The Gaze in time

Abstract

With a thorough analysis of a brief composition taken from Spanish traditional lyric poems (which proposes the image of a woman gazing at the sea) this article attempts to show that the procedures of the poem, as much as that image, define the form of time in which desire is lodged: mobility and permanence, flow and return. Time takes form in a recurrent game of oppositions. The article analyzes the relationship between a situated enunciator in a here-and-now and an observer situated in a there-and-now. Finally, it establishes an illustrative comparison between the poem under study and a brief passage from Martin Scorsese’s film The Age of Innocence in which the image of another woman leaning on the dock by the sea is presented by herself, for the desiring glance, as a form of time.