3—
Boscán, Garcilaso, and the Codes of Erotic Poetry

Boscán was the first poet in Spain to propose a radical plan for the rehabilitation of Spanish letters through the adoption of Italian verse forms. Specifically singling out Petrarch as a model for his contemporaries, he took up that challenge himself in book 2 of Las obras de Boscán y algvnas de Garcilasso de la Vega (first ed., 1543), through the composition of sonnets and canciones and their organization into a macrotextual collection. Although he pretends in these poems to address ignorant readers in need of instruction about the dangers of love, the poems are also directed at more knowledgeable readers, for they present, in the opening and closing sequences, a critique first of earlier Spanish poetry, and then of the Italian model itself. The result is constant intertextual tensions (with predecessor texts) as well as intratextual tensions (between the implied and intended readers).

While Garcilaso does not imitate Petrarch's organizational strategy, his sonnets reveal a close reading of Petrarch's poetry, as many of his poems take as a point of departure a line, a phrase, or an image sometimes deeply embedded in a Petrarchan text. To meet the challenge of this borrowing, Garcilaso marshals poetic resources drawn from a variety of different sources, including Ausís March, the cancionero tradition, and other Italian and classical poets; often this eclectic imitation brings with it erotic codes at odds with the initial model text. In the larger poems this play of erotic codes is amplified, as Garcilaso distances himself from the Petrarchan code, which is relegated to an alienated character. Finally, an allegorical reading of the third eclogue shows Garcilaso performing a metalepsis, reducing Petrarch to the status of one among many predecessor poets, and presenting himself as the fulfillment of all preceding traditions.

Boscán's Rewriting of the Rime Sparse

The translatio studii , as we saw in the last chapter, was a persistent topic in the Spanish Renaissance. Although earlier commentators such as Encina and Valdés cited the accomplishments of Boccaccio and Petrarch as models for the Spanish, they did so in terms of the Italians' efforts at improving their language. Juan Boscán was the first to assert that Petrarch should be a textual model, explaining, in the dedication that precedes book 2, his preference for the Italian forms because of their better antecedents (having been employed by Petrarch, Dante, and the Provençal poets), and because the longer hendecasyllabic line is aesthetically superior to the short, sound-oriented lines of medieval Castilian poetry. By ignoring fifteenth-century imitators of Petrarch, Bosán posed as the first Spanish Petrarchist poet, translating, as if in a vacuum, the Italian forms to Spain.^[1] Although the preface is imbued with the spirit of courtly sprezzatura , Boscán's sonnets are not mere exercises, but an ambitious set of Petrarchan imitations both individually and in their macrotextual arrangement.

The arrangement of the poems in Boscán's second book is canonical: although he died shortly before their publication, his wife, Doña Ana Girón de Rebolledo, declares in her unsigned preface that as the task was nearly completed, "á parescido passar adelante lo que él dexava enpeçado, digo la impresión" (it has seemed best to proceed with what he had begun, by which I mean the printing, 3). Yet this organizational aspect to the poems in book 2 was insufficiently appreciated by the early editors and critics of Boscán's works. In the first modern edition of Boscán's poetry (1875), William I. Knapp separated the canciones that the poet had intercalated among the sonnets, gathering them at the end. This rearrangement had a significant effect on subsequent readers of the poetry, who tended to emphasize, on a microtextual level, Boscán's borrowings from Petrarch, Ausías March, and other sources.^[2] Thus although sixteenth-century editions of Boscán are by no means rare, and in 1936 there appeared a facsimile of the 1543 princeps , only the publication of the critical edition by Martín de Riquer in 1957 rectified the situations.^[3] Recognition that the poems in book 2 constitute a macrotext is important because Boscán has suffered from the reputation of being a

mediocre poet at best; he has been criticized for using forced rhymes (Parducci, 48–51), for having very little imagery (Morreale, 251–53, 261–63), and for following Petrarch both too closely (Menéndez y Pelayo, 282) and not closely enough (286–87). These judgments are all based on notions of originality and poetic language as applied to individual poems; examination of the collection as such places Boscán in a better light, for as a collection the group of poems functions very well indeed. It is also historically notable that he chose to present his poems to us in this way, for macrotextual collections never became the rule in sixteenth-century Spain.^[4]

Book 2 consists of ninety-two sonnets and ten canciones . Like Petrarch, Boscán uses the canciones to focus the collection, recapitulating the preceding sonnets and sending the subsequent poems off in a different direction. Yet the total lack of autobiographical detail is a surprise, for where Petrarch localized Laura in time and space and used her name as one of the symbolic underpinnings of the collection (laura as the laurel tree and thus a symbol for poetry, as well as a reminder of the myth of Daphne and Apollo; l'aura as the dawn; etc.), Boscán refuses to name his beloved or give any information about her. Thus there is no sonnet parallel to Petrarch's "Era il giorno ch' al sol si scoloraro" (where Petrarch falls in love) or "Quando io muovo i sospiri a chiamar voi" (where Petrarch tells us Laura's name). Because otherwise Boscán follows the Italian poet's example very closely, this reticence shows him not only imitating Petrarch, but trying to rival him as well by doing something different. By not tying himself down to the specific circumstances of a particular love affair, Boscán attempts to write a sonnet collection that is both more universal and more abstract.^[5] The departure is immediately felt by the reader, whose expectations of Petrarchan detail are continuously frustrated.

The knowledgeable reader recognizes that Boscán is imitating Petrarch, for the very pretense of addressing an innocent reader is only the first of Boscán's Petrarchan imitations. The first four poems in the collection develop the theme established by Petrarch in his first poem: the poet addresses a reader and warns about the travails of love, and the very first line of Petrarch's first sonnet, "Voi ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono" (you who hear in scattered rhymes the sound) is echoed in line 9 of Boscán's "¡O! vosotros que andáys tras mis escritos" (Oh! you who wander after my writings, XXIX;

but note the transformation from an oral context, ascoltate , to a written one, escritos , important in terms of the critique of sound-oriented poetry in Boscán's preface).^[6] Like Petrarch, Boscán appears concerned that readers draw a moral lesson from his sorrows, a point he repeatedly makes in the first few poems. In the initial sonnets, he employs an almost semiotic vocabulary to mark the shift from hearing to reading and to underscore his concern that, by presenting signs of his wounds and pains (that is, by writing them up in these poems), the poet will be able to teach his readers a moral lesson. Thus in the opening lines of sonnet 2 he expresses the desire that his invisible (because they are interior and emotional) wounds become visible signs capable of instructing others, and he refers to them as an "istoria," a history or narrative available to those who know how to decipher it. Yet he hesitates, for the wounds are "señales tan feas, que é vergüença de mostrallas" (such ugly signs, that I am ashamed to show them, 2, XXX.13–14). The verb mostrar leads directly into the next poem, in which he resolves to show them because the potential benefits to others outweigh his shame, and in which he envisions the wounds as a broadsheet, "de mi muerte'l gran letrero" (of my death a great announcement, 3, XXXI.11). This textualizing of his suffering takes a further step in the next sonnet, in which knowledge of his suffering precedes him, "dando nuevas de mi desasossiego" (giving news of my distress, 4, XXXII.6); those who follow him will have no excuse for their ignorance. The semiotic theme continues in the ninth poem: there the poet compares himself to an astronomical sign in need of interpretation, and in sonnet 10, a meditation on his failure to assess correctly the beloved's attitude, in which he uses the word "vi" (I saw) to mark his enlightenment. It culminates in the last line of the eighteenth sonnet (XLVI), where he certifies himself as an interpreter, "ya no soy sabidor, sino adevino" (I am no longer knowledgeable but clairvoyant), and thus takes on the ancient mantle of the vates .

In sonnet 5 Boscán hyperbolically develops Petrarch's sonnet 2 ("Per fare una leggiadra sua vendetta / . . . / celatamente Amor l'arco riprese" [To take a graceful revenge . . . Love took up his bow again secretly], Rime sparse 2.1, 3); he too is enslaved by love, only it happened to him when he was still an infant, "aún bien no fuy^[*] salido de la cuna, / . . . / quando el amor me tuvo condenado" (I

had not yet emerged from my crib . . . when love seized and condemned me). The poem concludes with a set of questions:

¡O coraçón!, que siempre has padecido
dime: tan fuerte mal, ¿cómo es tan largo?
Y mal tan largo—di—, ¿cómo es tan fuerte?
(XXXIII.1, 3, 12–14)

Oh heart, you who have always suffered tell me: such a strong pain, how can it last so long? And such a long pain—say—how can it be so strong?

These questions also become a motif of the early sonnets, as the poet struggles to understand what has happened to him. Thus in sonnet 6 (whose astrological imagery parallels that in Petrarch's third sonnet), he is caught in an everlasting night; while in sonnet 7 ("Solo y pensoso en páramos desiertos," an echo of "Solo et pensoso i piú deserti campi") his senses have fled from him. In sonnet 8 he recalls desiring to express his love to his beloved; this frustrated desire is balanced by the comet in sonnet 9 that makes men prophets, which is compared to the effect that his suffering will have on others who can interpret it. In the twelfth poem the Petrarchan landscape—wild and unknown, an echo of poem 7—in which the poet finds himself stands metaphorically for his emotional condition, which resists understanding. The image of the poet as a wanderer reappears in the next two poems as well, where he trembles at seeing where his footsteps have brought him and longs to stop moving. Increasingly, he is alienated from himself: "Traygo este cuerpo" (I carry this body, 14, XLII.5) becomes, a couple of poems later, the Quevedesque "llevo tras mí mis años arrastrando" (I drag my years behind me, 17, XLV.2).

The twin themes of his failure to understand his condition, together with his suffering as a sign to others, continue to preoccupy him through the subsequent sonnets. They culminate in sonnet 18, the last before the first canción:

Oíd, oíd, los hombres y las gentes,
un caso nuevo que'n amar s'offrece:
amor en mí con su deleyte creçe,
mientras más males tengo, y más presentes
(XLVI.1–4)

Hear hear, men and peoples, a new instance of love offers itself: love with his delights in me grows, the more sufferings I have, and the more present

and in the canción itself, "Quiero hablar un poco, / mas teme'l coraçón de fatigarse" (I wish to speak some but my heart fears exhaustion, XLVII.1–2). When one considers that this is the first Petrarchist poem collection written in Spain, Boscán's torments, his incomprehension, and at the same time his desire to be a sign for others take on a new aspect. Like the preface, these first few poems serve as a platform for a critique of earlier Spanish poetry. Boscán was unable to understand what had happened to him because he had no models, no literary forerunners who could enlighten him about the nature of Petrarchan love, which he presents as in some crucial way different from the kind of love present in earlier poetry. Had other Spanish poets written about Petrarchan love before him, he would have been able to understand it. He thus draws a connection between the new meters and genres, and a new thematics of love.^[7] Similarly, he asserts for himself a role in literary history, instructing others who read him in the new ways of love and poetry; those who read his poems but fail to learn their lesson will no longer have an excuse. In sonnet 18 he receives some encouragement and it enables him to address the reader directly. Instead of having the reader draw conclusions from his sufferings and interpreting them as signs and comets are interpreted, Boscán can now tell us directly about his love; in semiotic terms, this change presents a shift from visual showing to oral saying. It is consequently no coincidence that both sonnet 18 and the first canción start with addresses to the reader: "listen" and "I want to speak."

Thus, there is a double didacticism at work in these early poems. On the amatory, thematic level, they are meant to admonish people not to make Boscán's mistake, not to fall in love as he has done; this aim will ultimately be inverted at the end of the collection. But on a metapoetic level, Boscán provides instruction both in Petrarchan love and in writing Petrarchan sonnets, so that in spite of the stated aim of warning people away, he actually seeks to be imitated. Boscán builds his collection consciously around the model provided by Petrarch, and it should be read in the same way, so that the decisions he makes exist in tension with Petrarch's collection and with the

reader's own ability to understand the love that afflicts the poet even as he himself does not. He obliges readers to "fictionalize" themselves (see Ong, 62–69) twice over, as erotic naïfs in need of instruction, but also as literary connoisseurs who recognize his models.^[8] The awareness of Petrarch's text creates a split, with the historical Juan Boscán and the reader, both familiar with Petrarch, on one side, and the implied reader as well as the poet-lover on the other. The latter figure is in turn fragmented even more: there is the lover's past history, which he did not understand, and which is narrated by the poet recollecting it in something less than tranquility and with greater or lesser degrees of understanding.^[9]

This division becomes particularly apparent in the first canción (poem 19, XLVII). As Parducci suggests (67–69), its basis is in Petrarch's famous canzone of metamorphosis, "Nel dolce tempo," save that for Boscán stasis triumphs over transformation. Yet stasis must give way to mutation so that a narrative can get started, or else the entire work might come to a halt. The need to narrate in order to organize a poem collection is the underlying theme of the 453-line poem, in which, as noted before, the poet finally gets to speak; and in contrast to his earlier tongue-tied and paralyzed state, he is at first unable to restrain himself:

hablaré, por no starme como stoy,
    pues no puedo star quedo,
. . .
Si parto, sólo por irme, me voy;
mudanças hago por no ser quien soy.
(18–19, 21–22)

I will speak, so as not to be as I am, for I cannot remain quiet. . . . If I depart, only to leave, I go; I transform myself so as not to be who I am.

The disjunction between lover and poet in this poem becomes particularly clear when one examines the use of grammatical tenses. The frame of the poem, "quiero hablar," is in the present, but the subject of this discourse is the history of his love.^[10] Speaking of it should serve as an instructional sign for others, as in the sonnets, and it may also have a therapeutic effect, "escójolo por menos peligroso" (I choose it because it is less dangerous, 9). Yet it might also bring him shame and, by forcing him to relive the experience, cast

him back into its turbulence, a possibility both frightening and irresistible:

Oyo llamar de lexos mis gemidos,
y é lástima de ver que van perdidos.
   ¡O mis crudos dolores,
dadme un poco d'alivio porque pueda
provar a ver si diré lo que digo!
(59–63)

I hear my cries call from afar, and I grieve to see they are lost. Oh my cruel pains, give me some relief so that I might attempt to see if I will say what I say!

The future tense here and at other key points throughout the poem suggests that once the discourse is started, the poet himself does not know where it will take him. Still it is not easy for him to get started, and so much of his speech becomes a metadiscourse on the difficulties of narration. His memory fails him, and "olvidando el comienço, el fin no hallo" (forgetting the beginning, I cannot find the end, 53). Whatever he says he must unsay, and everything comes out disorganized. Recalling the sonnets, he once again stresses the unprecedented nature of his love experience, but his attempt to narrate flounders in a series of imperfects that describe a recurring condition: hazía, spantava, osava, tentava, scapava, dexava, crecía, ocorríame , and so on—two and a half fourteen-line stanzas of almost exclusively imperfect verbs. When he does break into preterits, it is only to admit the hopelessness of his situation: "Quando pude curarme, no lo vi; / agora que no puedo, lo entendí" (When I could cure myself, I did not see it; now that I cannot, I understand, 149–50). Although these struggles with narration continue, he eventually succeeds in describing what happened to him, in a series of terse and halting independent clauses:

    El mal se declaró,
señaló y encontró todo en un punto;
mató después por términos, y largos;
   salióme el dolor junto;
dizen que'l alma del golpe cayó.
(211–15)

Suffering declared itself, signaled and found everything ready; later it killed in long measures; pain appeared along with it; they say my soul fell from the blow.

From this point on he can describe his love in terms of the familiar (to the reader) Petrarchan paradigm: he loved in secret and enjoyed the beloved's favors, but when he confessed ("Assí osando y temiendo, / díxeos no sé qué; no sé si os lo dixe" [thus daring and fearing, I don't know what I said to you; I don't know if I said it to you], 86–87), she spurned him.^[11] Eventually, however, he becomes trapped in stasis once again: the wheel of fortune turns but his situation remains always the same, and this new cycle of recurring situations, in the present tense, recalls the earlier one in the imperfect. Love keeps bringing back the same fantasy of hope even as he realizes that he can never attain it; once again he is unable to understand his situation ("Mas ¿dónde stoy? ¿Qué hago? / ¿Do tan allá el tormento me desvía?" [But where am I? What am I doing? To what beyond is torment diverting me?], 439–40), and finally his discourse breaks down completely ("No quiero más con quexas encenderme" [I no longer wish to burn with complaints], 443).

Still, this first canción has not been a total failure, for it has moved the lover away from his initial state of ignorance, and with him the putatively innocent reader, bringing them both closer to the actual poet and reader. It is followed by Boscán's most famous poem, the canción "Claros y frescos ríos" (XLVIII), an imitation of Petrarch's "Chiare fresche et dolci acque" (Rime sparse 126), which was itself also preceded by a poem devoted to the difficulty of speaking, "Se 'l pensier che mi strugge" (Rime sparse 125; see Durling, The Figure , 68–72). Yet the landscape that for Petrarch was so suggestive of Laura's body here becomes harsh and psychologically symbolic: as Cruz points out, the departures from the model stress the poet's isolation from his beloved and at the same time reduce the element of erotic idolatry present in the original, with the result that Boscán effects a disjunctive imitation of his model, recognizing its origin in order to hide it in his own poem (55).^[12] In contrast to the preceding canción , the smoothly flowing hepta- and hendecasyllables exemplify the virtues Boscán asserted in the preface, without the paralyzing, fractured syntax that reflected the first canción 's concern with

the difficulties of narration. In the third stanza, Boscán finally presents what is to be the somewhat obsessive theme of the poem, the continuing appeal of fantasy over harsh reality:

    He de querer la vida,
    fingiéndome sperança,
y engañar mal que tanto desengaña.
(25–29)

I ought to love life, feigning hope, and deceive that suffering that so undeceives.

As this conflict is one he shares with both Petrarch and the native tradition, Boscán here is not so much declaring his independence as asserting his continuity with his predecessors. Like his Italian model, in successive stanzas he imagines himself speaking with the beloved, pictures her laughter, and returns in his mind compulsively to the place where they first met:

    Viéneme a la memoria
    dónde la vi primero,
y aquel lugar do començé d'amalla.
(79–81)

There comes to my memory the place I first saw her and where I began to love her.

Parducci (57) sees in the appeal to memory an echo of Petrarch's "dolce ne la memoria" (sweetly in memory, Rime sparse 126.41); more generically, one can note throughout Petrarch a similar return to the time and place of his meeting with Laura (e.g., "Benedetto sia . . . e 'l loco ov' io fui giunto" [Blessed be . . . the place where I was struck], Rime sparse 61.1–4; "la memoria . . . mi mostra e 'l loco e 'l tempo" [memory . . . points out to me the place and the time], ibid., 175.13–14). Recalling the opening sonnets, Boscán repeatedly stresses the visual nature of his fantasy, but as Cruz observed (Imitación , 58) he shies away from actual physical description in favor of a catalog of her virtues. The cycles of encouragement and discouragement recall the preceding canción (and are a theme in Garcilaso as well), yet working against the alternation, as Cruz points out, Boscán's poem emphasizes the lovers' sure reconciliation, indicated

by the future tense in the lines just before the envoi, "que yo la veré presto, / y miraré aquel cuerpo y aquel gesto" (for I will see her soon, and gaze on that body and on that face, 168–69). As these lines are spoken by the poet to his heart in an attempt to encourage it, they do not have an objectively prophetic value, yet they do suggest an outcome different from Petrarch's, and implicate this poem in a linear narrative that will be achieved in the final poems of the collection. The theme of vision is playfully turned in on itself in the closing lines:

Cancón; bien sé dónde bolver querrías,
   y la que ver desseas,
pero no quiero que sin mí la veas.
(170–72)

Song, I know where you wished to return, and her whom you desire to see, but I don't want you to see her without me.

The envoi echoes Petrarch's "Ben sai, canzon" (Rime sparse 127.99), but, in contrast to Petrarch's fantasy about his song orally (and thus together with him) presenting a message to Laura, Boscán emphasizes that a written poem can make a journey, and "see" the beloved as she reads it (a point Petrarch exploits in other poems).

Boscán's second canción opens the main body of the collection. It consists of a mixture of sonnets and canciones in a combination of Petrarchan and traditional Castilian styles, in which the poet continues his struggle to narrate and to attain permanent rather than cyclical change. Particularly interesting, as Armisén has pointed out (391–95), is the sequence surrounding the forty-ninth poem (LXXVII), a sonnet at the very center of the collection. Its centrality is itself thematized within the poem, as Boscán recalls his position in the middle of fortune's wheel and recapitulates the cycles of hope and despair that have preoccupied him since the first canción , particularly in the two preceding sonnets; the metatextual concern with centering at the very center of the collection shows Boscán's strict sense of architectural organization. The central sonnet in turn is framed on the other side by a series recapitulating the beloved's birth in astrological terms, his falling in love, and their separation—the very subject matter of those early, halting poems, but now with greater self-understanding. The opening lines of the fiftieth poem, "Mueve'l querer las alas con gran fuerça / tras el loor d'aquella que

yo canto" (Desire moves its wings with great strength in praise of her whom I sing, LXXVIII.1–2), are ambiguous as to which—desire or the poet's song—is responsible for the other. The same suggestion that art precedes reality recurs in the following poem, where heaven and earth, pictured as artists, pool their skill to create his beloved; these masters, pleased with their creation, see that "acudía / la mano al punto de la fantasía" (their hands were capable of the fantasy, 51, LXXIX.6–7). The emphasis on visual image recalls the second canción , as does the restatement of Petrarch's "Benedetto sia" (Rime sparse 61):

Dichos el día, dichosa la hora,
tambiné la tierra donde nacer quiso
ésta del mundo general señora.
Dichosa edad, que tanto se mejora,
pues entre sí ya tienen paraýso
los que infierno tuvieron hasta'gora.
(51, LXXIX.9–14)

Happy the day, happy the hour, also the land where she chose to be born, this lady commander of the world. Happy the age that so improves, for they have among themselves a paradise whou until now had only a hell.

But while in sonnet 61 Petrarch praises not where Laura was born but where he met her and how the experience transformed him into a poet, Boscán in these closing lines veers from mythological encomium to sacred hyperbole (associating her birth with Jesus's), a direction carried farther in the next sonnet, where the poet asks himself how her birth could have gone unnoticed, and asserts that she is not given but merely lent by God in order to show his capabilities. Whereas two poems earlier Boscán had sublimated himself in her, "vean a mí, y entenderán a ella" (look at me, and you will understand her, 49, LXXVII.10), now he affirms that "en ella él se viesse" (he could be seen in her, 52, LXXX.13).^[13] This assertion of the saving power of the beloved again underlines the linearity of the collection by pointing to its conclusion. Just as the opening set of sonnets in the collection constituted a defined set, so too do the closing group of poems. The transition to this final group is an abrupt one; in sonnet 85 (CXIII), Boscán declares that the thought of perishing was so welcome to him that it gave him the very strength that led to his

inadvertent survival. This concept, emblematic of the vicious circle in which he has been caught since the first canción , is common in Petrarch and the cancionero , and by using it at this point in the collection Boscán reasserts his connection to the preceding traditions, highlighting the degree to which he will depart from it in the concluding poems.

In sonnet 18 Boscán referred to himself as "un caso nuevo" (a new case). This line is echoed in the eighty-sixth poem (CXIV), which occupies an almost symmetrical position in relation to the end of the collection, and in which Boscán describes a sudden change of state:

Otro tiempo lloré y agora canto,
canto d'amor mis bienes sossegados;
d'amor lloré mis males tan penados, que por necessidad era mi llanto.
Agora empieça Amor un nuevo canto.
(1–5)

Once I wept and now I sing, I sing of the wealth my love secured; I wept my painful love sufferings, that made weeping necessary. Now Love begins a new song.

The phrase nuevo canto echoes Petrarch's "Io canterei d'Amor sí novamente" (I would sing of love in so rare a way, Rime sparse 131.1), but also Psalm 149:1, "Entonad al Señor un canto nuevo, su voz suene en el concejo de los altos" (Sing to the Lord a new song, let his voice ring in the councils of the high); throughout this last section of the poem collection, both Petrarchan and biblical allusions tie the poems together as Boscán celebrates his conversion from a passionate love which brought him only unhappiness, a conversion that recalls the one experienced by Petrarch after Laura's death (although of course Boscán gives us no such biographical fact to explain or motivate it).^[14] Yet, in addition to these references, two other features unite the closing poems: specific recollections of earlier poems in the collection, particularly the opening sequence of sonnets and the first canción , and a growing assertion of the poet's role as a rival to Petrarch.

Indeed the very biblical allusions that Boscán uses serve in part to assert this rivalry, for just as Petrarch used as an organizing principle allusions to the Passion, Boscán selects passages typologically

associated with the Resurrection. Thus in sonnet 88 (CXVI) he speaks of being resurrected by love; in 90 (CXVIII) he recalls the plagues in Exodus, from which he is spared; and in 91 (CXIX) he is in Paradise. In 92 (CXX) God is responsible for the change in him, while in 96 (CXXIV) he compares himself to both the blind man whose sight was restored and the Jews marveling at his recovery. In 99 chaste love, sent by God, speaks to him the words spoken by Jesus to the cripple, "¡toma tu lecho a cuestas y haz tu vía!" (take up your bedding and go on your way! CXXVII.8; cf. John 5:8, etc.).

In addition to these biblical and religious allusions, the closing sonnets also contain a great many references to the opening poems. The new love introduced in sonnet 86 allows him to sing, that is, to compose poetry, the very activity that the old love made so difficult in the first canción . That poem is also specifically recalled in the next sonnet:

Demás del gran milagro que Amor hizo,
haziéndome, después de star deshecho,
fué muy maravilloso y nuevo hecho
ver que un Amor me hizo y me deshizo.
(87, CXV.1–4)

In addition to the great miracle Love performed, making me after I had been unmade, it was a new and marvelous deed to see how Love could make and unmake me.

