in the girl seeing the girl seeing herself?), mirrored in a mise en abyme of selfie-reflection. This theorization of the contemporary meme could double as a theory of early modern love lyric. “It me,” that lyric tradition might say, looking longingly at memes across the centuries like a distracted boyfriend ignoring his own historical context in favor of a hotter, younger, more modern one (fig. 14). “The prospect of an ecstatic dissolution of the individual self into a grammar of gestures and images”³⁶—what could better describe the erotic lyric sequence in general but also, in particular and perhaps especially, the specifically obscure, infinitely self-reflexive Délie?

The immersive immediacy of “it me,” in both its Renaissance lyric and contemporary memetic forms, might not seem like an ideal aesthetic mode. It’s flat; it’s narcissistic; it’s too easy. Recently, it has become the object of a much-circulated critique by Anna Kornbluh. Beginning with its title, Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism makes “immediacy” take a long, hard look in the mirror at “the style of too late capitalism.” Contemporary high and low culture alike, Kornbluh argues, have turned against mediation—the process of “making sense and making meaning by inlaying into medium”—in favor of “flexibility and fluidity, emanation and connectivity, directness and instantaneity,” which, in too late capitalism, “are economic premiums as much as they are artistic ones.”³⁷ Everything from immersive art exhibits to memes to prose poetry to NFTs are cited as symptomatic of contemporary art’s unique failure to run our souls through the meat grinder of a medium and thus remake them. The nineteenth-century realist novel, Kornbluh’s own area of specialization, is by contrast real, mediated art: public-facing rather than navel-gazing, socially enmeshed rather than personally obsessed. Kornbluh argues that the dominance of third-person narration in the nineteenth century, at the novel’s height, thrust readers out of their heads and into the headwinds of history, while today’s autofiction and diaristic prose poetry, automatically reducible to the author’s own measly life, simply stall.

In Kornbluh’s framework, it is immediacy itself, rather than the “self” so often blamed for our current “narcissism epidemic,” that is the object of desire, and object of most base vice.³⁸ It (im)me(diacy). Kornbluh does not have far to look in identifying the culprit responsible for thus short-circuiting our wires and replacing our windows with mirrors, our thatness with thisness. It’s right in front of us, staring us in the face, usually from a handheld screen. It’s the omnipresent breakdown of institutions, the privatization of the public sphere, the Uber-like apps that go over the heads of the middlemen, and, of course, social media, with the meme as its primary emblem.³⁹ In prose littered with hashtags, quotations of quote-tweets, and emblematic aphorisms—“It me!”; “no words”; “#NoFilter”; “It is what it is”—Kornbluh repeatedly mirrors the semiotic system of repeated mirroring she critiques and insists on tying to our present moment an aesthetic tendency that has been tying itself to the present for thousands of years. The use of an artistic medium to produce an impression of immediacy, and the pleasurable wonder this impression produces, is of course as old as art itself: both the proverbial attempt by birds to eat the grapes in Zeuxis’s paintings and their failure to do so are effects of a medium that masterfully remediates itself as immediacy, as is the contemporary appetite for reality TV that is only heightened by the concomitant understanding that everything about it is staged.⁴⁰ Kornbluh acknowledges in a footnote that many media theorists, going back to antiquity, have seen immediacy as the telos of art, but rejects this aesthetic theory in favor of Marxist accounts of the fall of production and rise of circulation in recent decades. For her, to ask after art’s surprising stability over time is to “oddly essentialize.”⁴¹ Why do something so odd as to study the distant past when a more immediate explanation is available?

