Key Figures in Renaissance Poetry: Garcilaso & Fray Luis
Poets of the Renaissance
Garcilaso de la Vega
Prototype Renaissance gentleman, soldier, and poet, harmonizing ideals of arms and letters.
His poetic path has three creative stages:
- The influence of song poetry, in alternating octosyllabic forms. His verses lack Petrarchan elements and abound in cancionero love poetry, usually employing wordplay.
- The Petrarchan stage where he internalizes and imitates Petrarch, describing his love sentiments and using nature as a reflection and framework to portray his beloved.
- The full creative fruit of his stay in Italy and his approach to classical authors provides formal restraint and naturalness of expression.
Work: His work is ready to be heard, though scarce. It covers an epistle in verse, two elegies, three eclogues, five songs, thirty-eight sonnets, and traditional poetry samples.
His sonnets represent an acclimation to Spanish literature and are mostly of amorous themes, stressing elements like “while pink and azuzena,” “passing sea,” and “Leandro spirited, beautiful nymphs.”
His most perfect works are the Eclogues “I” and “III.” Written in the first, pastor Salicio laments the loss of his beloved Galatea, while Nemoroso mourns the death of his beloved Elisa. In Eclogue III, written in stanzas, the poet draws on his own experience of love, and the subject becomes embroidery of one of the four nymphs of the Tagus banks, reflected in his canvases, stories of love and death.
Poetic Themes: The predominant theme is love, showing Neoplatonism with Petrarchan features: indifference of the beloved mistress, pain, oscillation between hope and despair, and secret love. Another theme is nature, a stylish surrounding where characters show their woes, confiding in pastors who appear as listeners and consolers in their grief.
Style: The first stage is marked by typical cancionero poetry resources: word games, antithesis, and opposition. Subsequently, he seeks harmony, and poetic language conforms to the Renaissance ideals of naturalness and elegance. He uses bimembrations, syntactic parallelism, and enumeration of elements, giving his verses a simple and fluent expression.
Fray Luis de Leon
He imposed Platonic and Christian humanism, reconciling classical and Renaissance forms with religious themes.
Works in Verse: His poetry consists of fewer than forty poems circulated in manuscripts, usually in three periods:
- Poems written before his imprisonment, including “Ode to the Retired Life of Prophecy” and “Them Tagus.” Fray Luis Morales appears in the classic sense, showing loneliness and longing for the disdain of mundane pleasures.
- Verses composed in jail: “Calm” and “Night.” In two works, “Ascension” to the religious and out of jail “at the injustice” is a complaint of incarceration.
- Works written after prison, such as “Ode to Salinas” and the “Ode to Felipe Ruiz,” reveal a certain spiritual mysticism.
Poetic Ideas and Influences
The predominant motives in his poetry are nature, longing for the countryside at night, and music. Classical tradition, all Platonic, Pythagorean, or Stoic.
He adopts the Neoplatonism ideal vision of a universe collected by a harmony. For example, the “salt” ode to Francisco.
He accepts the Pythagorean idea that everything can be reduced to numbers; also, celestial bodies and the universe are a perfect harmony.
He adopts the Stoic philosophy of the Golden Mean to live according to nature and order to face life’s difficulties.
From these ideas comes the restful life, the search for peace in his “Ode to the Retired Life,” which develops the topic of beatus ille and flight from the world.
Style
He employs the lyre invented by Garcilaso, allowing multiple rhythmic variations to appear in his odes. There is symmetry in the perfect construction of the stanzas and a careful lexical selection, formal polysyndeton, asyndeton, alliterations, and hyperbaton.