Garcilaso de la Vega and San Juan de la Cruz: Spanish Renaissance Poetry
Garcilaso de la Vega
Garcilaso de la Vega’s poetic career can be divided into three creative periods:
- The first period shows the influence of song-poetry, with compositions alternating between octosyllabic and the first Italian forms. His verses from this period lack Petrarchan elements, but abound in topics of *cancionero* love poetry, often employing puns.
- The second stage is characterized by the internalization of Petrarchan love. He describes his feelings of love and uses nature as a framework for discussion and a means to portray the beloved.
- The third period represents the full creative fruit of his stay in Italy and his approach to the classics. It offers formal compositions with natural and expressive sobriety.
Works
Prepared by his friend Boscán and published in 1543, his body of work is scarce. It includes an epistle in verse, two elegies, three eclogues, five songs, thirty-eight sonnets, and some samples of traditional poetry.
Poetic Themes
His work predominantly features Neoplatonic love, with Petrarchan influences: the indifference of the beloved, the lover’s pain, wavering between hope and despair, and secret love. Another prominent theme is nature, a stylized environment in which characters express their woes, appearing as a confidant and comforter who listens to the shepherds.
Style
The first stage is marked by typical resources of the poetry of songs: antithesis, opposition, and word games. Subsequently, he adjusted his poetic language to Renaissance ideals of naturalness and elegance, striving for harmony. He often used bimembrations, syntactic parallelism, etc., which give his lines a simple and fluid expression.
San Juan de la Cruz
San Juan de la Cruz’s poetry is short, but it looms large in universal lyric.
Works
His poetic production develops the theme of the experience of the mystical union of the soul with God. This union is expressed symbolically: a woman starts the search for the beloved through nature, which is a reflection of that love. She finds and merges with him in the ecstasy of love.
Poetic Themes
His work includes several short poems of a popular character and three great poems: *Spiritual Song*, *Dark Night of the Soul*, and *The Living Flame of Love*.
- The Spiritual Song closely follows the *Song of Songs* from the Bible and is organized as a pastoral dialogue between the beloved and the beloved, whom she has sought through valleys and mountains.
- The Dark Night consists of eight *liras* in which the beloved, after leaving her home disguised, joins the beloved in mystical ecstasy.
- The Living Flame of Love exposes the amorous feelings experienced by the beloved in marriage.
Style
Three influences can be seen in his work: folk poetry and songbooks, Italian-influenced education, and biblical poetry. He incorporates popular themes, motifs, forms, and choruses, the Italian eleven-syllable verse, and the use of the *lira*. He also employs imagery from the Bible, giving his poetry a divine religious meaning.
The formal characteristics of his poetry are the prominent use of nouns and a shortage of adjectives, which are often postponed. The lexicon alternates between Latinate roots and popular vocabulary. The basic metaphor is human love, as the poet is unable to fully convey the experience of union with God.