The earlier cycle of hacer and deshacer is now cast in the preterit, as something finished, while a new cycle that remakes him has replaced it. In light of this transformation, he learns that he can both love and be loved, and "que'n Amor no es término forçado / sólo scrivir aquél cue dolor siente" (in love it is not obligatory that only he who is in pain can write, 89, CXVII.3–4). Poetry can thus free itself from the ancient paradigms of suffering. Two poems later, love can provide him a "dulce . . . un no se qué" (a sweet . . . I know not what, 91, CXIX.9), a phrase that recalls his barely comprehensible confession in the canción . Above all, no longer is his poetry, like Petrarch's, a warning against love: now it is an encouragement to love, to take heart from his example. Whereas earlier he had been a sign warning of sterility, in 94 the fire with which he burns is "puro y simple" (pure and simple, CXXII.2); and in contrast to the desolate landscape portrayed in the second canción , he brings spring wher-

ever he goes. Thus the breach between his functions as model lover and model poet is healed.

The closing sonnets also contain a number of navigation images, in which the poet speaks of being safely in a harbor and of being saved from a shipwreck. In part they refer to a series of sonnets in the middle of the collection (71, XCIX; 72, C; 79, CVII; 84, CXII) in which the opposite was the case. The topos is Horatian in origin, and while it has some biblical resonances as well, they are relatively weak. Why then does Boscán repeatedly employ it in this final section of his collection? To find the answer one must turn back to Petrarch and examine the nature of his conversion in the final poems of the Rime sparse (see Kennedy, 40). After Laura's death, Petrarch does indeed change his attitude about love, but his initial reaction is to despair: her death has left him totally disconsolate, and he compares himself several times to a ship out of control in a storm. As Parducci noted (65–66), Boscán picks up the image from Petrarch, but he turns it around: whereas Petrarch is lost on stormy seas, Boscán is safe and sound. Indeed, several times in these final poems Boscán sets himself up as a direct rival to Petrarch; sonnet 89, for example, contains the only overt allusion to the laurel in the entire collection:

Celebrado seré en toda la gente,
llevando en mi triunpho para'l cielo,
con el verde laurel la blanca palma.
(CXVI.11–14)

I will be celebrated by all peoples, taking my triumph to heaven, the white palm together with the green laurel.

Boscáns conception of love, at the end of the collection, is likewise very different from the Petrarchan love that at first he could not understand. As already noted, at the end of the collection Love is specifically associated with the poet's salvation; he is the one who speaks God's words, and it is only because Boscán has experienced "un nuevo Amor" (a new Love, 90, CXVIII.1) that he can sing his "nuevo canto. He sums up this lesson in sonnet 93:

Amor es bueno en sí naturalmente,
y si por causa d'él males tenemos,

será porque seguimos los estremos,
y assí es culpa de quien sus penas siente.
(CXXI.1–4)

Love is good in itself by its nature, and if because of him we have sufferings, it is only because we exceed his limits and so the fault belongs to him who suffers.

For Petrarch, Love always remained a trickster who had enslaved him, and while once Laura was dead he came to value chastity, it was only because it increased the chances of their being reunited in Paradise. Boscán by contrast transforms the notion of love in this world, and with this new conception of love, he is already in Paradise. Petrarch looks forward to death, while Boscán is already resurrected.^[15]

These themes are all brought together in the final poem of the collection—a canción —which, in contrast to the first one, opens with a relatively simple and direct autobiographical narration of his early errors. He concedes that love had brought him both pleasure and pain, but both were equally the misguided results of his delusions. Only the direct intervention of God, "que derramó su sangre por nosotros" (who spilled his blood for us, 102, CXXX.62), has broken this cycle, and the implied biblical comparisons of the closing sonnets are finally resolved by the poet when he overtly compares himself to Lazarus,

    Tú, Dios, con tu sentencia
m'enterraste'n dolores tan continos,
porque después me diesse tu clemencia
que otro Lázaro fuesse'n tu presencia
(73–75)

You, God, with your sentence buried me in continual pain, so that later you could give me your clemency that I might be another Lazarus in your presence

as well as to the victim rescued by the good Samaritan (see Darst, Juan Boscán , 77–80 and Cruz, Imitación , 61).

The overall result is to give the implicit narrative a stronger ending than that of Petrarch's Rime sparse . Instead of the weak lover gradually finding solace in the notion of a world to come, we have a strong one who has already managed to find his salvation. When

discussing the end of the collection, traditional Boscán scholarship has focused on interpreting just what this new love of Boscán's is meant to represent. Cruz (ibid., 62) is closer to the mark when she asserts that the autobiographical implications of the last poems derive from Boscán's imitation of Bembo and Petrarch, and that a literary appreciation of their function need not be based on any particular interpretation of these poems. Thus the final poems are important not only for our understanding of Boscán's notions of love, but even more for our appreciation of what he, as a latter-day rival of Petrarch, was trying to do. He began the collection by obviously imitating Petrarch, leading the reader to expect the same kind of thing. He concludes it by challenging Petrarch and setting up an alternate vision of love, and an immanent rather than a transcendental closing to the collection. Whereas the first poems in the collection offer us a paraphrase of Petrarch, frustrating to the reader familiar with the Rime sparse in their lack of personal detail, the last poems present a rewriting of the sonnet collection in which the poet frees himself from the limits imposed by Petrarch's conception of love.^[16] Only by reading the collection as a whole and in comparison with Petrarch's can Boscán's achievement be appreciated on its own terms; reading them together illuminates Boscán's choices and casts a critical light on the original.

As noted at the beginning of this section, the collection contains a double narrative, that of the lover learning about love, presented in a series of present-tense "snapshots but also the somewhat later recollections of the poet. The key event both in the fiction of his life and in his struggle to narrate is the conversion that occurs at the eighty-sixth poem, which is presented by means of Christian imagery. Yet this is not Boscán's only conversion; it depends, in fact, on that earlier conversion, before the poem collection even began, to Petrarchism and away from the composition of traditional Spanish poetry. It is the subject of the preface to the collection, and in that preface it too is described via biblical allusions. Thus in addition to the fictional love-narrative and the narrative of the poet writing about his love, we have a third narrative, perhaps also fictional, of Boscán's learning to write like Petrarch and then gradually outdoing him.

Yet a fourth narrative can be construed, that of our reading of the collection. For Corti, one of the keys to macrotextuality is the

arrangement of the texts. Most of these features, particularly the carrying over of images and allusions, can only be ascertained through a process of reading through a collection that is at least somewhat extensive. Reading implies time, and time in turn begets narration; that makes reading any macrotext somewhat akin to reading fiction. Narrativity, in imitation of Petrarch, is a key feature of Boscán's work, both formally (because he is imitating Petrarch and Bembo in writing an imitatio vitae ) and thematically (the many poems that reflect on the difficulty of narration). In this fourth narrative the break between the doubly fictionalized readers is healed, and it is we as readers who are converted, minimally into admirers of Boscán's maximally into his imitators.^[17] Corti, by singling out the macrotext as a special kind of sign and providing terms for its evaluation that take into account the special modes of signification that it employs, gives us another way to approach Boscdán's literary accomplishment. Applying the criteria of macrotextuality to book 2 gives us a very different view of Boscán's poetic abilities, albeit one that resists the kind of anthologizing that earns a place in the canon. Boscán's techniques—a careful web of literary allusion, themes carried over from sonnet to sonnet, and images recalled across the space of many poems—are borrowed from Petrarch, but they must be examined with a literary theory that has a place for them. When this is done, Boscán's collection as a whole is seen not as a weak copy of Petrarch, but instead as a strong work that stands not only on its own, but in tension with the original.

Garcilaso and the Codes of Erotic Poetry

The arrangement of Garcilaso's poetry does not permit the poem-by-poem analysis one can perform on Boscán's; Garcilaso's response to the challenge of Petrarch's canonicity is not articulated in macro-textual arrangement but in a marshaling of resources to address a particular poetic problem, often derived from the careful reading of the source text. Many of the sonnets take as their point of departure a line, image, or trope with specific Petrarchan resonances; Garcilaso's successful struggle to incorporate the allusion in his own poem often casts a critical light on the original. In the longer fifth canción and in the eclogues, the Petrarchism is even more revision-

ary as it is alienated away from the poet's own voice and relegated to a distanced character. Garcilaso's relationship with Petrarch can be explored through an allegorical reading of the sonnets and the third eclogue: in the former the overwhelming exposure to a poetic father, in the latter his metaleptic reduction to the status of a predecessor.

As noted in the preceding chapter, Boscán in his preface presents himself as the one who taught Garcilaso to write sonnets, and thus his friend's poetry may be seen as the culmination of his own. Boscán is also responsible for the preservation of that poetry, having acted as the Castilian's literary executor: Doña Ana, in her preface, recounts that because of their great friendship Boscán was entrusted with Garcilaso's works, and that Boscán agreed "que las dexasse como devían de estar" (to leave them as they should be, 3). The function of Garcilaso's poetry as culmination of the book was recognized by the privilege that the emperor granted Doña Ana to publish a volume to include "ciertos sonetos y canciones del dicho Garcilasso" (certain sonnets and songs of the said Garcilaso, 5). We know, however, from the existence of texts left out of this first edition, that in his exercise of direct control over the contents of the volume, Boscán did not include all of Garcilaso's poems—because he did not have a copy of the others, or because he did not like them, or, as Armisén has argued (424), because they did not fit the aesthetic and ideological aims of the 1543 edition. While it is clear from that edition that Boscán (or conceivably Doña Ana) attempted to impose an order on the poems, in our terms to structure their reading, by placing the first canción between sonnets 16 and 17, the effort is dropped and the rest of the canciones appear after the sonnets (see Cruz, Imitación , 64). Subsequent editors who corrected this effort and reunited the canciones have also differed on the order in which to arrange the additional sonnets by Garcilaso that have since come to light.

The lack of an overriding architecture governing the arrangement of the poems is not a grievous loss, however, for Garcilaso's response to the challenge posed by Petrarch's hypercanonicity is quite different from Boscán's. The latter attempts, through echoes of Petrarch's poems and through the ordering of his own, to elaborate an alternative macrotext that will lead the reader to new understandings of both love and poetry. Garcilaso's approach is to marshal his poetic

resources so as to meet the challenge of specific problems often derived from his careful reading of Petrarch. Among those poetic resources are the language and techniques of cancionero poetry, the Catalan legacy of Ausías March, and the imitation of classical and secondary Italian poets. As Cruz argues (ibid., 71–72), Garcilaso's imitative technique involves an eclectic group of models, but while details may come from here or there, the overall conception of the poem is often, and often explicitly, taken from Petrarch. By manipulating diverse sources and traditions within a constant Petrarchist generic context, Garcilaso weaves his way through the boundaries demarcating various erotic codes.

Yet it is also possible to investigate how Garcilaso structured the reading experience of individual poems, for we have an invaluable resource in the Renaissance commentaries by Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas ("El Brocense," 1574), Fernando de Herrera (1580), and Tomás Tamayo de Vargas (1622) that document the way in which near contemporaries read and attempted to shape others' readings of his works.^[18] In addition, Rafael Lapesa, in his magisterial Trayectoría poética de Garcilaso , attempted a structured reading through a systematic, chronological examination of the texts. Lapesa's book held sway as the dominant interpretation of Garcilaso's poetry for nearly forty years, but in spite of the sensitivity of his readings and the degree of his erudition, as a global interpretation of Garcilaso it depends on some crucial assumptions: that the few poems we possess today are a large enough sample of his poetry to be considered representative; that a chronological sequence can be established; and that the keys to this chronology are Garcilaso's love for Isabel Freire and a set of phases in his career in which Petrarch replaced the cancionero as the primary source of influence, only to be supplanted in turn by Sannazaro and Virgil. Yet a series of recent articles has shown that Garcilaso and Freire may never have met, and that the myth of their love dates from more than a century after his death (see Goodwyn; Darst, "Garcilaso's Love"; and Waley).^[19] Without Freire there are no grounds for Lapesa's chronology and hence for his trajectory, or for the structure of his reading. Moreover, as we shall see, the concept of phases in Garcilaso's career has been exaggerated. Lapesa's book is invaluable for the insights about individual poems and their relations to their sources (hence Nadine Ly's attempt to rehabilitate part of the trajectory on purely stylistic

grounds). Freed of the trajectory, post-Lapesan Garcilaso criticism can open up new issues in both source scholarship and interpretation.

Traditional Garcilaso criticism has tended to discount the most clearly imitative poems as literary exercises difficult to accommodate in a biographically centered trajectory. One such poem, troubling to the dominant interpretation of Garcilaso, is sonnet 22, in which the poet expresses, with Ovidian wit, a desire to look through the beloved's dress to see her breasts; the poem ends with a quotation from Petrarch's canzone 23:

  Con ansia estrema de mirar qué tiene
vuestro pecho escondido allá en su centro
y ver si a lo de fuera lo de dentro
en aparencia y ser igual conviene,
  en él puse la vista, mas detiene
de vuestra hermosura el duro encuentro
mis ojos, y no passan tan adentro
que miren lo que'l alma en sí contiene.
  Y assí se quedan tristes en la puerta
hecha, por mi dolor, con essa mano,
que aun a su mismo pecho no perdona;
  donde vi claro mi esparança muerta
y el golpe, que en vos hizo amor en vano,
non esservi passato oltra la gona .

