Under Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine.

The line is the opening of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Le Pont Mirabeau,” written in the years just before World War I and published in his landmark collection *Alcools* (1913). The poem is set at the Pont Mirabeau in Paris, spanning the Seine between the 15th and 16th arrondissements. Apollinaire uses the bridge and the river as a concrete Parisian scene through which to meditate on the passing of love and time—often linked biographically to his turbulent romantic life in the early 1910s. The poem became one of his best-known lyrics and a touchstone of modern French poetry.

By beginning with an almost plain statement of geography, Apollinaire anchors the poem in a real Paris landmark, then turns that stability into contrast: the bridge stands while the Seine flows, just as memory persists while feelings and moments move on. The line’s simplicity sets up the poem’s central metaphor of time’s irreversible current, in which love, joy, and sorrow pass beneath the fixed structures we try to rely on. In the larger poem, the refrain insists that “days go by” and “I remain,” capturing the tension between inner stasis (the self who remembers) and the external world’s continual change.

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine