Garcilaso de la Vega

• Born: 1501
• Birthplace: Toledo, Spain
• Died: October 14, 1536
• Place of death: Nice, France

Other literary forms

Garcilaso de la Vega (gahr-see-LAH-soh day lo VAY-guh) is remembered only for his poetic works.

Achievements

Garcilaso de la Vega revolutionized Castilian poetry, playing a unique role in Spanish literature and achieving a notable place in European literature as well. In accomplishing this poetic revolution, Garcilaso may rightly be called the first modern Spanish poet. Although the fifteenth century in Spain had seen efforts to introduce into Castilian poetry the Italian hendecasyllable, attempts such as those of the Marquis of Santillana, who composed a collection of “Sonetos fechos al itálico modo” (sonnets made in the Italian way), had not been successful. Equally unsuccessful had been the use of a non-Italianate hendecasyllabic line by the fifteenth century poets Juan de Mena and Francisco Imperial.

Garcilaso’s perfection of the Castilian hendecasyllable, successful cultivation of both Italianate verse forms and metrical innovations, and his use of classical models, all contributed to a poetry of intimate sentiment, delicate metaphor, conceptual content, and musicality. Religious themes, so important in the poetry of even the late Middle Ages in Spain, are completely absent in his verse, which crystallized the introduction into Spain of the essentially secular values of the Renaissance. From fifteenth century Spanish poetry, Garcilaso retained a certain predilection for wordplay, along with the favorable influence of the Catalan poet Ausias March. While at times expressively manipulating syntax, Garcilaso created a poetic diction soon regarded as a model of lucid simplicity for the Spanish language.

In international terms, Garcilaso is also notable for having preceded by many years the introduction of Italianate forms and sentiment into both English and French poetry. His use of pastoral poetry to express interiorized sentiments, of interest to the student of comparative literature, also represents a notable contribution to the development of this international literary mode.

Garcilaso’s poetry, all of which was published posthumously, was rapidly accorded classic status, and editions of his poems with copious annotation and commentary appeared within the sixteenth century. The first of these was the edition by the esteemed scholar Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, initially published in 1574. The important poet Fernando de Herrera first published his annotated edition in 1580. Additional annotated editions were published by other editors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The 1543 edition included most of the sonnets currently known to be Garcilaso’s or attributed to him, all the other poems in Italian meters, and one poem in a traditional Castilian verse form. Subsequent editions have gradually been enlarged by adding more sonnets, other compositions in Castilian verse forms, and several Latin poems, as well as some letters and the poet’s will. Virtually all dating of his compositions is conjectural, and the numbers commonly assigned to specific poems do not correspond to their presumed order of composition.

Garcilaso’s poetry in some sense became the model and inspiration for virtually all poetry written during the nearly two centuries of Spain’s Golden Age and for much of Spanish poetry up to the present day. Although the traditional Castilian verse forms were championed by poets such as Cristóbal de Castillejo and his followers in the sixteenth century, the influence and acceptance of Garcilaso’s innovations was so pervasive that it has been said that every Spanish poet “carries his Garcilaso inside himself.” Garcilaso’s own compositions in the traditional verse forms—and his Latin poetry—illuminate the development of his Spanish poetry in the new style but are not themselves of primary interest in defining or understanding his art. The poetical canon left by Garcilaso provided the inspiration and basis for both of the somewhat antithetical schools or styles of poetry that were to evolve later in the Golden Age. The statement of ideas without metaphorical adornment and Garcilaso’s retention of wordplay and puns from medieval Spanish poetry evolved ultimately into the dense, conceptual style exemplified by Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas, while Garcilaso’s manipulation of word order, sense of color, and use of metaphor were reflected in Luis de Góngora y Argote’s hyperbatons, polychromatic palette, and extravagant imagery.