With great desire to see what your chest holds there hidden in its center, and to see whether the inside is equal to the outside in appearance and being, I put my eyesight to it, but your beauty detains my eyes from a stiff encounter, and they do not penetrate enough to see what the soul in itself contains.

And so they remain joyless at the door made, for my suffering, by that hand which does not forgive its own breast; thus I saw clearly the death of my hope, and the blow love gave you in vain, never having passed beneath your gown .

The seed for the poem is its final line, which Garcilaso filches—an action that itself imitates Petrarch's canzone 70, in which the concluding lines of the stanzas are taken from other poets.^[20] Garcilaso also turns Petrarch's own meaning on its head, thus performing one of the verbal tricks most praised by Castiglione, that of taking a well-known phrase but subverting its intent. The choice of this phrase shows Garcilaso to have been a careful and imaginative reader of

Petrarch; here as elsewhere, he develops the source in an original way that also comments on the underlying text. In the canzone , the line referred to Petrarch's own gown, not yet penetrated by the arrows of love. Garcilaso seizes on the full erotic potential of the unpenetrated gown, appropriate as neither he nor love has gotten under the dress of the woman in question. Yet that the quote is from canzone 23 is itself significant, because that poem ends with Petrarch, like Actaeon happening upon the naked Diana, transformed into a stag and torn apart by hounds. Garcilaso's sonnet too is ultimately about a frustrated act of voyeurism, and the woman quickly covering her body recalls this myth and thus underscores the degree of violation implicit in the poet's ocular desire. In Petrarch, the Diana myth serves as the basis for a visual fetishism that extends throughout the collection (see Nancy Vickers); Garcilaso for his part gives the poet's eye an odd will of its own; it desires a "duro encuentro" and hopes to pass literally into the beloved's body.

Consequently it is not surprising that the poem has been very troubling to the commentators. El Brocense remarks,

Más fácil sería en este Soneto refutar lo que otros han dicho, que decir cosa cierta: porque no se sabe el intento a que fue hecho. Parece que él la topó algún día descompuesta, y descubierto el pecho, y ella pesándole dello, acudió con la mano a cubrillo, y hirióse con algún alfiler de la beatilla en él, de lo cual el Poeta se duele. (269)

It would be easier to refute what others have said about this sonnet, than to say anything certain; for the purpose for which it was made is unknown. It seems that he found her undressed one day, with her breast uncovered, and she, regretting this, attempted to cover it with her hand, and hurt herself with a pin from the linen, causing the poet's distress.

El Brocense diverts the reader's attention with an anecdote about an accidental injury that has no basis in the text: the note implies that others have found the poem objectionable, and it attempts to rescue Garcilaso by inventing an elaborate story about how he happened to see his beloved uncovered. Herrera takes a different tack but also tries to distract; his explanation centers on the word "hermosura" in the second line, giving it an extended Neoplatonic gloss and using it as the basis for an interpretative reading, such that Garcilaso "paró

en la belleza exterior, yendo a la contemplación de la celestial del espíritu" (stopped at exterior beauty, while on his way to contemplate that celestial [beauty] of the spirit, 368). He also severely criticizes Garcilaso for incorporating into his poetry another poet's words in another language, though acknowledging Petrarch's own example in this regard. Tamayo ignores El Brocense's anecdote and rejects Herrera's spiritual reading, instead interpreting "la puerta / hecha . . . con esa mano" to mean a collar that she herself had made, and concentrating his attention on the issue of interlinguistic borrowing (603). José Nicolás de Azara (1765) merely declares that the previous interpretations are not satisfactory (668); and Lapesa largely ignores the poem, commenting only that, with its last line in Italian, it was most probably written in Italy (193).

The commentators may be right in seeing an anecdotal basis for this sonnet, but it is important for us in that it exemplifies how Garcilaso misreads Petrarch by playing with the codes of erotic poetry. What is troubling about this poem is its expression of erotic desire not through the canonized medium of cancionero erotic poetry (see Whinnom, 374–81), but within the confines of a self-conscious (and self-signaled) Petrarchan tradition. Interpreters feel that they are faced with the necessity of either spiritualizing its intent or dismissing it as a decadent Italianism, in order to preserve intact their horizons of expectations. Yet what Garcilaso has done is to remotivate a highly suggestive line of Petrarch's, wasted, as it were, in its original context, by plundering canzone 23 and making the spoils unmistakably his own. The procedure, moreover, is a typical one for him; this poem is only the most obvious instance of Garcilaso's appropriation of a Petrarchan motif.

The sonnet is also important in building a bridge to canzone 23, a poem that underlies, covertly or overtly, much of Garcilaso's work. In poem 23, the first canzone of the Rime sparse , Petrarch narrates his youthful imperviousness to Love until the latter, with the aid of a powerful lady, transformed him into a green laurel: his hair turned into the leaves "di che sperato avea già lor corona" (I had formerly hoped would be my crown, 44), and his feet "diventar due radici sovra l'onde / non di Peneo ma d'un più altero fiume" (becoming two roots beside the waves not of Peneus but of a prouder river, 48–49). The details of his metamorphosis look back to the myth of Apollo and Daphne as told by Ovid; Petrarch, by means such as the

leaves and the name of the river, specifically recalls the myth, yet he also represses the connection. As Barnard argued (The Myth , 83), because Daphne prefigures Laura, one expects her to be the transformed; but then by extension Apollo, in his erotic pursuit, would be a prototype of the poet, an admission of sexual desire too direct for Petrarch, whose entire collection is predicated on defenses against his sexuality. Thus by transforming himself, rather than Laura, Petrarch attempts to allude to and at the same time evade the erotic passion that was the basis of the myth. Moreover, although this metamorphosis is crucial to the collection, it is not the poet's only transformation in the poem. Like Cygnus lamenting the loss of Phaeton, he is turned into a swan; confessing his love, Laura transforms him, through her continuing disdain, first into stone and then, like Byblis, into a fountain of tears. Moved by pity, she restores him, only to have him offend again and be reduced, like Echo, into rock; released yet again, he sees her bathing and is changed, like Actaeon, into a stag. Like the Daphne myth, each of these others has a specifically erotic dimension that Petrarch tries simultaneously to recall and avoid, and with each transformation the tension grows as the "innocent" poet violates the sexual taboo even more. Like the myth of Daphne, the others too have to do with water, which thus acquires a symbolic association with a sexuality that lurks beneath the surface.

Expanding on canzone 23, Durling, Freccero, and Sturm-Maddox, among others, remind us of the nature and importance of Petrarch's love experience. Unlike Dante, for whom Beatrice became a means to salvation, Petrarch never fully overcomes his love for Laura, a love that is in its essence sinful because it is founded on his sexual desire for her beauty. The very symbol he assigns to her—the eponymous laurel tree—stands for poetic glory but at the same time reminds us, through a contrasting typological relationship with the fig in Augustine's Confessions , of his idolatry. Whatever else she may represent she remains, at least within the fiction of the poem collection, a woman he loves, and beneath many of the poems there is a strong undercurrent of eroticism. It is precisely this undercurrent that Garcilaso brings to the surface, not only by realizing the ambiguous potential of the line he directly quotes, but also by alluding to one of the principal myths in Petrarch's poem. The result is to reinvest the Petrarchan imitation with an Ovidian wit that is both anti-

thetical to and necessary for the original. To perform this operation Garcilaso must take Petrarch apart, both psychologically and literarily, and then reconstruct the remains.

Another example of the use of Ovidian style within a Petrarchist context can be found in Garcilaso's thirteenth sonnet, which retells the crucial Daphne and Apollo myth. As noted, while using the myth as the cornerstone of his collection, Petrarch in canzone 23 is evasive about its direct significance, merely alluding to the violent passion that caused the pursued nymph's transformation into a tree. Garcilaso by contrast identifies directly with Apollo:

  A Dafne ya los braços le crecían
y en luengos ramos bueltos se mostravan;
en verdes hojas vi que se tornavan
los cabellos quel oro escurecían;
  de áspera corteza se cubrían
los tiernos miembros que aun bullendo 'stavan;
los blancos pies en tierra se hincavan
y en torcidas rayzes^[*]  se bolvían.
(13.1–8)

Daphne's arms were already growing and showing themselves changed into long branches; into green leaves I saw that hair turn that had once made gold dim: with a harsh bark were covered those members that still moved, and the white feet sank into the earth and into twisted roots were transformed.

The key here is the word "saw," "en verdes hojas vi que se tornavan." Herrera, the only one of Garcilaso's Renaissance annotators to comment on the word, thought its only purpose was to fill out the line (349). Yet its use also recalls several key lines of Petrarch's, including the idolatrous sestina 30 "Giovane donna sotto un verde lauro / vidi" (A young woman beneath a green laurel / I saw, Rime sparse 30.1–2), and canzone 23 itself, "e i capei vidi far di quella fronde" (and hair I saw turned into those leaves, 43). But in the canzone Petrarch sees his own transformation, while in Garcilaso's sonnet the object of his vision is not the poet himself. He may be describing a painting, which would link this poem to his many ekphrastic compositions, particularly the third eclogue (see Lapesa, 164–65). But he also figures himself as Apollo the pursuer (see Barnard, The Myth , 115–16), putting the poet—and by extension the reader—directly in Apollo's place, seeing the transformation as he

saw it and feeling his frustration. Like Ovid, Garcilaso presents Apollo's loss of Daphne's beauty in terms of synecdoches: arms become branches; hair, leaves; and feet, roots; while her still-heaving body is not so much transformed as covered by the bark, eternally denied to the pursuing lover. Lapesa, unable to fit this poem in a trajectory centered on Garcilaso's relationship with Freire, correctly places it in the class of the poet's "plastic" compositions, but emphasizes the connection to Ovid, going so far as to link it with other late poems in which Garcilaso abandons subjective inspiration and Petrarch's influence is either weak or completely absent (182). Yet subjective vision is what this sonnet is about, and considering the role of this myth in Petrarch, El Brocense is surely correct in asserting that Garcilaso imitates Petrarch (268), an assertion unchallenged by Herrera (see also Barnard, The Myth , 110–15).

In the tercets, however, the poet steps back and comments on what he sees, employing what Rivers in his notes characterizes as "una agudeza . . . conceptista" (metaphysical wit, 101):

  Aquel que fue la causa de tal daño,
a fuerça de llorar, crecer hazía
este árbol, que con lágrimas regava.
  ¡Oh miserable 'stado, o mal tamaño,
que con llorarla crezca cada día
la causa y la razón por que llorava!
(13.9–14)

He who was the cause of so much damage, by the force of his weeping made this tree grow, as with tears he watered it. Oh miserable state, oh great suffering, for by sobbing over her every day, he causes the reason for his weeping to grow.

Through this remark the situation is transformed, as Garcilaso finds a way for Apollo's bodily effusions nonetheless to fertilize the elusive nymph and to make her "hojas" (leaves/pages) grow; on an allegorical level, to make poetry divine. By emphasizing Apollo's continuing ability to inseminate, Garcilaso distances himself from Petrarch's insistence on his own sterility ("i' non fu' mai quel nuvol d'oro / che poi discese in preziosa pioggia / sí che 'l foco di Giove in parte spense" [I was never the cloud of gold that once descended in a precious rain so that it partly quenched the fire of Jove], Rime sparse 23.161–63; see Nancy Vickers, 267). At the same time, by ac-

knowledging Apollo's responsibility for the alteration, Garcilaso also recalls and critiques Petrarch's evasions in the original canzone . The closing witticism is based on a combination of sources: as Barnard points out (The Myth , 127), in Ovid Apollo designates the laurel as the tree of poetry, while in sonnet 228 Petrarch feeds it with his tears. Garcilaso draws on both sources, exacerbating the implications of the latter's image by combining the two: the tree prompts the agudeza which is emblematic of poetry itself.^[21] Far from being, as for Petrarch, a rival, Apollo here becomes the poet's accomplice and alter ego, as together they (and the reader) mouth the closing witticism. Hence the loss of the nymph Daphne is poetically empowering, for had he had his way with her, there would have been no need for the remark, and no opportunity for the poem. In this way Garcilaso thematizes the double bases of poetry in both emotional and literary experience, the effective fusion of which has led so many readers over time to interpret the poems autobiographically.

A further example of the Spaniard's relation to Petrarch can be found in Garcilaso's eleventh sonnet, the famous "Hermosas ninfas," in which the poet's tears, in sonnet 13 emblematically linked to poetry, also appear. According to Herrera, the opening line of the poem—"Hermosas ninfas, que en el rio metidas"—has its basis in Petrarch's sonnet 303, in which the nymphs are only one party in a general apostrophe to all of nature, which is invited to hear his woes. Garcilaso shifts the nymphs from Petrarch's woodlands ("o vaghi abitator de' verdi boschi, / o ninfe" [O wandering inhabitants of the green woods, o nymphs], Rime sparse 303.9–10) and places them instead in a liquid environment suggested by the following line, an allusion to the river Sorgue ("voi che 'l fresco erboso fondo / del liquido cristallo alberga et pasce" [you whom the grassy floor of the liquid crystal shelters and feeds], 10–11); the procedure again singles out an element and exploits its erotic potential. As an eclectic imitator he combines and develops reminiscences of Virgil, Sannazaro, Bernardo Tasso, and others, presenting the nymphs in a highly artificial underwater habitat, built of shining stones and glass columns. Throughout there is understandably an emphasis on their watery surroundings: they live in the river; the stones of their palace are shiny because wet; the crystal columns recall a foamy cascade; the nymphs are literally drunk ("embebecidas") with the medium

that envelops them, one that acquires a special dimension when one recalls the multiple instances of water-related erotic myths in canzone 23. In this context the last two lines ("convertido en agua aquí llorando, / podréys allá d'espacio consolarme," 13–14) take on a particular significance. While the bulk of the sextet concentrates on the nymphs, Garcilaso's own potential transformation into a fountain in the last two lines again returns us to canzone 23 and the myth of Byblis; it thus functions as what Cruz calls an implied mythological metaphor, a device typical of Garcilaso (see "La mitología como retórica").

The commentators found nothing objectionable about this sonnet; Tamayo's explanation of the obvious, "El XI es a las lágrimas que el sentimiento de verse ausente le hacía derramar" (602), is the only hint that another interpretation might be possible. It is important to recognize that Garcilaso may have been employing erotic code-words in this poem, for "nymph" was an extremely common term used for prostitute (see Alonso Hernández, 555), while "weeping" was sometimes used for ejaculation (see Alzieu, 343), and riverbanks were places for sexual encounters (recall the escudero's attempts at seduction in Lazarillo de Tormes ). Yet if there is some erotic ambiguity in the poem, it is only a small portion of the pleasure to be derived from it. There are no explicit descriptions of sexual acts in Garcilaso's poem, no suggestions of sexual plenitude; the riverine prostitutes, if that is what they are, are transformed into nymphs who pursue aristocratic pastimes, and even their bodies are not specifically invoked. The first-person point of view increases the lyric value by placing the reader in the poet's situation, just as the use of a subjective point of view in the earlier sonnet had placed the poet in Apollo's. The existence of alternative meanings gives this poem interest by creating tension between the traditional Petrarchan lament on which it is based and its transformation into a coy and aristocratic compliment initiating a sexual encounter. The poem thereby again serves as a critique of the very tradition from which it takes its point of departure.

Yet this ambiguity is but one element in the poem. The nymphs addressed in Petrarch's sonnet were purely rhetorical, existentially distinct from the weeping poet, whose transformation into a fountain, in the canzone , only underlined his isolation from the rest of the world. It is, however, not primarily the Petrarchan subtexts that

give Garcilaso's poem its erotic dimension, but instead the description of the nymphs themselves, like court ladies sometimes weaving, sometimes gossiping about their lovers. By commanding them to leave off their occupations, "alçando / vuestras rubias cabeças a mirarme" (raising your blond heads to see me, 9–10), Garcilaso conveys that he and the nymphs belong to the same world, and that mythology is not merely a poetic adornment but a part of existence.^[22] Their reality in turn makes plausible the poet's own potential transformation into the very water that courses around them. Once again the poem closes with a witticism implying that all is not lost, and that a union between himself and the nymphs through the medium of mythological metaphor is both possible and desirable. In this context the erotic potential of the two final words far exceeds what it attains if one bases the reading on the simple equivalence of nymphs and prostitutes; but the power of that eroticism is lost if, like Lapesa, one emphasizes the borrowing of details from Sannazaro rather than the basis in Petrarch.^[23]

Tears again play a prominent if very different role in yet another poem, the sonnet "Estoy contino en lágrimas bañado."

  Estoy contino en lágrimas bañado,
rompiendo el ayre con sospiros,
y más me duele el no osar deziros
que he llegado por vos a tal estado.
(Rivers ed., 38.1–4)

I am continuously bathed in tears, breaking the air with my sighs, and it pains me most not to dare to tell you that I have reached this state because of you.

The date of this poem is completely uncertain, a problem compounded by its not being included in the first edition of Garcilaso's works and by its thematic similarity to, but stylistic differences from, sonnet 1 (see Lapesa, 197; Rivers ed., 162). As in many of Petrarch's poems, we find the poet here in an extreme state of desolation, with a familiar emphasis on his tears and sighs, while these are discounted as inconsequential in comparison to that silence which has been imposed on him and which keeps him from voicing his suffering directly to his beloved. Lapesa links this feature to the cancionero tradition, in which the poet's silence arises from a situa-

tion that forbids speech, and uses that association in turn to posit a series of poems characteristic of Garcilaso's early career:

Las producciones que con mayor fundamento pueden considerarse anteriores a la estancia de Garcilaso en Nápoles abundan en rasgos no petrarquescos propios al de la lírica recopilada en los cancioneros. La sobriedad nerviosa va unida a una extraordinaria austeridad imaginativa: las canciones I y II, los sonetos I, IV y XXVI son desnuda exposición de afectos, vigorosa unas veces, tiernamente conmovedora otras, sin una imagen que se cruce en la escueta manifestación del íntimo sentir. (54)

Those works which can most surely be considered prior to Garcilaso's stay in Naples abound in un-Petrarchan remnants more proper to the lyric gathered in the cancioneros . Nervous sobriety is united to an austere imagination: canciones 1 and 2, sonnets 1, 4, and 26 are a naked exposition of affects, sometimes vigorous, sometimes tenderly moving, but without a single image that might interfere with the direct manifestation of intimate feelings.

Yet in sonnet 38 the poet's silence is not something he boasts of because of his "greater gentility" (Lapesa, 53); rather, as in Petrarch, it is something imposed by the woman. The opening phrase both recalls and contrasts with canzone 23's "lagrima ancor non mi bagnava il petto" (nor tear yet bathed my breast, 27) as well as with the subsequent myth of Byblis, a punishment imposed on Petrarch for failing to keep silent. Thus Garcilaso opens his poem with a direct, pointed allusion to his model and to the issue of silencing, reinforced by the fourth line of the poem, imitated from Rime sparse 134.14 ("in questo stato son, Donna, per vui" [in this state am I Lady, on account of you]; see Mele, 243). Silencing, for Petrarch, had caused him to resort to writing ("le vive voci m'erano interditte, / ond' io gridai con carta et con inconstro" [words spoken aloud were forbidden me; so I cried out with paper and ink], Rime sparse 23.98–99; see Nancy Vickers). Garcilaso alludes to the same impetus, while also invoking the Ovidian tradition of silent speech by boasting about his ability to transform his suffering into tears and sighs while not uttering the forbidden words. As the poem is addressed to the lady, he is, slyly, communicating the very thing that he pretends to keep hidden; as his suffering is sublimated into tears and

sighs, so too his speech is sublimated into the writing of the poem, which will accomplish what is otherwise forbidden to him.

The rest of the poem continues to combine Petrarchan and cancionero reminiscences. Lines 5–6, "que viéndome do estoy y en lo que he andado / por el camino estrecho de seguiros," do indeed recall, as Rivers noted (ed., 162), the first lines of the first sonnet, "Quando me paro a contemplar mi 'stado / y a ver los passos por dó m'han traydo^[*] ." Yet even that (for Lapesa) exemplary instance of cancionero influence on Garcilaso had its roots, as Rivers notes (ed., 66), in Petrarch's sonnet, "Quand' io mi volgo indietro a mirar gli anni" (When I turn back to gaze at the years, Rime sparse 298.1). Yet undeniably there are cancionero elements in sonnet 38, particularly in the bleak landscape through which the poet wanders, reminiscent of Boscán's second canción , and which culminate in the almost surrealistic final image, praised by Herrera as an "hermosíssima alegoría" (388): "sobre todo, me falta ya la lumbre / de la esperança, con que andar solía / por la oscura región de vuestro olvido" (above all, I lack the light of hope, with which I once wandered through the dark regions of your forgetfulness, 12–14). Thus the poem has its basis in a textual deviation from Petrarch's canzone 23, is elaborated through reminiscences of both Petrarch and the cancionero , and closes with a witticism that is Garcilaso's own. The imitative technique here is no different from that of the other sonnets we have examined; just as in sonnet 11, eclectic sources, and their embedded erotic codes, are marshaled to meet the challenge posed by a Petrarchan incipit . Instead of constituting a distinct and inferior phase in Garcilaso's poetic trajectory, the cancionero influence is but one more of the many poetic resources on which he draws throughout his career.

One final example from Garcilaso's sonnets will allow us to assess his use of Petrarch:

  Un rato se levanta mi esperança,
mas cansada d'averse levantado,
torna a caer, que dexa, a mal mi grado,
libre el lugar a la desconfiança
  ¿Quién suffrirá tan áspera mudança
del bien al mal? ¡O, coraçón cansado,
esfuerça en la miseria de tu 'stado,
que tras fortuna suele aver bonança!

  Yo mesmo emprenderé a fuerça de braços
romper un monte que otro no rompiera,
de mil inconvinientes muy espesso;
  muerte, prisión no pueden, ni embaraços,
quitarine de yr a veros, como quiera,
desnudo 'spirtu o hombre en carne y huesso.
(sonnet 4)

My hope rises for a while. But tired from having risen it turns to fall, leaving, against my will, free space for despair. Who will suffer these harsh transformations from well-being to suffering? Oh tired heart! Make an effort, in your miserable state, for behind fortune there is often happiness.

I myself will undertake with the strength of my arms to break a mountain none other would break, dense with a thousand troubles. Neither death, nor prison, nor burdens can prevent me from seeing you, one way or another, a naked spirit or a man of flesh and bone.

Lapesa (83–85) sees this poem as the product of a middle period in Garcilaso's production, between Isabel Freire's wedding and her death, when he had not yet fully assimilated Petrarch's influence. Thus although the sonnet takes both its beginning and its conclusion from Petrarch's canzone 37, lines 5–6 closely parallel a source in Ausías March; above all, Garcilaso fails to imbue his poem with the melancholy of the Petrarchan original, transforming it instead into a supreme cry of independence, the grandiose boast of one who expects to govern himself even after death (85; see also Mariscal, 119). To these sources one might, with El Brocense, add Bernardo Tasso, Sannazaro, Theocritus, and Horace, and note an affinity to Garcilaso's own second eclogue; or, with Herrera, add sources in a hymn to Priapus and in Pliny, as well as a parallel in Garcilaso's second elegy. Yet whatever the sources, Lapesa is essentially correct; the bursting of the impeding mountain rewrites Petrarch's "me celan questi luoghi alpestri et fieri" (these mountainous and wild places hide them from me, Rime sparse 37.104), and Garcilaso's final lines are a far cry from Petrarch's, spoken to the canzone itself:

non la toccar, ma reverente ai piedi
le di' ch' io sarò là tosto ch' io possa,
o spirto ignudo od uom di carne et d'ossa.
(Rime sparse 37.118–20)

Do not touch at, but reverently at her feet tell her that I shall be there as soon as I can, either a disembodied spirit or a man of flesh and bone.

Garcilaso's poem is dynamic in conception; it begins with the familiar Petrarchan image of hope, which is so weary that being aroused it falls back again in exhaustion, leaving the way open for despair.^[24] But Garcilaso urges the heart to rouse itself and offers with his own strength to break apart the mountain that is oppressing it, such that neither death, nor prison, nor burdens can prevent him, dead or alive, from attaining his goal. Thus although the poem begins with images of exhaustion and despair, it ends on notes of invincible strength. Yet while closely cleaving to his source text, he completely revises the implicit codes of Petrarchan love poetry. By emphasizing his ability to overcome suffering, he suggests his parallel ability to emulate and surpass Petrarch through a show of physical, emotional, and poetic strength. Once again, Garcilaso has used Petrarch as a launching pad for poems that are unmistakably the Spaniard's own.

The sonnets examined so far come from all of the phases in Garcilaso's poetic trajectory. In each instance he has taken a specific element from Petrarch—sometimes some lines, sometimes an image or a concept—and used it as the seed from which he then elaborates a poem through eclectic imitation of Sannazaro, Ausías March, the cancionero , and other influences. This imitative technique is one Garcilaso employed in the longer canciones as well. For example, the second canción begins with the very Petrarchan image of the poet "esparziendo / mis quexas d'una en una / al viento" (scattering my complaints one by one to the wind, 4–6), but the rest of the poem is developed with acute rhymes and wordplay more often associated with the cancionero; Lapesa at first classifies it with the early poems (55–56) but then concludes that it is Petrarchan in general tone if not in specific detail (75–76). Similar strategies of both composition and, later, interpretation exist for the third and fourth canciones . Often, too, the poems comment on a Petrarchan source, and so, like Boscán's collection, exist in tension with it. The knowledgeable reader of a sonnet like number 22 recognizes the source in canzone 23, understands how Garcilaso has altered its meaning, and sees what a suggestive line it was in the first place. Ultimately, the con-

flict with Petrarch is embodied in the very tension between formal, Italianate elements (genre, diction, the hendecasyllabic line) and the Castilian language itself.

