Examples
The medieval French poet François Villon famously echoes the sentiment in the Ballade des dames du temps jadis ("Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past") with his question, Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? ("Where are the snows of yesteryear?"), a refrain taken up in the bitter and ironic Berthold Brecht/Kurt Weill "Nannas Lied", expressing the short-term memory without regrets of a hard-bitten prostitute, in the following refrain:
Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend?
Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?
Another famous medieval French writer, Rutebeuf, wrote a poem called Poèmes de l'infortune ("Poems of the misfortune" —or bad luck—) which contains those verses:
Que sont mes amis devenus
Que j'avais de si près tenus
Et tant aimés ?
Roughly: "Where are my friends I used to embrace so close and loved so much". In the second half of the 20th century, the singer Léo Ferré made this poem famous by adding a music. The song was called Pauvre Rutebeuf (Poor - or sad - Rutebeuf).
In "Coplas por la muerte de su padre", the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique wrote equally famous stanzas about contemporaries that death had taken away:
¿Qué se fizo el rey don Juan?
Los infantes de Aragón
¿qué se fizieron?
¿Qué fue de tanto galán,
qué fue de tanta invención
como trujeron?
Las justas y los torneos,
paramentos, bordaduras
y cimeras,
¿fueron sino devaneos?
¿qué fueron sino verduras
de las eras?
What became of King Don Juan?
The Princes of Aragon,
What became of all of them?
What of so much handsome nobility?
And of all the many fads
They brought with them?
What of their jousts and tournaments,
Gilded ornaments, fancy embroideries
And feathered tops?
Was all of that meaningless waste?
Was it all anything else but a summer's green
on the fields?
(Translation: Simón Saad)
In medieval Persian poetry, Ubi sunt? is a pervasive theme in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say:
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.
Read more about this topic: Ubi Sunt
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people’s attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)