Garcilaso pioneered the use of six distinct verse forms in Spanish poetry. The Spanish sonnet, composed of fourteen hendecasyllabic lines divided into two quatrains and two tercets, possessed a fundamentally different structure from the sonnet subsequently developed in English by William Shakespeare. The estancia combined lines of eleven and seven syllables in a pattern established in the poem’s first strophe and then repeated in the subsequent strophes. The lira, so called because of its use in an ode whose first line contained this word (meaning “lyre”), was a particular form of the estancia, which became standardized. The tercetos consisted of three-line stanzas of eleven-syllable lines, with the first and third lines rhyming, and the middle line rhyming with the first and third lines of the next stanza. The octava real was a stanza of eight hendecasyllabic lines, rhyming abababcc. Garcilaso also introduced into Spanish the use of blank verse.

Biography

Garcilaso de la Vega’s brief but active life might serve as a model for that of the multitalented Renaissance man. Born in 1501 of a family with influence in the court of Ferdinand and Isabella and with several well-known authors in its antecedent generations, Garcilaso died in 1536 of wounds received in Provence while he was fighting for Emperor Charles V.

Garcilaso entered the emperor’s service in 1519 or 1520, was first wounded in battle in 1521, and he participated in several important campaigns, for which he was awarded the prestigious Order of Saint James in 1523. During his accompaniment of the court in the subsequent years of the decade, his friendship with the poet Juan Boscán developed. This relationship was of profound significance for Garcilaso’s literary career; when, for example, his friend Boscán was persuaded by the Venetian ambassador to employ the Italian hendecasyllable in Castilian verse, Garcilaso did likewise, changing Spanish poetry forever. It has been suggested that his sonnets 31 and 38 were written in this period.

In 1525, Garcilaso married Doña Elena de Zúñiga, a lady-in-waiting to Charles V’s sister, Princess Leonore. The following year, he met and became infatuated with Isabel Freyre, who came to Spain from Portugal with Doña Isabel de Portugal when the latter married Charles V. Although his marital relationship apparently never saw expression in his poetry, Garcilaso’s love for Isabel Freyre, seemingly unrequited, became a central poetic theme. The “Canción primera” (“First Ode”) and sonnets 2, 15, and 27, probably from this period, express the poet’s emotional state and his amorous devotion to an unnamed lady. The first numbered of his “Canciones en versos castellanos” (“Songs in Castilian Verse Forms”), on the occasion of “his lady’s marriage,” was presumably composed in response to Isabel Freyre’s wedding. While with the retinue of Charles V in Italy, where the monarch had gone in 1529 or 1530 to receive the Imperial crown, Garcilaso apparently composed his “Canción cuarta” (“Fourth Ode”) and sonnet 6, perhaps reflecting his anguish over the affair with Isabel.

In 1531, however, Charles V withdrew his favor, banishing Garcilaso to a small island in the Danube River because he had persisted in supporting a marriage opposed by the royal family. Sonnets 4 and 9 and the “Canción tercera” (“Third Ode”) reflect the poet’s unhappiness during this period. Thanks to the intervention of the duke of Alba, however, the island confinement was altered to banishment to Naples, where the poet gained a position of confidence with the viceroy, earned the praise of Cardinal Bembo, and, as reflected in his sonnets 14, 19, and 33 and in the famous “Canción quinta, a la flor de Gnido” (“Fifth Ode, To the Flower of Gnido”), made the acquaintance of several other important Neapolitan literary figures. During this period, he also studied the classics and met the expatriate Spanish author Juan de Valdés, who mentioned Garcilaso in his Diálogo de la lengua (wr. c. 1535, pb. 1737; dialogue of the language). Garcilaso’s “Egloga segunda” (“Second Eclogue”), probably composed shortly after his brief trip to Spain and return to Naples in 1533, praises the House of Alba, while the “Egloga primera” (“First Eclogue”) and sonnet 10, both apparently composed during the period 1533-1534, reflect the death at that time of Isabel Freyre. It is reasonable to assume that during this time in Naples, the poet composed his several Latin poems and stopped composing in the old Castilian verse forms.

During 1535 and 1536, Garcilaso returned to the emperor’s service. Sonnets 32 and 35 suggest that Garcilaso was wounded in an encounter with the Moors in an expedition to Tunis in 1535. With the emperor’s entourage in Sicily after returning from Tunis, Garcilaso composed his “Elegía primera” (“First Elegy”), for the recent death of the brother of the duke of Alba, and the “Elegía segunda” (“Second Elegy”), addressed to his friend Boscán. The “Egloga tercera” (“Third Eclogue”), generally regarded as the poet’s last work, was written when Garcilaso was again part of the emperor’s court and in full favor, as Charles V decided to move against the French. It was while participating in this campaign that the poet was killed.

