Coplas on the Death of His Father by Jorge Manrique

First published:Coplas por la muerte de su padre, 1492 (English translation, 1833)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Jorge Manrique, regarded as among the most accomplished of late medieval Spanish poets, belonged to an aristocratic Castilian family, one that left its mark upon the cultural as well as the political history of the fifteenth century. His father, Rodrigo, Count of Paredes, rose to be Master of Santiago and Constable of Castile. Jorge’s uncle, Gómez Manrique, was one of the finest poets of the reign of King Enrique IV (1454-1474). Among more distant kinsmen, Jorge could claim as a great-uncle the celebrated writer Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana. Thus, Jorge Manrique was part of a brilliant vein of literary culture that marked at least certain individuals and families among the fifteenth century warrior aristocracy of Castile. Characteristic of his time, he was torn among the claims of a soldier’s, a courtier’s, and a poet’s life, eventually dying in battle in 1479 fighting on behalf of Queen Isabel.

Coplas on the Death of His Father has been called the greatest poem in the Spanish language, but even without it, Manrique’s approximately fifty canciones (lyric poems) and decires (narrative, panegyric, or satirical poems) would have established him among the leading poets of his time. As it was, Coplas on the Death of His Father so touched the imagination of subsequent generations that for more than two hundred years, criticism was written that sought to discover new and esoteric meanings in Manrique’s masterpiece. Lope de Vega Carpio esteemed it so highly that he declared that it should have been written in letters of gold. Manrique’s most eloquent English translator, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, thought it to be the most beautiful “moral” poem in the Spanish language, and Pedro Salinas wrote that the poem represents the culmination of the elegiac lyric in Spanish. Manrique’s critics concur that in this work he excels all other poets of the fifteenth century in Spain.

The poem, which consists of approximately five hundred lines divided into forty-two coplas (or stanzas), is a memorial to Manrique’s father, Rodrigo, who died in 1476 at the height of his fame. An intensely emotional poem, it integrates the poet’s personal loss, the medieval worldview, concern for the passing of time, the vagaries of fortune, the inevitability of death, and the hope of salvation. Its uniqueness lies in Manrique’s ability to employ familiar and rather well-worn themes in such a way as to extend their aesthetic potential. A mark of Manrique’s greatness is his ability to render the grief of one individual in such a way that it becomes a grief universally shared by his readers.

The poem uses the form known as the copla de pie quebrado, familiar in Spanish poetry from the time of Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, in the fourteenth century. In the pie quebrado, the tetrasyllablic (four-syllable) line is used with the octosyllabic (eight-syllable) line, thus reducing some lines to half the metrical length of the others, in mixed trochaic meter. These half-lines, when handled by a master, create an effect of suspense or hesitation. Manrique’s use of the pie quebrado form became so famous that thereafter the term copla manriqueña (after Manrique), or simply the copla de Jorge Manrique, became as distinctive as the Shakespearean sonnet became in English letters.

The dominant motifs in the Coplas on the Death of His Father reflect characteristic medieval themes: the ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere? (what has become of those who have gone before us?); the memento mori (in the middle of life we are in death); and the contemptus mundi (contempt for the things of this world); death personified; death as the great equalizer; the fleeting nature of fame and honor in this world; and the eternal promise of Christian salvation. Manrique, in presenting these well-known themes, achieves a rare intensity with his simple and direct vernacular Castilian. This was peculiarly significant for his time, because, in an age of classical translations, Castilian poets were increasingly abandoning vernacular forms of expression in favor of imitations of classical themes and forms. The poem, in exploiting every possibility of the vernacular language, demonstrates the fullest potentiality of Spanish versification. Furthermore, Manrique exemplifies the mood of his age, a period of profound pessimism and self-doubt. Such a mood is characteristic of an age of economic and demographic decay, as well as of plague and pestilence.

The poem can be divided into three sections. The first is a discussion of the theme of human mutability, the second pursues that of ubi sunt, while the third is an elegy for the late don Rodrigo. It begins by expressing a mood that is general and universal, meditating upon the transitory nature of this world, and then, following a series of examples taken from recent and ancient history, turns to the core of the poem, the reputation of the dead man himself.