Yet if in the sonnets Garcilaso plays with the conventions of Petrarchan poetry, he submits them to a thoroughgoing critique in two longer poems, the fifth canción (actually a Horatian ode in liras , a form borrowed from Bernardo Tasso), and the second eclogue, both from his later Neapolitan period. The transformation into a fountain of tears from sonnet 11 reappears in the canción , also known as the "Ode ad florem Gnidi." The poem is an appeal to Violante Sanseverino, a Neapolitan lady who has refused the attentions of a friend of Garcilaso's, and the friend's situation is thus that of a classic Petrarchan spurned lover. Lapesa, echoing Menéndez y Pelayo, calls the poem a precious toy (154), while Dunn has added much to our understanding by explicating some of its Neoplatonic dimensions. Yet this poem of Garcilaso's in particular demands to be read in terms of the "inelegant associations" Alzieu found typical of the erotic tradition (x).^[25] Garcilaso's friend, Mario Galeota, is identified by means of a pun one-third of the way into the poem, "aquel cativo / . . . / que 'stá . . . / al remo condenado, / en la concha de Venus amarrado" (that captive condemned to row, bound in Venus's shell, verses 31–35). The image of the galley slave is meant to recall Galeota's name, and the Venus shell recalls the myth of Venus and Mars, which had occupied the first third of the poem. Yet the word "concha" had associations with female genitalia so indelicate that even Herrera could not overlook them:

Fingen que Venus va en concha por el mar, dejando la causa principal, que no es tan honesta que la permita nuestra lengua; porque el mantenimiento de este género conmueve el incentive de la lujuria. (411)

They pretend that Venus traveled across the sea in a shell, leaving aside the principal reason, which is not so honest that our tongue would permit it; for maintaining this type of thing is an incentive to lust.

Tamayo in turn notes similar lascivious uses of the word by Plautus and Tibullus. As Dunn showed, this part of the poem is primarily an imitation and inversion of Horace, Ode I.8, where love for Lydia had made Sybaris effeminate. Here, however, it is precisely

the Petrarchan situation of unreciprocated love that makes the friend a slave to a sexual object and keeps him from his manly duties; the blatantly obscene reference to the seashell signals a series of erotic code-words that allow interpretation of the succeeding stanzas:

    Por ti, como solía,
del áspero cavallo no corrige
    la furia y gallardía,
    ni con freno la rige,
ni con bivas espuelas ya l'aflige;
    por ti con diestra mano
no rebuelve la espada presurosa,
    y en el dudoso llano
    huye la polvorosa
palestra como sierpe ponçoñosa;
    por ti su blanda musa,
en lugar de la cíthera sonante,
    tristes querellas usa
    que con llanto abundante
hazen bañar el rostro del amante.
(36–50)

Because of you he no longer, as he did, corrects the fury and boldness of the frenzied horse, nor controls it with his rein, nor with his living spurs afflicts it; because of you with skilled hand he does not wave the quick sword, and in the plain of doubt he flees the dusty field like a poisonous serpent; because of you his soft muse, in place of sounding the lyre, he makes sad complaints that with abundant tears bathe the lover's face.

Thus we have Galeota neither directing nor spurring his horse, no longer waving his sword in his hand, fleeing the battlefield as if it were a poisonous snake, and bathing his face in tears instead of playing the guitar. In the Alzieu anthology and the Alonso Hernández dictionary, we find that swords, horses, and snakes are all attested as phallic metaphors; weeping stands for ejaculation, guitars (like seashells) represent female sexual organs, and battlefields suggest beds (recall Garcilaso's own "y duro campo de batalla el lecho" [and a hard battlefield my bed], sonnet 17.8). The use of erotic codewords in this poem is all the more striking because of its placement in a new generic context, distinct from the cancionero , where tradition sanctioned it.

But how do these details add to our understanding of the ode? This question returns us to the beginning of the poem, for the most famous of all erotic battlefields was the "Justa de Marte y Venus." Like the story of Venus's birth, this myth had allegorical importance for the Neoplatonists, who saw it as the victory of love over war, the reconciliation of opposites, and the source of harmony; but in addition to these dimensions, it had tremendous potential as a story of sexual pleasure: in Ovid's version Mars, caught in the act, says the ridicule was well worth the time spent with Venus. Now this myth was introduced into Garcilaso's poem in a curious way, alluded to by means of a juxtaposition: using contrary-to-fact constructions, the poet tells Violante (already identified with Venus in that Nido, her neighborhood in Naples, is eponymous with the site of a temple to Aphrodite) that, were he able, he would not sing of Mars's fury but of her beauty and of the armor she wears. This armor, "el aspereza de que estás armada" (that harshness with which you are armed, 25), does double duty as an allusion to her treatment of Galeota and to Mars's armor, worn by the sexually victorious Venus.^[26] Yet Garcilaso cannot sing of Violante's victory because it has not taken place. In Ovid there were two victors in the struggle: Venus triumphed, thereby proving the sexual superiority of women, but so did Mars, who did not have such a bad time of it. Garcilaso would rather sing of Venus than of Mars—that is, of love instead of war—but is faced with a martial woman and an emasculated man. He envisions a victory for Venus as one for the erotic principle whose image the woman Violante should be, yet by taking the opposite role, through her "aspereza," she robs Galeota of his just attributes. A joust between them in turn would allow Galeota to realize himself fully as a man, both sexually and militarily, by releasing his horse, waving the sword, going to battle, and so on. Indeed, just as Galeota has lost his masculinity because of his sexual frustration, so too Violante is threatened with an imminent loss of her female sexual identity as she turns into a statue, a permanently inaccessible image of Venus, cold and, through its hardness, more masculine than feminine. For her instruction, Garcilaso introduces at the conclusion of the ode the myth of Anaxarete, with an extended narration of her transformation into stone. As Rico suggests (337), this description recalls canzone 23, while the exchange of sexual roles invokes (ironically) the motif of the lover transformed into

the beloved; Cruz strengthens the connection to Petrarch by recalling Laura's complex role as a Medusa figure, both petrifying the poet's heart and being herself made stony by his idolatry (Imitación , 67–69).

Far from being (as Lapesa put it, 155) a poem that does not captivate the reader, who longs to lose himself in the poet's sweet, deep soul, this occasional poem turns out to be one of Garcilaso's most mature and personal creations, imbued not with the details of a fictional autobiography, but with a meditation on the true functions of love and passion. The poem thus represents an inversion not only of Horace but of the entire courtly and Petrarchan code, with its valuation of frustrated love. Furthermore, as Lázaro Carreter notes, Garcilaso's purpose is to offer a demonstration of the strength of love, interwoven with an appeal to a beauty on a friend's behalf, showing us Galeota made a slave by Venus's shell, and thus materializing with malice what was usually sublimated ("La 'Ode,'" 125). By infusing hendecasyllabic poetry with an erotic polysemy proper to the Castilian tradition, Garcilaso seeks both to show and to criticize the ultimate focus of Petrarchan fetishism. For Garcilaso, moving strongly toward the values embedded in the erotic code, sexual consummation emerges as a necessity for men and women alike to maintain both their proper social roles and their adult sexual identities. Tears like Apollo's are good for poetry but bad for life.

A situation similar to that of Mario Galeota occurs in the second eclogue; there, the shepherd Salicio encounters Albanio beside a fountain, and the latter describes how with the onset of adolescence he fell prey to the attractions of his childhood companion, Camila. One hot day, on returning from the hunt and cooling themselves by the same deserted fountain, he admitted his love for her. The heat, the isolation, and the presence of the fountain all seem to be pointing the narrative toward a prelapsarian consummation, but Camila took offense and fled; later, when he encountered her yet again by the fountain, he attempted to rape her. Since the late sixteenth century critics have recognized the eighth prosa of Sannazaro's Arcadia as the source for this episode; Azar's careful analysis shows how in fact Garcilaso has assembled details from tales in the seventh, eighth, and ninth prose (respectively, Sincero the courtly lover, Carino the pastoral lover, and Clónico the mad lover). He thus carefully reassembles the Petrarchan persona Sannazaro had taken apart and

reproduces that key situation, also present in Petrarch's canzone 23: it is the lover's confession of his sexuality that earns him the beloved's scorn, which in turn completely emasculates him. Yet by presenting the emotions in a quasi-dramatic form, not as his but as those of the shepherd Albanio, Garcilaso achieves a type of alienation effect (Ly, distanciation [280]; Cruz, fragmentación [Imitación , 94]) that allows him to present a critique of those emotions. As Cruz notes, Albanio personifies Petrarchism, and Garcilaso recognizes the fallacy of an always imitative Petrarchism that engraves the sentiment of absence on the figure of the lover, and the mimetic sterility that would eventually result from the continuous imitation of Sannazaro's pastoralism (ibid., 94). Albanio's suffering in no way ennobles him, for the rejected lover is presented as both mad and in the throes of a specifically adolescent passion, which, as in the ode, has robbed him of his proper social role, as indicated by the various references to his neglected sheep.

The myth of Narcissus is recalled twice in the narrative, when the characters look into the fountain to see their reflections: first Camila, who is told by Albanio that within it she will see the woman he loves; then Albanio himself, who goes mad thinking his body has been stolen. Upon seeing herself, Camila ran away, frightened by the sight of her adolescent self and of the new relationship to Albanio it implied.^[27] It is important to interpret fuente not as gushing phallically, but as a still spring or a pool; only then does the secondary meaning of the word, as a female sexual metaphor, become clear (see Alonso Hernández, 371).^[28] Then Albanio, seeing himself caught within it, goes mad and loses all power (he is unable to consummate his suicide, is knocked over by a mere gust of wind, and so on), because he is, like Galeota, the equivalent of a prisoner in Venus's shell. That the encounters in the first half of the poem all take place around the fountain further transform it into an umbilicus mundi that is the center of all the characters' lives. Significantly, Albanio's cure will be performed by Severo, who can control the course of rivers and who proclaims a prophecy given to him by the god of the Tormes. The duke of Alba, whose life is narrated in the second half of the poem, is noted for both his sexuality ("ardiendo y desseando estar ya echado" [burning and desiring to be laid], line 1416, a line Herrera found "bajísim[a] . . . obscenidad y torpeza" [the lowest ob-

scenity and crudeness], 546) and his military prowess. The predominance of flowing over still waters in the second half of the poem further marks the shift to manhood and an active male sexuality.

For Garcilaso, as for Boscán, Petrarch is primarily a love poet; in the sonnets Garcilaso establishes a relationship with the Petrarchan love code through hyperbolic development or redirection and appropriation of motifs, but in the eclogue this code is finally revealed as an adolescent fantasy. As Cruz sees it, Garcilaso in the eclogues reinterprets Petrarchism in order to explore and exacerbate the problem of poetic imitation (Imitación , 91). Garcilaso's poetry depends on Petrarch's, but he struggles against an exclusively literary referent and tries to make it, if not mimetic, at least meaningful by reactivating those psychic elements latent in the Italian's poetry. In order to do so he employs erotic codes from the popular and cancionero traditions, yet these do not diminish the functional literariness of his poetry because they are as much literary codes as the Petrarchan one. Especially in the two longer poems analyzed here, they give the poems a semblance of realism that could be mistaken for mimesis; the poetry seems to be "about" something, and that "something" is closer to average human experience than is Petrarch's tortured Augustinian sensibility.

Our emphasis on intertextuality is thus not meant to diminish the poetry's capacity to convey meaning, but that meaning need not be limited to the emotions associated with the legend of Isabel Freire. The autobiographical interpretation of Garcilaso began in the Renaissance and has continued to the present day, in part because of the poems' rhetorical power, what Paul Julian Smith has called their sense of "presence." Smith goes on to note,

The romantic, almost novelistic quality of the life of Garcilaso de la Vega (his love for Isabel Freire and his early death in battle) has lent force to the biographical approach of more traditional modern critics who tend to see the excellence of the poem in the extent to which it inspires a sense of intimacy between poet and reader, a sense of the poet as immediate presence or voice. Yet there is much evidence that, even in the case of Garcilaso, Golden Age readers had little interest in sentimental biography. Herrera's Anotaciones offer a minute analysis of Garcilaso's linguistic practice to the neglect of his amorous motivation. (Writing , 50)

Smith is not entirely right here: there existed Renaissance novelizations of the life of Petrarch based on his sonnets; the legend of Isabel Freire dates to the seventeenth century, if not to Garcilaso's own day; and even Herrera occasionally postulates a "real world" inspiration for the poems. But Smith is correct in drawing our attention to Garcilaso's more artificial compositions and using these rather than the sentimental ones as paradigms; as we have seen, these artificial compositions can be as communicative as the sentimental. Not all emotions are amorous, however, even if presented in those terms, and Garcilaso's poetry also lends itself to other interpretations. In the following section we shall continue our analysis of Garcilaso by examining two poems in terms of how the Castilian poet thematizes and ultimately determines his place in literary history.

Garcilaso and the Primal Scene of Instruction

The first poem in which I find an allegorical account of Garcilaso's relation to the Petrarchan tradition is his tenth sonnet, also one of his most famous:

  ¡O dulces prendas por mi mal halladas,
dulces y alegres quando Dios quería,
juntas estáys en la memoria mía
y con ella en mi muerte conjuradas!
  ¿Quién me dixera, quando las passadas
oras que'n tanto bien por vos me vía,
que me aviades de ser en algún día
con tan grave dolor representadas?
  Pues en una ora junto me llevastes
todo el bien que por términos me distes,
lleváme junto el mal que me dexastes;
  si no, sospecharé que me pusistes
en tantos bienes porque desseastes
verme morir entre memorias tristes.

