Renaissance Spanish Poetry: Garcilaso, Fray Luis, St. John

Posted on Feb 24, 2025 in Latin

Garcilaso de la Vega’s Path (3 Stages)

  1. Poetry of Songs: With octosyllabic verses, it presents the first forms alternating with Italian styles. It is abundant in the use of amorous games and wordplay.
  2. Petrarchan: Internalized love, describes his feelings of love, and uses nature as a framework for reflection and a half-portrait of his creative love.
  3. Plenitude: The fruit of Italy and its stance on the classical approach, formal and expressive sobriety of nature.

Work: Published in 1543, it includes epistles, elegies, sonnets, *Leandro*, etc., passing through sea nymphs, *The Bold and Beautiful*, and eclogues.

Topics: Predominant love (Neoplatonic and Petrarchan features: indifference, pain, etc.). Another very important topic is nature.

Style: Antithesis, oppositions, and wordplay; then, it looks for simple and fluid harmony of expression.

Fray Luis de León

Imposed a Christian Platonic humanism.

Verse Work: Brief, published in 1637.

Three Periods:

  1. Before Prison (1572): Moralist, yearning for solitude and contempt for worldly pleasures.
  2. In Prison: *Ode to a Serene Life*, religious content, and, upon release from jail, reflections on the injustice of his situation.
  3. After Prison: *Ode to Salinas*, reveals a certain spiritual mysticism.

Poetic Influences:

  1. Departing from the classical tradition:
  2. Neoplatonism: An ideal universe, the desire for peace and serenity, harmony (*Ode to Salinas*).
  3. Pythagoras: Everything comes down to numbers, and everything is connected.
  4. Stoic Philosophy: *Aurea mediocritas*. This develops the idea of a restful life and the theme of flight from the world.

Style: Use of the lira, poems addressed to a second person, conversational character, enumerations, rhetorical lexicon. Careful punctuation and symmetry of the stanzas.

St. John of the Cross: Works, Themes, and Style

Develops the theme of mystical union between the soul and God, symbolically represented as the beloved (wife) and the soul (loving God), ending in ecstasy.

Works:

  • Short poems of popular character.
  • *Spiritual Canticle*: Pastoral dialogue, follows the *Song of Songs*.
  • *Living Flame of Love*: Romantic feelings of the beloved.
  • *Dark Night*: Ecstasy (8 mythical liras) between lovers; she, disguised, leaves her house.

Style Influences:

  • Popular: Themes, motifs, shapes, and choruses.
  • Italian: Lira and hendecasyllable.
  • Biblical: Religious sense.

Formal Characteristics: Substantivation and scarcity of adjectives, lexical switches between the root and popular Latinizing words. It is the similitude of basic human love with mystical poetry.

Key Themes in Renaissance Poetry

  • Nature: Idealized (*locus amoenus*, “pleasant place”), retreat of the poet.
  • Love: Neoplatonic and Petrarchan, which elevates man, expresses this intangible antithesis.
  • Mythology: Symbols of their own emotional conflict.
  • Escape from the World: Yearning for transcendence, moral *beatus ille* (“happy is he”), golden mean (life and moderation), man lives in prison in the world.
  • Mystical Union: Union of the soul with God, asceticism, grace, produces a state of ecstasy, use of symbolic allegories, paradoxes, or antithesis.
  • Patriotic Ideal: Nationalist spirit.
  • *Collige, virgo, rosas* (“Gather, maiden, the roses”): An exhortation to a woman to enjoy love. *Carpe diem*: Live this day.