Scève’s emblems, and his emblematic lyric, expose the limits of a theory like Kornbluh’s, which flattens an artwork’s cultivation, through a process of mediation, of an immediacy effect into a media consumer’s experience of immediacy, which may itself involve awareness of the mediation that produced that experience: this cultivation and this experience are neither the same nor are they each as one-dimensional as Kornbluh paints them to be. “Immediacy writing collapses into self-identical emission: ‘This!’”⁴² This is one of Scève’s favorite formal devices, deixis, a formal technique of instantiating presence: “Voicy (ô paour d’agreables terreurs)”! The reason Délie inspires mimetically memetic responses—gazing at our own reflection, spinning our own wheels—is because the form of dizain and emblem, individually and together, works to create that response. Kornbluh’s mock-aphoristic “Seeing is reading”⁴³ reduces to a slogan not only the habits of TikTok teens but also long traditions, lyric and neoplatonic, that strive to make the visual, instantaneously apprehended, a window to the soul.⁴⁴ As Françoise Charpentier puts it, “La Délie-livre (mais aussi Délie femme) est chose à voir”: from the first word of dizain 1, the capitalized “L’Oeil,” reading is seeing, seeing is reading.⁴⁵ Kornbluh’s picture of contemporary literary works “composed in the present tense, or transpiring in a looping temporality heeding neither linear plotting nor substantial time-span,” that “generate a destination-less instantaneity of mesmerizing acuteness, a lassitude picaresque,” looks like the mirror image of Délie, which likewise “holds incredible lure, but it sticks too close”⁴⁶; it cycles us through what Greene calls an “iterative present” that makes of time a treadmill or trap, where “the orderly, sequential flow of the natural universe gives way to the weary, undifferentiated impulses of romantic habit,” or what Sieburth calls “the unrelieved agony of an endlessly repeated Now,” now more than (or perhaps just as much as) ever.

Memes, emblems, and dizains achieve immediacy through formal manipulation, and despite Kornbluh’s claim that contemporary literary production is descending into “formlessness,” form remains formidable.⁴⁷ In poetry, the rise of New Formalism has led to a revalorization of rhyme and meter; Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Tradition (2019) was lauded for its invention of a new form, the “duplex,” which combines elements of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues.⁴⁸ (“I hadn’t written a thing and had no idea where to start and was fascinated by the fact that I was in the midst of inventing a form starting with the form itself and not with a single line of poetry,” Brown reflected.)⁴⁹ Even Rupi Kaur, a poet not usually credited with upholding the integrity of the form, fulfills Kornbluh’s criterion for poetic formalism: the poems she shares with her 4.5 million Instagram followers all have line breaks.⁵⁰ As Michael Dango argues in an essay on “meme formalism,” the internet has arguably produced far more formalists than the novel: “Any user who manipulates a meme must first recognize the outlines of the form they will fill in with new text and images. Indeed, the popularity of memes shows that people aren’t just reading for content, but reading for shape: for how something is said, for the kinds of sentences it might appear in, for how the parts relate to the whole, and how the container for a thought changes the thought itself.” “What memes get at,” Dango sums up, “is the pleasure of formalism.”⁵¹

Scève’s immediacy, like that of memes, is a product of mediation through form and citation. Some of Scève’s goofier emblems may not quite activate the “telegraphic, kinetic clarity” of “it me” and might work better with another frequent internet image caption, the more narratively embedded “*Record scratch, freeze frame*: Yep, that’s me. You may be wondering how I got into this situation…” (Examples of images accompanying this caption include Christ on the cross, a bug-eyed shark about to be eaten by an alligator, an athlete upside-down mid-air.) What we’ve seen, what we’ve gotten, is not so much “me” as “it.” The clarity and economy are the clarity and economy of quotation: an efficient shorthand that, like a coup de foudre, or too like the lightning, makes us feel like we’ve caught something, a reference or a feeling. As Sieburth puts it, Délie is shot through with “a kind of exacerbated citationality, as if Scève were recycling a dictionary of received ideas and images only to capture the extent to which his lover’s discourse will never be able to free itself from the obligatory conceits and commonplaces within which it finds itself compelled to act out all the preordained postures of its joy or distress.”⁵²

