“Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments”: Sepúlchred Verse

Abstract

Abstract “‘Not Marble, nor the gilded monuments’: Sepúlchred Verse” challenges the classical rhetorical claim that scripta manent (writing lasts) while marble and stone monuments crumble. It explores the material paradox of lyric claims to supersede mineral monuments. Rather than seeing the quarrel as antagonistic and rivalrous, this chapter explores how a rich cultural habitus reveals the claims to instead be symbiotic and constitutive. Through a reading of the biblical inheritance of the Mosaic tablets alongside the occult traditions surrounding the seminal text of alchemy, the emerald tablet, the chapter argues that engraved stone held intercessory powers capable of binding celestial and terrestrial realms. Within this matrix, the chapter then reads two oft-recruited lyric examples of linguistic, as opposed to lithic, continua: Shakespeare’s sonnet 55 and Milton’s “On Shakespeare.” It argues that both poems recruit petrification in order to perdure and in so doing imagine a distinctly inhuman posterity.