Oh sweet treasures, for my suffering encountered, sweet and joyful when God so wanted, joined in my memory and sworn together with it against my life! Who could have told me, in those past hours when you caused me so much joy, that some day you would present yourselves to me with so much pain?

For as in an hour you took away all that good which once you had measured out, take away also the suffering you left me; if not, I will

suspect you put me amid such joys because you wished to see me die amid sad memories.

The most common interpretation of the poem was laid down by El Brocense. "Parece que habla con algunos cabellos de su dama" (he seems to speak to some locks of his lady's hair, 267), he declared, and went on to propose as the poem's point of departure a line from Virgil's Aeneid: "Dulces exuviae dum fata, Deusque sinebant" (Oh relics, sweet while fate and the gods allowed! 4.651). Herrera does not dispute this attribution but, analyzing the poem rhetorically as an extended example of prosopopoeia, he goes on to cite other instances of the trope in Ovid, Propertius, and Horace, as well as a contemporary example by Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa. He also finds a subtle echo of the second line in a poem by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and sees a further source in Petrarch's canzone 50 ("Nella stagion . . . "); as he does not specify a particular line and there are no clear candidates, he may be referring to the general theme of the passage of time, which is the subject of that poem. This in turn suggests that Herrera subscribed to a more meditative interpretation of the sonnet—a notion echoed by Tamayo who, after praising the poem and again asserting its Virgilian source, explains that "su sujeto no es cosa señalada, sino cualquiera prenda de voluntad o imaginada o verdadera" (its subject is not indicated, but may be any token of her will, real or imagined, 602).

Yet in our own century critics have returned to the biographical gloss. As Elias Rivers notes in his commentary in the Obras completes (92), Heyward Keniston connects this poem with Nemoroso's address to his dead beloved's hair in the first eclogue and uses this link to determine that Garcilaso must have written the sonnet shortly after Isabel Freire's death. Tomás Navarro Tomás, William Entwistle, and Audrey Lumsden followed in Keniston's interpretative footsteps, the latter emphasizing the sonnet's greater abstraction. Lapesa, however, had some doubts, writing of this interpretation,

[N]ada obliga a ello; todas las frases del poema pueden explicarse por la presencia de cualquier objeto que, viva o muerta la amada, evocara en el poeta recuerdos de pretéritos días venturosos. Al no mencionarse las circunstancias concretas gana amplitud y profundidad la contraposición entre la felicidad perdida y el dolor presente. (Trayectoría , 128)

Nothing requires it; all of the phrases in the poem can be explained by the presence of any object that, whether the beloved was dead or alive, evoked in the poet memories of past happy days. By not mentioning concrete circumstances, the juxtaposition of lost happiness and present sorrow gains in proportion and depth.

He notes the rhythmic bifurcation of the first line (" . . . prendas | por . . . "), which emphasizes the two moments in time that are the theme of the poem; this pattern is repeated in lines 2 and 3 and ends only in the rhythmically tripartite fourth line, which both thematically and phonetically is subtly based on Petrarch's "o stelle congiurate a 'mpoverirme" (Rime sparse 329.2), but is strengthened through the substitution of the poet's death for his impoverishment. In one of his most nuanced analyses, Lapesa also notes the rhythmic irregularities of the second quatrain and the complex interplay of antitheses in the first tercet, which threaten to render the poem abstract and reminiscent of the cancionero , only to have the sense of emotional presence return in the closing lines. While the latter express the intensity of the poet's suffering, at the same time their poetic power underscores his strength.

Yet clearly for most twentieth-century critics the interpretative contaminatio with the first eclogue has led to a focus on the poem as an expression of mourning for a departed beloved. New readings of the sonnet were made possible by the contribution of Carroll Johnson. Taking as his point of departure Goodwyn's calling into question of the Isabel Freire legend, Johnson proposes reading Garcilaso's poem as being about the changing value of signifieds in a stable signifier. He notes that the Virgilian passage repeatedly cited as a source contains no references to hair, and that while El Brocense clearly had the first eclogue in mind when interpreting this sonnet, his only gloss to that passage in the eclogue is not to an event in Garcilaso's life but to its source in Sannazaro (290). He also recalls that by itself the word prenda means a bond or guarantee, or any other symbol of intent to comply with a promise. He summarizes: "A prenda , it seems, can be just about anything, material or otherwise. The essence of a prenda is not what it is materially, but that it stands for something else. It is a sign, whether of love, of willingness to repay a loan, of friendship or whatever" (291).^[29] Because of the prenda 's status as a sign, Johnson sees an ampler meaning to the poem, as a meditation on the passage of time and on how "a signi-

fier means whatever it means only within a particular signifying system or code, and that the same signifier in a different code means something different" (291–92). Yet if a prenda is a contract, or even a lock of hair given as a sign of love, its meaning does not change, only the poet's emotional relationship with it; in E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s classic formulation, there has been a change not in meaning but in value (146).

Another possible meaning of prenda is booty or plunder; in light of Garcilaso's remarks in his preface to Boscán's Cortegiano translation and his struggle to appropriate Petrarch as outlined in the preceding section, the poetry of his Italian predecessor is a signifier likely to have affected the Castilian in this way. Garcilaso's words recall Bloom's description of the moment of poetic misprision, when a successor poet is seized by the desire to be a poet, engendered by the reading of his poetic father. That earlier voice cannot die, and indeed continues to live by dominating the poetic son it has engendered, who in turn seeks to tame a precursor "outrageously more alive than himself" (Map , 19). We have seen this contest in the poems in which Garcilaso repeatedly took an idea from Petrarch and wrestled it into his own poem. Garcilaso's tenth sonnet, in this interpretation, represents the reading of Petrarch, which to Garcilaso might once have seemed a happy experience, but which ultimately becomes a burden as the Italians poetry continues to speak through his own; the texts that once brought him great pleasure now only bring sorrow. Able readers, like Herrera and particularly Lapesa, can detect even in the Virgilian "O dulces prendas" Petrarch's undeniable presence. As Lapesa pointed out, Garcilaso adapted Petrarch's sonnet by bringing into the poem the notion of his own death; thus the prendas are linked to the poet's inevitable demise in line 4, they bring him great pain in line 8, and in the final tercet he accuses them of having once seduced him with pleasure only in order to see him later die in pain. These details facilitate a Bloomean interpretation of the poem, for the death in question is that of Garcilaso as a pleasure-seeking but passive reader. Conversely, from this death there rises Garcilaso as a self-conscious Petrarchist poet. At the same time the object of his love changes from the poetry of others to his own; acknowledging Petrarch's poetic priority and glory leads him to desire the same thing. In effect, he too yearns for the crown made from Daphne's leaves.

This reading of the tenth sonnet opens up the possibility that other love poems can also be interpreted as metapoetic allegories. Such a reading would not exclude other referents, for the themes of frustration and desire that run throughout Garcilaso's corpus need not be limited by one particular motivation, be it unrequited love or the emperor's favor or Petrarch's priority. The poems only present anew the emotions themselves, reconstructed in and for the reader through the recourses of rhetoric; conversely, the expressions of emotion are overdetermined, and one can read back a host of motivations, both general and particular, as the biographical critics have done. Yet if it is difficult for readers to imagine Garcilaso as a slave in Apollo's shell, the reason lies in the way that Garcilaso writes himself into literary history, in his last and most complex poem: the third eclogue.

Almost all critics agree that this work was written during the poet's last military campaign against the French in Provence; the poem, which consists of forty-seven stanzas of eight hendecasyllables, is highly structured and easily divides and subdivides into parts (see Elias Rivers, "The Pastoral Paradox"; Fernández-Morera, 74). Three of the initial, prologic stanzas expand on the conflict between his active, military life and his desire to be a poet. Thus after declaring that fortune afflicts him and tears him away from home, he finds that the worst part is that "la carta / donde mi pluma en tu alabança mueva / . . . / me quita" (that page on which I might move my pen to praise you . . . [fortune] takes away, 21– 24), preventing him from praising Doña María Osorio Pimentel (to whom the poem is dedicated) and, by extension, keeping him from being a poet. Yet he will succeed; Apollo and the Muses will find for him the necessary leisure, and

Entre las armas del sangriento Marte,
do apenas ay quien su furor contraste,
hurté de tiempo aquesta breve suma,
tomando ora la espada, ora la pluma.
(37–41)

Amid the arms of bloody Mars where scarcely anyone can oppose his fury, I stole this brief quantity of time, wielding now the sword, now the pen.

These lines, imitated countless times in Spanish Renaissance literature, locate Garcilaso at the crux of the conflict between arms and letters. The perfect balance of line 40, wherein each of these callings is allocated an equal number of syllables and where they are in fact linked by a comma-spanning synaloepha (to/ man/ do_o/ ra/ la_es/ pa/da_o/ ra/la/ plu/ma), shows Garcilaso not choosing between one of these limiting options but successfully combining the two offices. Although he uses the word ocio , Garcilaso is here clearly recalling Castiglione's notion of sprezzatura , presenting this long, polished, and highly artificial composition as the product of moments snatched here and there between battles. By doing so, he destroys the traditional notion of ocio even more effectively than Boscán had done in his translation of Il Cortegiano and in the preface addressed to the duchess of Soma; ocio no longer means extensive time for study, but brief instants of poetic activity, enough for the composition of a line or two. At the same time, the practice of poetry need no longer interfere with an active military life, which is accorded equal value. Garcilaso thus succeeds in fashioning his image in literary history: he will forever be known as the courtier poet who healed the theoretical split between arms and letters and made the pursuit of the latter a legitimate aristocratic activity. That these crucial rhetorical and theoretical moves are nestled in the opening, dedicatory stanzas of a pastoral poem further shows Garcilaso's complete assimilation of the indirect, courtly manner of argumentation.

The initial stanzas are also important because in them Garcilaso establishes a complex relationship with his dedicatee, which both draws on and subverts the Petrarchan tradition. The first seven stanzas constitute the dedication to the "illustre y hermosíssima María" (illustrious and most beautiful María, 2), probably María Osorio Pimentel, wife of Pedro de Toledo, Garcilaso's friend and viceroy of Naples, to whom the first eclogue was dedicated. From the beginning Garcilaso contrasts his desire to praise her with the constraints imposed on him by his military activity. The first, imperfect verb ("Aquella voluntad . . . / / que'n mí de celebrar tu hermosura, / . . . estar solia " [that desire to praise your beauty which used to be in me], 1, 3–4) rhymes with María and seems to imply that the desire to praise her is no longer there. But this reading is belied by the

second half of the octave, where he declares that in spite of the detour imposed on him by fortune, "está y estará tanto en má clavada / quanto del cuerpo el alma acompañada" (it is now and always will be nailed into me, as long as my body is accompanied by my soul, 7–8). This theme is developed in the third to fifth stanzas, culminating in line 40. But the second stanza takes line 8 as its point of departure, as Garcilaso expresses his intention to continue praising Doña María after his death; his tongue, cold and dead in his mouth, will continue to sing in the voice he owes to her, while his soul singing alongside the Styx will, like Orpheus, arrest the waters of oblivion. Thus the first two stanzas set up a number of implied antitheses (past/ present, life/ death, remembering/ forgetting) even as their efficacy is denied. On the one hand, Garcilaso declares that his poetry will prevent her being forgotten, but on the other hand he attributes his poetic voice to her ("la boz a ti devida" [that voice I owe to you], 12), employing a trope he had also used in sonnet 5 ("quanto yo escrivir de vos desseo: / vos sola lo escrivistes" [whatever I desire to write of you, you alone have written it], 2–3). In so doing, he implies an identification of poetry with love; he, like Apollo in the Daphne sonnet, will find in frustrated emotion the motivation for poetry. This connection is underscored by the word clavada , which vividly suggests that the specific moment in which he was made a poet occurred when the desire to praise her was nailed into him. At the same time, however, the connection is dissolved when the reader stops to consider that this is not a love poem but an eclogue, a highly artificial one at that, which exists as a companion piece to the earlier one. Garcilaso's desire to praise Doña Maria is not based on passionate love of a Petrarchan sort, but on her being the wife of his good and powerful friend. By making and then unmaking the connection between love and poetry, Garcilaso signals the purely rhetorical nature of his Petrarchism.^[30]

In the sixth and seventh stanzas of the poem, Garcilaso asks Doña María to accept this offering even though it is a simple pastoral poem; his reason for adopting the low style is presumably his lack of time and the military encampments that have already taken him into the countryside.^[31] By thus emphasizing the humility of the pastoral, he diverts attention away from the fact that except for the two opening stanzas the poem is not at all in praise of Doña María and in fact has nothing more to do with her. Instead, the rest of the work

deals with four nymphs: stanzas 8–13 describe their emergence from the river into a locus amoenus , the central twenty-one stanzas (14–34) describe the tapestries the nymphs are weaving, and the closing thirteen stanzas present the song of two shepherds whom the nymphs overhear and the latter's return to the river.