Boscán, Garcilaso’s lifelong friend, gathered Garcilaso’s poems, intending to publish them with his own. Upon Boscán’s death in 1542, his widow carried out the project, realizing its publication in 1543.

Analysis

While Garcilaso de la Vega took much inspiration from Italian and classical models, he did not merely imitate them; rather, he assimilated and transformed these influences in the development of his own distinctive poetic voice.

“Second Eclogue”

This development is particularly evident in Garcilaso’s eclogues. The “Second Eclogue,” his longest composition, fully initiated the pastoral mode in his poetry. The poem possesses a balanced structure in which motifs and differing stanzaic forms—tercetos, estancias, rima al mezzo (interior rhyme)—are arranged in a symmetrical pattern centered on lines 766 through 933, which portray in dialogic form a chance encounter between the shepherd Albanio and Camila, his childhood playmate, who has earlier rejected his translation of their childhood friendship into love. On being rejected once more by Camila, after his hopes have been raised, Albanio goes mad. This central scene is preceded by a prologue in which Albanio laments his sad state; by several estancias inspired by Horace’s Beatus ille; and by a section of dialogue between Albanio and Salicio in which Albanio recounts the story of his love for Camila, her negative response, and his present desire to kill himself. The dialogue, modeled on an episode in Jacopo Sannazzaro’s Arcadia (1501-1504), is punctuated by an exchange in Petrarchan rima al mezzo in which Camila the hunter appears at the fountain where she first rejected Albanio and recalls the unpleasant incident.

Following the central scene between Camila and Albanio, a passage in rima al mezzo presents the struggle of Salicio and Nemoroso, another shepherd, to control the crazed Albanio. The following passage is in tercetos; with Albanio subdued, Nemoroso tells Salicio that Severo, a sage enchanter who had cured him, has come to Alba and can cure Albanio of his love woes. A brief dialogic rima al mezzo then leads to a lengthy panegyric by Nemoroso to the House of Alba. A short dialogue in estancias reaffirms the certainty of Albanio’s eventual cure, and as dusk falls, the two shepherds discuss their leave-taking and the disposition of Albanio.

The “Second Eclogue” departs from the refinement of Vergilian bucolics and displays characteristics that separate it from the more perfected form that Garcilaso was to achieve in his “First Eclogue” (which, despite its designation, was composed after the “Second Eclogue”). The tranquility and idealization of nature and human feelings are disturbed by a number of familiar or rustic expressions and proverbs, concentrated in the dialogue between Albanio and Salicio that precedes Camila’s appearance. These exchanges acquire an almost comic character that has caused some critics to regard them as constituting a dramatic farce in themselves. The poet engagingly steps outside the poetic conventions of the pastoral mode by having Albanio question Salicio’s advice with the query, “Who made you an eloquent philosopher/ being a shepherd of sheep and goats?” There is a considerable amount of jocularity elsewhere in exchanges between Albanio and Salicio and in Nemoroso’s initial resistance to helping Salicio subdue the crazed Albanio. Although it has been assumed that Albanio represents Garcilaso’s friend and mentor the duke of Alba, a number of details suggest that Albanio is more plausibly Bernardino de Toledo, the duke’s younger brother, whose death in 1535 occasioned Garcilaso’s “First Elegy.” Though somewhat distracting, these elements contribute to the originality of Garcilaso’s poetic creation.

The “Second Eclogue” is also rich in conceits and various forms of wordplay. Some of these devices are reminiscent of Petrarch, while others have their antecedents in Castilian poetry of the fifteenth century. In its representation of Albanio’s love as an anguished state, the poem recalls the Petrarchan influence evident in Garcilaso’s earlier works.

