Time & Perspective Quote by Alfred de Vigny

De Vigny draws a hard border between what life can give us and what art can steal back from it. The phrasing is legalistic - "province" - as if he is parceling human experience into jurisdictions: daily existence belongs to time, but religion, philosophy, and "pure poetry" hold the only passports that cross the checkpoint into eternity. The audacity is in that "only". It elevates poetry to the same metaphysical rank as theology and first-principles thought, then implies that ordinary life, however vivid, is structurally incapable of sustaining meaning on its own.

The subtext is Romantic-era impatience with the cramped measurements of modernity: industry, politics, and empiricism reducing the soul to what can be counted. De Vigny, writing in a century that watched revolutions rise and stall, is suspicious of history as progress; time is not liberation, it's erosion. Eternity becomes less a church doctrine than a counterweight to dispossession - a place where what we love, fear, and lose might stop decaying.

Notice the careful modifiers: not poetry in general, but "pure poetry". He is defending a particular kind of lyric seriousness, cleansed of utility and reportage. Pure poetry doesn't report life; it metabolizes it into something durable, turning private sensation into a form that can outlast the person who felt it. In that sense, the line is both manifesto and consolation: if the world won't keep faith with us, language might.