Garcilaso de la Vega and Fray Luis de León: Poetic Analysis
Garcilaso de la Vega
His poetic career has three creative periods:
- The influence of the Cancionero poetry, which features octosyllabic compositions alternating with the first Italian forms. It uses wordplay.
- The stage where he imitates Petrarch, internalizing love. Nature is used as a framework for reflection and a means to portray his beloved.
- The fullness of creation. He offers formal and sober compositions that are naturally expressive.
The Work
The poetic work, prepared and published by his friend Boscán in 1543, is scarce. It covers an epistle in verse, two elegies, three Eclogues, five songs, thirty-eight sonnets, and some samples of traditional poetry.
In Eclogue I, Salicio complains of the disdain of his beloved Galatea, while Nemoroso mourns his beloved Elisa. In Eclogue III, the poet draws on his own experience of love.
Poetic Themes
The predominant theme is love, which shows Neoplatonic features with Petrarchan traces: indifference of the beloved, the lover’s pain, oscillating between hope and despair, and secret love. Another of his themes is the locus amoenus.
Style
He uses antithesis, opposition, and word games. Later, he seeks harmony, and his language is natural and elegant. He uses bimembrations and numbering parallels that give simplicity and fluidity.
Fray Luis de León
He imposed a Platonic and Christian humanism. He was ascetic: a person who wants to get in touch with God, trying to cleanse the inside to come into contact with divinity.
He was forbidden to translate the Bible, and because of that, Fray Luis was imprisoned, and his works are arranged thus.
The original poetry is brief, consisting of less than forty poems, published by Quevedo in 1637. Generally, they fall into three periods:
- Before prison: includes Ode to the Retired Life and the Prophecy of the Tagus. Shows desire for solitude and contempt for worldly pleasures.
- Verses composed in jail: Night, Ascension, Serenity, and religious content. He complains about the injustice of his imprisonment in Al out of jail.
- Works written after prison: Ode to Salinas, Ode to Felipe Ruiz. They reveal a spiritual mysticism, a nostalgic longing for harmony or peace.
Oda: It is a hymn of praise to something concrete or someone.
Poetic Ideas and Influences
The dominant motifs in the poetry of Fray Luis de León are nature, longing for the countryside at night, and music. All are rooted in the classical tradition: Neoplatonic, Pythagorean, or Stoic.
- From Neoplatonism, he takes the ideal vision of a universe ruled by harmony.
- From the Pythagoreans, he agrees that everything can be reduced to numbers; also, celestial bodies and the universe are a perfect harmony.
- In adopting the Stoic philosophy of mediocritas aura, living according to the natural order and the ability to meet the challenges of life.
Of these ideas comes the search for a rested life (we want to escape to a place where peace will reign forever and harmony away from everything), which develops the topic beatus ille.
Style
He uses the lira, which allows rhythmic variations.
Several of his poems provide a conversational character, with enumerations, exclamations, and rhetorical questions. There is a perfect symmetry in the construction of the stanzas and a citizen or formal lexical selection.