“First Eclogue”

In “First Eclogue,” Garcilaso attained perfect balance and equilibrium, a consistent and refined tone, idiom, and sentiment, and the definitive expression of the central amorous relationship in his life, the love for Isabel Freyre. A four-stanza prologue and dedication to the duke of Alba introduces two shepherds, again Salicio and Nemoroso, who lament respectively and in succession, each in twelve stanzas, their disappointments in love. The two successive speeches are separated by a one-stanza transition, and culminated by a single stanza conclusion, so that the poem as a whole comprises thirty fourteen-line stanzas.

In the two shepherds and their lamentations, the poet has represented himself (“Salicio” is an anagram of Garcilaso, while “Nemoroso” is a coinage based on the Latin root nemus, closely related in meaning to Spanish vega, a meadow) and expressed in a perfectly balanced duality the two essential elements of his relationship with Isabel Freyre: its failure, followed by her marriage to another, and her death. The lamentations begin at daybreak and end as the sun sets and the shepherds return with their flocks. Unity is achieved in the use of a single verse form throughout, the estancia (here a fourteen-line stanza of eleven- and seven-syllable lines); in the two shepherds’ embodiment of the poet; and in the restriction of the action to a single day’s time. Without calling attention to itself, an exquisite and seemingly effortless design governs the entire poem, which in its structure is similar to that of Vergil’s “Eighth Eclogue.”

The poem’s opening six lines establish the delicacy and balance of the pastoral mode, exemplifying Garcilaso’s expressive manipulation of word order to yield consonance of form and meaning. The first two lines,“The sweet lamentation of two shepherds/ Salicio jointly and Nemoroso,” introduce the duality of the shepherds, separating and balancing them at the beginning and end of the poetical line. Here, the use of the first of many carefully positioned modifiers begins to create the idealized, gentle, tender ambience that defines the eclogue. The opening lines contain no active verbs, instead using infinitives, participles, and verbs of being. This construction suggests that the sheep are forgetful of their grazing, attentive rather to the shepherds’ “savory song,” a dreamlike oblivion and perfect harmony between nature and man. In an abrupt change, the next line addresses the duke of Alba, expressively heightening the contrast between the idyllic pastoral environment and the affairs of state or martial concerns that preoccupy the dynamic man of action.

The evocation of the duke’s military activities in the succeeding stanzas touches a theme that was an important part of the poet’s life and that finds expression in other of his poems, most notably the “Second Elegy.” This poem, apparently written to Boscán from Sicily in 1535, expresses the poet’s distaste for the petty politics of the emperor’s retinue. Garcilaso depicts himself as a tender lover trapped in Mars’s service, envying Boscán’s tranquil, secure family life, and scorning the hypocrisy and ambition of those who surround the “African Caesar.” The poem’s opening lines, remarking on Vergil’s presence in Sicily, through Aeneas, confirm Garcilaso’s active awareness of Vergil during this period.

The stanza of the “First Eclogue,” which connects the dedication to the duke with the beginning of Salicio’s lament, returns to the idyllic natural setting. A characteristic hyperbaton represents the gradually rising sun, first rising above the waves, then above the mountains, and finally directly revealed at the beginning of the stanza’s third line to introduce at daybreak the reclining Salicio. The pasture in which the shepherd is at his ease is crossed by a gurgling brook whose pleasant sound harmonizes with the music of the shepherd’s sweet complaint. Assonant rhyme in addition to the usual consonantal rhyme, and internal rhyme in one verse, lend the passage a delicate musicality. As the clear brook flows unimpeded and burbling to accompany the shepherd’s song, so too does the stanza, continuous, unimpeded, and without rigorous syntax.

The stanza that begins Salicio’s complaint, addressed to the absent Galatea, who has not returned his love, is reminiscent of the plaints of several of Vergil’s shepherds and provides a strident contrast to the sonorous passage preceding it. The shepherd first berates Galatea as harder than marble to his complaints and colder than ice to the fire that consumes him. The bitterness of these sentiments becomes death in the absence of the one who could give him life with her presence, then shame and embarrassment at his own pathetic state, then incredulity at the lady’s refusal to command a soul that has always given itself to her, until it dissolves in the stanza’s last line in the flowing tears bidden to emerge abundantly and without sorrow. This final line becomes a refrain at the end of the remainder of Salicio’s stanzas, with the exception of the last one. Following stanzas contrast the permanence of the shepherd’s sorry state with the daily changes of a delicately evoked nature, questioning the justice of his situation and reproachfully recalling his lady’s falseness and deception.