Citation in the emblems is often intermedial. In Emblem 1 (fig. 1), a unicorn is embraced by an apparently naked woman by a tree, an arrow in his flank mirroring the angle of his horn. To me, this screams “Me and who?,” but the emblem’s motto reads, instead, “Pour le veoir je pers ma vie [by looking I lose my life].” This makes more sense if you know the traditional method for trapping unicorns, as prescribed by medieval bestiaries: leave a topless virgin alone in the woods as bait, and a unicorn will be lured by her scent, fall in love with her at first sight, and fall asleep in her lap, making him an easy target for unicorn hunters.⁵³ The unicorn’s situation is like that of the Petrarchan lover: his horniness will end up being a pain in the ass; his lusty looks can kill him. The following dizain (6) opens with a line (“Libre vivois en l’Avril de mon aage”) lifted from Petrarch (“ch’ era de l’anno et di mi’ etate aprile”⁵⁴) and proceeds to recycle a major Petrarchan trope: the idea that his eye, on that fateful April day, was stricken by the beauty of the beloved lady, from whose eyes in turn fatally subduing arrows were launched: “de ses yeulx l’archier tout bellement / Ma liberté luy a toute asservie [the cruel archer of her eyes / Took my freedom as his prize].”⁵⁵ In dizain 7, the Petrarchan imprint of dizain 6 deepens with the idea that Délie’s beauty is “imprimé” on his eye, like a retinal tattoo that remakes the whole world in her image.⁵⁶ This generic imprint of feminine beauty is also like an anachronistic instance of what would later be called cliché, the term derived from nineteenth-century printing that would seem to apply just as well to the mechanically repetitive reuse of stock images in both Scève’s repurposed emblems and his remixed Petrarchan poems. The fictional name of his beloved also sounds like the product of a kind of literal typecasting, as if he had kept on rescrambling the letters for “l’idée,” for his abstract poetic idea, until he arrived at an anagrammatic combination that would also work as an individual woman’s name: Délie.

This preservative transformation, this remixing, this “exacerbated citationality,” is Scève’s proto-memetic methodology. The final dizain (449) leaves us with one last figure of generic singularity. “Nostre Genevre ainsi doncques vivra / Non offensé d’aulcun mortel Letharge” are the closing lines of the sequence: “Our Juniper shall thus live on, / Unspoiled by death’s Oblivion,” in Sieburth’s translation.⁵⁷ It is as if Scève has taken Petrarch’s immortal laurel (lauro), the plant Daphne turned into in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and that Petrarch turned in turn into a figure for both his beloved Laura and his own poetic glory, and turned it into a different nondeciduous tree, the juniper: a change in unchanging species. Joachim Du Bellay would do something similar shortly afterward in his 1549 sonnet cycle dedicated to a woman named “Olive,”⁵⁸ such that the evergreen lady becomes a kind of evergreen meme, one of the most accessible files in what Scève calls the “tristes Archives” stored in the obscurity of his brain.⁵⁹ Before Délie, Scève’s claim to fame was his alleged discovery in Avignon of the unmarked tomb of the real-life inspiration for Petrarch’s Laura, which he identified based on the contents of the casket: a (somewhat derivative) Petrarchan sonnet and a medal imprinted with the emblematic initials “M. L.,” which Scève interpreted as “Madonna Laura.”⁶⁰ It is not unlike Scève’s serendipitous inheritance of a set of stock images, the empty spaces of which he may or may not have filled in with new mottos, the spaces around which he filled with poems produced by an almost algorithmic logic, a dizzying dizainogenesis, of repetitions on a theme. Scève was always looking for images of the act of looking: seeing is reading; Délie, like Délie herself, is “chose à voir,” as Charpentier puts it⁶¹; and “L’Oeil,” the eye, the first word of the collection’s opening huitain, is in a way the only word we need, the eye interminably revolving in its own socket, the eye I cannot help but see as “me.”