ABSTRACT
The mother bird's love for her offspring is described in stilnovistic terms that eroticize the maternal. Both deal with the way that language-through the desire it embodies-attempts to transcend time and gain access to its origin. The lark is suspended in a moment of contemplative silence that repeats its own creation in God's eternal good-pleasure. Lyric transcends the constraints of ordinary and fallen time by creating a time of its own-in effect, by recreating the time of Creation. In fact, "desire which anticipates" is a good description of Dante's Paradiso as a whole in its attempt to give a foretaste of heaven. Its sense as a genre is captured best as the foretaste of what the people desire to enjoy unendingly-beyond their present in the time that consumes the reader. The lyric substitutes a satisfaction immanent to language for the fulfillment that ordinarily comes from some extralinguistic object or event that is referred to or indicated.