While Salicio’s unrequited love for Galatea recalls Garcilaso’s disappointment in his love for Isabel Freyre, the shepherd Nemoroso’s lament for his lost love, Elisa, recalls Garcilaso’s mourning at Isabel’s death. Nemoroso’s lament confirms in a general way, though without many specific borrowings, Garcilaso’s profound familiarity with Petrarch and his ability to equal or surpass the Italian model in his own poetry. Nemoroso’s theme, the loved one’s death, is also traditionally regarded as the subject of Garcilaso’s famous sonnet 10, “Oh dulces prendas, por mi mal halladas” (O sweet favors, found to my woe), and sonnet 25. Sonnet 10, expressing the poet’s grief on finding a token of his departed love, and contrasting the joy that love once brought him with the sadness it presently causes, is reminiscent of both Vergil and Petrarch. The sonnet is recalled in the “First Eclogue” when Nemoroso describes the consoling tears engendered by a lock of Elisa’s hair, always kept at his bosom.

Nemoroso’s song begins with an evocation of nature, distilled into select details each refined with adjectival description into exquisite perfection (“running, pure, crystalline waters,” “green field,” “fresh shade”). The natural setting is self-contained, turned in upon itself and vaguely anthropomorphic as green ivy winds its way among trees that see themselves reflected in the water. The harmony between man and his thoughts and an idealized natural surrounding is disturbed only by the suggestion of present sadness and by the last line’s reference to joy-filled memories, implying that joy is past.

The following stanzas recall the happy times the lovers shared and mourn their brevity; in imagery that anticipates the Baroque violence of Góngora, the shepherd expresses his passion, his rage, and his desolation. In the final stanza of Nemoroso’s lament, anger and despondency yield to a quiet prayer to the now-divine loved one to hasten the coming of the shepherd’s death so that they may enjoy tranquilly together and without fear of loss the eternal fields, mountains, rivers, and shaded flowery valleys of the third sphere. Natural beauty is thus raised to a cosmic plane; in Salicio’s plaint, the imagery that concludes the lament recalls its opening lines.

The dreamlike poetic moment of the two shepherds’ lamentations is ended in the eclogue’s final stanza. Looking at the pink clouds and sensing the creeping shadows that reverse the process of sunrise described at the poem’s opening, the two shepherds awaken from their reverie and conduct their sheep home, step by step. So, too, does the reader leave an exquisite and incomparably evoked poetic world of true sentiment, delicate appreciation of nature, and harmony between man and his surroundings, representative of Garcilaso’s enduring contribution to Spanish literature.

Bibliography

Cammarata, Joan. Mythological Themes in the Works of Garcilaso de la Vega. Potomac, Md.: Studia Humanitatis, 1983. A critical analysis of Garcilaso’s use of folklore and mythology. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Fernández-Morera, Dario. The Lyre and the Oaten Flute: Garcilaso and the Pastoral. London: Tamesis, 1982. A critical study of selected works by Garcilaso. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Garcilaso de la Vega. Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by John Dent-Young. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. This translation divides the poems into sonnets, songs, elegies, and eclogues, providing a short introduction to each.

Ghertman, Sharon. Petrarch and Garcilaso. London: Tamesis, 1975. Ghertman analyzes and compares the linguistic styles of Petrarch and Garcilaso.

Heiple, Daniel L. Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Heiple analyzes Garcilaso’s work and its place in the history of Italian renaissance literature. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Helgerson, Richard. A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Helgerson starts with a sonnet to Juan Boscán from Garcilaso and proceeds to examine Garcilaso’s effect on the poetry of Europe.

Torres, Isabel. “Sites of Speculation: Water/Mirror Poetics in Garcilaso de la Vega, Eclogue II.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 86, no. 6 (2009): 877-893. Examines Garcilaso’s “Second Eclogue,” noting water and mirror images in the poem.