In principio era Marino? Il poeta e il motivo dell'orologio

[Machine translation] The clock motif, destined to become a topos in baroque lyric, has Giovan Battista Marino as one of its earliest interpreters. The mechanical clock, with its complex gears that move with admirable precision, is not seen by Marino as a dark image of Tempus edax; instead, in a madrigal of the Lyre and in an idyll of Sampogna, a reflection on the mysterious psychic time of love; in a Lyre sonnet it serves to illustrate the delicate question of salvation by faith and works; in the Adone it becomes a metaphor for the world, and, at the same time, of the poem itself, of which the author is the creator and regulator.