The description of the nymphs' emergence from the water, their "coquettish gestures" (Fernández-Morera, 89), and their cleaving lasciviously through the river on their way to the shore, recalls the sonnet "Hermosas ninfas," while their riverside retreat, with ivy growing up the trunks of willows shielding it completely from the sun, the river nurturing the grass even as it gladdens the ear, birds flying overhead and bees buzzing, is a compendium of topics associated with the locus amoenus . These highly artificial and literary aspects contrast with Garcilaso's repeated insistence that the nymphs are emerging from the Tajo and that the retreat is located on its banks. The river's modern vernacular name, mentioned three times in as many stanzas, contrasts with the nymphs' neoclassical names, and the conflict between the two is but a continuation from the preface of a complex back-and-forth movement that places events sometimes in a vague mythological past, and sometimes in the real-world landscape of Garcilaso's own day. Such a contrast, inherited from Virgil, is typical of complex pastoral, meant to highlight the artificiality of the genre (see Bruno Snell, 291–92; Panofsky, 297–99). But the combination also has another effect; instead of working against the literariness of the pastoral, it asserts that sixteenth-century Spain is as worthy of pastoral literature, as capable of sustaining nymphs, as ancient Sicily or Arcadia. Garcilaso's nymphs, here as in "Hermosas ninfas," are as real as any others, and if they are evidently rhetorical constructions, they are also not merely the result of prosopopoeia, imitating and personifying their environment (see Elias Rivers, "Pastoral"; Cruz, Imitación , 108). By extension, Garcilaso thus presents himself as the fit heir to the classical tradition, going back beyond Petrarch, entitled to appropriate its figures (in both the mythological and the rhetorical sense) and use them to his own purposes.

The next eighteen stanzas, the heart of the poem, describe the tapestries that the nymphs are weaving. The first three tapestries are described in three stanzas each; Filódece weaves one which shows the Thracian river Estrimón and on its banks Eurydice, being

bitten by a snake. It also shows Orpheus descending to the underworld and, after his impatience has robbed him of his wife, his "quexa al monte solitario en vano" (vain complaint to the solitary mountain, 144). The second tapestry, made by Dinámene, shows Apollo absorbed in the hunt, about to be wounded by Cupid's arrow; also Daphne, her hair flying in the wind, fleeing as the sun-god pursues her, and her metamorphosis into a tree as he kisses and embraces her. The third nymph, Climene, weaves a tapestry showing a mountainside, and a boar mauling a youth who had earlier wounded it; he is Adonis, as shown by Venus's lament over him, her mouth placed on his in order to catch his last breath.

Details from all of these myths are incorporated into the fourth tapestry, which takes nine stanzas to be described. Nise, its maker,

         no tomó a  destajo
de los passados casos la memoria,
y en la lavor de su sotil trabajo
no quiso entretexer antigua istoria.
(193–96)

did not take as her task the memory of past episodes, and in the labor of her subtle work did not wish to weave an ancient story.

She shows the Tajo circling a mountain topped by ancient buildings (that is, the city of Toledo), and then watering the neighboring fields "con artificio de las altas ruedas" (with the artifice of the water wheels, 216). Nymphs can be seen coming out of the water, bearing flowers to another nymph who lies on the bank, "entre las yervas degollada" (with slit throat amid the grass, 230). Another nymph identifies her:

  "Elissa soy, en cuyo nombre suena
y se lamenta el monte cavernoso,
testigo del dolor y grave pena
en que por mí se aflige Nemoroso
y llama 'Elissa'; 'Elissa' a boca llena
responde el Tajo, y lleva pressuroso
al mar de Lusitania el nombre mío".
(241–47)

I am Elisa, with whose name the cavern-filled mountain sounds and laments, witness to the pain and great sorrow with which Nemoroso

afflicts himself on my behalf, calling "Elisa," and full-mouthed, the Tajo responds "Elisa," hurriedly bearing off my name to the Lusitanian sea.

The tapestry also shows the story of their love, which Nise learned from Nemoroso himself.

Rhetorically, the descriptions of the tapestries are extended examples of ekphrasis (see Spitzer; Selig; Paterson; and Bergmann, 102–5). By describing the objects, the poet emphasizes their artificiality, which is further underlined by the importance he places on the materials of which they are made and the repeated use of terms related to painting. This process begins with an allusion to the Greek painters, whose works that of the nymphs could rival (111–20). Filódece "tenía figurada" (had drawn, 123) the banks of the Estrimón; "estava figurada . . . Eurídice" (Eurydice was drawn, 129–30); and Orpheus "figurado se vía" (drawn could be seen, 137). "Dinãmene no menos artificio / mostrava en el lavor que avía texido" (Dinãmene no less artifice showed in the work she had woven, 145–46); while in her tapestry, "Apollo en la pintura parecía" (Apollo in the painting appeared, 156). Climene, not to be outdone,

          llena de destreza y maña,
el oro y las colores matizando,
yva de hayas una gran montaña,
de robles y de peñas varïando;
(169–72)

full of dexterity and skill, mixing gold with colors, gave variety to a mountain with beeches, oaks, and cliffs.

Nise, busy "en la lavor de su sotil trabajo" (in the labor of her subtle work, 195), "figuró" (drew, 199) the Tajo, which was "pintado" (painted, 201) on her tapestry, "la hermosa tela" (the handsome cloth, 217) and "esta tela artificiosa" (this artful cloth, 249). At the same time, each story takes place in an artificial natural setting—that is, nature within an artwork—and as such, each is a pastoral narrative in miniature. The plastic art employed by the nymphs to represent nature (and in turn re-presented to us by Garcilaso) is thus the functional equivalent of the verbal art used by the poet to create the locus amoenus within which the nymphs are working.

Artificiality is also stressed by two details of the last tapestry: the

buildings on top of a hill, representing Toledo, and the machines that use the Tajo's water to irrigate the neighboring fields (see Elias Rivers, "Pastoral"). These features serve to locate the events represented on the final tapestry in something like Garcilaso's own day, while the description of the place where Elisa's body lies, surrounded by nymphs, closely resembles that where the action is supposedly taking place. Thus once again Garcilaso mixes the classical, mythological past with the present. Nise is described as having chosen a modern theme for her tapestry, and indeed she seems to be depicting the very tale that would have formed the "basis" of Garcilaso's own first eclogue, the companion piece to this one. To modern biographical critics, Elisa represents Isabel Freire and Nemoroso, Garcilaso himself; in the first eclogue, we get the immediate and lyrical outpouring of his grief, while in Nise's tapestry, a more distanced narration. In this interpretation they get some support from the Renaissance commentators, all of whom identify Elisa with Freire, though not Nemoroso with Garcilaso. From an intertextual perspective, however, the first eclogue is just one more subtext which precedes this one, as do the texts of Ovid, Virgil, Theocritus, and Petrarch from which Garcilaso takes the details that are illustrated in the first three tapestries.^[32] These portray stories of unhappy love from ancient literature, and by devoting the fourth tapestry to Nemoroso's unhappiness, the poet is placing it on the same level as the ancient examples—and, by implication, equating himself to his predecessors.^[33] Ekphrasis moreover is not the only link between Nemoroso's story and the others'. Individual details of his story are anticipated in them as well: the riverside setting is also present in the Orpheus tapestry; the tree on which Elisa's epitaph is carved is anticipated by the laurel that Apollo embraces; and the nymphs lamenting over Elisa's body find their model in Venus's lament over Adonis. Not only the details add up; there is also an incremental growth in violence and sexuality, culminating in the final image of Elisa with her throat cut.^[34] The final tapestry is thus an object lesson in imitation and amplification. By cannibalizing his own first eclogue as a source, Garcilaso represents himself as already a classic; by making "his" tapestry the last in the series, he presents himself as the heir and culmination of the tradition.

This final point has an important repercussion, to which we shall return; first, however, to the conclusion of the eclogue. The conclud-

ing portion of the poem consists of an amoebean competition between two shepherds singing of their loves; indeed, the nymphs are about to return to the river when they hear them approaching. In contrast to the tragic stories on the tapestries, these two are happy in love; the first shepherd, Tirreno, uses positive, sensual images to describe his beloved, while the second, Alcino, uses negative ones to contrast with her (see Fernández-Morera, 92–100). Although the song competition is modeled on Virgil's seventh eclogue, Garcilaso alters the motivation of the songs by eliminating the element of explicit competition, making the songs lyrical expressions of emotion. Tirreno's beloved seems all sweetness and light, while Alcino's seems harsher; but, again in contrast to the tapestries, both shepherds convey a happy sexuality, in the natural imagery and in their impatience "por ver ya el fin de un término tamaño, / deste día, para mí mayor que un año" (so as to see an end to the enormous term of this day, longer to me than a year, 319–20). Through the transition from the tapestries to the song Garcilaso puts Petrarchism behind him: it thus represents a shift from an obsession with the past (even Nise, as Paterson noted, had portrayed a historical event, however recent) to the present (see also Moreno Castillo). The tapestries represented violence and sexual frustration, focusing fetishistically on body parts: Eurydice's "blanco pie mordida / de la pequeña sierpe poncoçosa" (white foot bitten by the small poisonous snake, 130–31); Daphne's hair, arms, and feet; Adonis's mouth. In contrast, the shepherds' songs express a fulfilled love in a pastoral setting. Above all there is a shift from the visually oriented ekphrasis of tapestries that are seen to songs that are heard, in which, as Ly suggests, the words in the intricate final stanzas seem chosen more for their sound than for particular sense (329). With this final transition Garcilaso reintroduces musicality into the aesthetics of hendecasyllabic poetry.

The location of the fourth tapestry and the length of its description (nine stanzas, equal to the other three put together) are no accident; I have already discussed how Garcilaso through this and other maneuvers represents himself as the fitting heir to the classical and Italian lyric traditions. There is yet another way to interpret this relationship, which, however, depends on a habit of reading somewhat alien to our own. To Renaissance readers, later texts could echo but earlier ones could also foretell. If the methods of typological inter-

pretation are applied to the succession of tapestries, then Eurydice, Daphne, and Adonis are all figures of Elisa, and the poetry of Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, and Sannazaro is not merely imitated but fulfilled in that of Garcilaso. Within the eclogue, as Barnard points out, this analogy is suggested by Garcilaso's self-presentation in the dedication as a successful Orpheus, in contrast to the failed Orpheus of the tapestry ("Garcilaso's Poetics"; see also Gallagher). Through the technique of self-figuration, which invites a typological reading, Garcilaso tropes his predecessors and achieves in his final poem what no other Spanish Renaissance poet would accomplish until Góngora: in a successful act of metalepsis, he reduces his sources to the status of predecessors.^[35] No longer do they speak through him, perpetuated as a classically educated reader notes conscious and unconscious echoes of their works in Garcilaso's. Rather, it is Garcilaso himself who, in this poem at least, predominates and who seems dimly anticipated in the works of his poetic fathers, who are read through him. The result is a crucial one for the emergence of a national literature, as it makes possible the notion of Castilian-educated readers who turn to the classics only because of their interest in Garcilaso. But the impact of the metalepsis is not uniform, and the cost is a diminution in the appreciation of Garcilaso's rhetorical craft. For every Herrera annotating sources and techniques there would be a Prete Jacopín defending the poems as authentic and natural expressions of emotion; and the conflict continues to this day.

The powerlessness inherent in the Petrarchan sonnet as a genre can be read sentimentally, politically, or metapoetically, but it is also a feature of the genre. Because Petrarch (rather than Dante, Ariosto, or Aretino) is the canonic source for the genre, the formal elements take on the status of a sign, creating in the reader a horizon of expectations and indicating Garcilaso's entrance into a literary system. At the same time, his masterful use of Castilian shows his effective resistance to the Italian linguistic codes heretofore exclusively associated with the sonnet. Garcilaso's Petrarchism, with its graceful, seemingly artless blend of elements, fulfills Castiglionian requirements and is an appropriate trope for Charles V's international empire. The poetic glory Garcilaso ascribes to himself has an inherently political dimension, as the achievement of the half-century-old dream of a literary translatio .

As surely as Boscán, in the dedication to the duchess of Soma, wrote himself into literary history as the bridge between Petrarch and Garcilaso, so the latter in his third eclogue writes himself as the solution to the debate between arms and letters and as the fulfillment of Petrarch. The canonization of Garcilaso became one of the principal critical problems of the next fifty years, and it can be said to have been launched by the poet himself. The third eclogue is a subtle, and thus Castiglionian, exposition of Garcilaso's literary theory, a demonstration of and an argument for sprezzatura . With this poet, Spain attained the rarefied level of poetic glory. The victory, however, proved fleeting; Garcilaso's life was cut short, and there is an elegiac dimension to the posthumous publication of his works. just as Il Cortegiano represented both nostalgia for Urbino and an attempt to negotiate a compromise with the realities of Castiglione's life, so too Boscán's evocations, in the preface, of the living Garcilaso's encouragements and the publication of his poetry point to an attempt to secure for his friend the immortality through fame that is only a simulacrum of living presence. Without the living Garcilaso, Spanish letters once more seem inferior to Italian, while the example of his achievements only adds a further layer of belatedness between Spanish poets and the Petrarchan source. Living up to the challenge of that belatedness became the preoccupation of the next generation.