In the first section, the poet contemplates the passage of time and the significance of memory. He explores the theme of life as a journey that eventually merges with death and thus returns to the source of all life: “Our lives are like rivers,” he writes, gliding to the “boundless sea” that is the grave, in which “all earthly pomp and boast” are swallowed up. This section then develops the stock medieval theme of contemptus mundi as a prescription for attaining salvation: Things such as beauty and wealth, which are admired and esteemed in this temporal world, must perish, while those things that partake of the eternal, such as the human soul, endure. What men and women desire and pursue in this world are mere fleeting things that have no meaning and that offer no sustenance to the soul. At this point, death is introduced as the equalizer, for all are united in death. It is better, then, to regard this world as a journey until, in encountering death, one attains a better life beyond the grave. This present world is subject to mutability, chance, disaster, and decay, from which not even those in the highest places can escape. Manrique uses a favorite late medieval metaphor, the goddess Fortuna, ever inconstant, raising up men and women with the ascent of her wheel, only to cast them down again in despair.

Manrique turns to a second medieval theme, ubi sunt, posing several questions that ask, what happened to the men and women of the past? The answer is that they have all passed away because they are a part of this transitory and impermanent world, a theme that recalls the earlier theme of contemptus mundi. While the reiteration of the ubi sunt theme is ubiquitous in medieval literature, it is indicative of Manrique’s inventiveness that in his use of it he is superior to all his contemporaries. He invokes those names associated with the life of his father, don Rodrigo, beginning with his king Juan II (1406-1454), the Infantes of Aragon, and don Alvaro de Luna, the notorious favorite of the king. He evokes the chivalric trappings of the royal court, the festivities and the tournaments, but in describing all this, he underscores the transitory nature of worldly splendor and of a life “false and full of guile,” observing that “our happiest hour is when, at last,/ the soul is freed.”

In the final section, the poet introduces don Rodrigo as “Spain’s champion,” implying for his readers a comparison with another Rodrigo, El Cid. He declares that there is no need for a eulogy because “ye saw his deeds!” His father’s name “dwells on every tongue.” There then follows an elaborate passage of comparisons with the Roman heroes of old—Caesar and Octavian, Titus, Trajan, and Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Constantine—Manrique claims for his father “Scipio’s virtue” and “the indomitable will/ of Hannibal.”

In the last part of the poem, Death appears in person and courteously addresses don Rodrigo. Here, Death is not the typical macabre figure familiar to contemporaries from the dance of death but is a mediator assisting don Rodrigo in transcending the mortal state and attaining fame and immortality: “Let virtue nerve thy heart again,” says Death, proclaiming the ideal of the “brave knight whose arm endures/ Fierce battle, and against the Moors/ His standard rears.” Rodrigo replies: “O Death, no more, no more delay!/ My spirit longs to flee away/ And be at rest.”

In its perfect use of medieval topics, the poem represents a high point, and thus a change, in medieval consciousness. In contrast with a work such as The Poem of the Cid (twelfth or early thirteenth century), which glorifies action, Coplas on the Death of His Father embodies the contemplative spirit. This treatment of examining the meaning of life and the nature of reality makes the poem distinctive. Although the poem is a traditional elegy, the genius of the poet transforms the experience of personal loss into a universal statement of the transitory nature of earthly happiness and an affirmation of the Christian ideal of salvation.

Bibliography

Bell, Alan S. “Tradition and Pedro Salinas’s Original Approach to Jorge Manrique.” South Atlantic Bulletin 39, no. 4 (November, 1974): 38-42. A critique of Salinas’s widely read essay on Manrique.

Brenan, Gerald. The Literature of the Spanish People from Roman Times to the Present Day. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. A definitive study in English of Spanish literature.

Danker, Frederick E. “The Coplas of Jorge Manrique.” Boston Public Library Quarterly 10 (July, 1958): 164-167. An introduction, including the poem’s early printing history.

Deyermond, A. D. A Literary History of Spain: The Middle Ages. London: Ernest Benn, 1971. One of the best introductions to medieval Spanish literature.

Domínguez, Frank A. Love and Remembrance: The Poetry of Jorge Manrique. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Devotes two chapters to discussing the background and providing an interpretation of Coplas on the Death of His Father.

Dunn, Peter N. “Themes and Images in the Coplas . . . of Jorge Manrique.” Medium Aevum 33 (1964): 169-183. A close reading of the poem, more concerned with aesthetic integrity than with literary history.

Krause, Anna. Jorge Manrique and the Cult of Death in the Cuatrocientos. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937. Emphasizes late medieval attitudes toward mortality and death.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, trans. “Ode on the Death of His Father,” by Jorge Manrique. In Ten Centuries of Spanish Poetry: An Anthology of English Verse with Original Texts from the Eleventh Century to the Generation of 1898, edited by Eleanor L. Turnbull. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Longfellow’s translation remains highly readable. Pedro Salinas’s introduction to this book also is valuable.

Vinci, Joseph. “The Petrarchan Source of Jorge Manrique’s Las coplas.” Italica 45 (1968): 314-328. Vinci makes a good case for Petrarch being a major influence on Manrique. Contains textual comparisons.