5—
Góngora, Quevedo, and the End of Petrarchism in Spain

At first glance, the transition from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth in Spain can seem like the beginning of a decline; the national enthusiasm that Herrera could feel after the 1571 victory at Lepanto gives way to the so-called desengaño or disappointment of the new century, heralded by unsuccessful wars with England and France, rebellions in the Netherlands and Aragon, the 1588 defeat of the Armada, the 1596 bankruptcy, and the plague of 1600. Yet contemporaries need not have perceived the decline so clearly: Philip III (1598–1621) may have abdicated responsibility to a favorite or privado , but his reign was one of relative peace, as internal turmoil kept France distracted and a truce was achieved in the Netherlands, and it saw the emergence of Baroque culture, Spain's true "Golden Age," the time of Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Calderón.^[1] In addition to the stylistic transformations common throughout Europe, the characteristics of Spanish Baroque lyric include the revival of Castilian genres such as the romance (ballad) and letrilla (short song lyric), often employing formal techniques such as octosyllabic and acute verse and assonant rhyme, and the emergence of social satire as a theme; while in the realm of theory, systematic treatments of poetics become the norm. Thus in contrast to Boscán, Garcilaso, and Herrera, whose forays into these genres were clearly secondary works, writers such as Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) left behind a far more heterogeneous body of work. There are nonetheless significant areas of continuity, and in examining the seventeenth century this study will focus on what is most distinctively "Renaissance" about Góngora's and Quevedo's work, in particular secular love poems in hendecasyllabic verse that are in competition both with the classical and Italian lyric traditions (the latter now expanded to include poets such as Torquato Tasso

and Giambattista Marino), and with earlier Spanish poets who had already achieved canonical status. As in the sixteenth century these poems, and their related paratexts, reveal a continuing worry about the legitimacy of Spanish culture and about the cultural primacy of a long-subjugated Italy.

Góngora and the Poetics of Fulfillment

The eclecticism of Góngora, and his more than successful metalepsis of his predecessors, might exempt him from the main trajectory of this study. While clearly nurtured by Petrarchist poetry, even at an early age he was not dependent on Petrarch alone but on a tradition that included Ovid, Horace, Virgil, and less canonized classical authors; other Italian poets, notably Bernardo and Torquato Tasso; as well as Spanish predecessors. Yet he must be taken into account, for his redirection of the Petrarchist tradition subverted its canons to the point that they were nearly redefined, necessitating a direct return to Petrarch by his younger contemporary, Quevedo. Góngora's most obviously Petrarchist works are his love sonnets, numbering forty-five in Ciplijauskaité's critical edition.^[2] Chronologically, this category can be further subdivided into twenty-six poems dating from 1582 to 1585; thirteen poems from 1594 to 1609; and five poems from 1620 to 1623. They thus span all stages of the poet's career, from a novitiate in his twenties to his maturity (Góngora completed his most famous poems, the Soledades and the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea , in 1612) to his old age, and allow us to examine his shifting orientation vis-à-vis the Petrarchist tradition. Moreover, as Jammes noted, the twenty-six early sonnets, while not a collection, do constitute a corpus that can be examined independently of the other poems. To Jammes, Góngora in these poems follows models so closely that they contain little that had not been used many times earlier and very little that did not figure in Garcilaso; the latter's pervasive influence is evident both in thematic details such as the conventional idealization of the beloved, the pastoral landscape and classical names, and so on; as well as in the diction and the smooth flow of the hendecasyllabic lines (362–63).

Yet imitation does not preclude difference, and Góngora's poetry contains significant departures from Garcilaso as well. Two famous

carpe diem poems, "Mientras por competir con tu cabello" (Sonetos 151) and "Illvstre i hermossissima Maria" (Sonetos 152, its incipit a line from Garcilaso's third eclogue), are particularly good examples. Though termed love sonnets in the Vicuña and Hozes editions, they were reclassified under the rubric "morales, sacros, varios" (moral, sacred, and various) in the Chacón manuscript; Terracini (I codici , 101–21) correctly situates "Mientras por competir" between the "strict" carpe diem tradition, represented by poems such as Garcilaso's sonnet 23 and Bernardo Tasso's "Mentre che l'aureo crin," and the more "moral" memento mori tradition, evident in Herrera's "Oh soberbia y cruel en tu belleza" (Anotaciones , 374). Yet more than the emphasis on the beloved's decay and ultimate death differentiates Góngora's sonnets from Garcilaso's. In "Mientras por competir," the linear succession of hair, forehead, lips, and neck becomes through repetition a cycle and then a vertical axis in the poem, as the features are gradually transformed, first into metaphorical equivalents (gold, lilies, carnations, crystal) and ultimately into earth, smoke, dust, shadow, and nothing. This metamorphosis creates competing linear and vertical axes that draw attention to the poem's own verbal artistry and away from the natural processes of enjoyment and transformation that it describes. Moreover, by joining the carpe diem and memento mori motifs, Góngora violates Christian norms of decorum but recalls an earlier pagan tradition. Thus even when most imitative of Garcilaso, Góngora pushes at the boundaries of canonical categories and heightens the autoreferentiality of the poems.^[3]

Similarly, on a moral level, the alba poem "Ia besando vnas manos crystalinas" (Sonetos 62) challenges the bounds of even Garcilaso's lax standards of decorum (the perception of which had become considerably stricter, in the course of his canonization by the commentators), while the conventional metaphors used to describe the woman (for instance, "ia quebrando en aquellas perlas finas/ palabras dulces" [now breaking sweet words against those fine pearls], 5–6) work against the reader's perception of her as an erotic whole rather than a collection of attributes transformed into textures and colors (see Calcraft, 31–34). This is even more true of "De pvra honestidad templo sagrado" (Sonetos 55), where the representation of the beloved as a temple and an idol (see Bergmann, 293–95) is morally offensive, while the emphasis on metaphorical construction (in a double sense: the building of the temple, the building of the poem)

privileges aesthetic ingenuity over eroticism. These last two poems are significant because alone among Góngora's love sonnets they were criticized by the Jesuit Juan Pineda in a report to the Inquisition after the Vicuña edition of Góngora's works.^[4] Pineda criticizes as indecent the moral content of "Ia besando" along with the style of "De pvra honestidad," characterized as "loca exageración de profanos poetas, que en boca de un sacerdote . . . se haze más intolerable" (the mad exaggeration of a profane poet, which in the mouth of a priest . . . becomes even more intolerable, xxxii). Thus Pineda seizes on the twin issues of stylistic and moral unsuitability, suggesting a complete rejection of the Petrarchist style as Góngora practiced it.

A further look at two early sonnets will enable us to explore Góngora's combination and manipulation of sources. Garcilaso's sonnet 23 lies visibly behind Góngora's carpe diem poems; it can also be perceived in "Al tramontar del sol," written, according to the Chacón manuscript, in 1582:

  Al tramontar del Sol la Nimpha mia,
de flores despojando el verde llano,
quantas troncaba la hermosa mano,
tantas el blanco pie crecer hacia.
  Ondéàbale el viento que corria
el oro fino con error galano,
qual verde hoja de alamo loçano
se mueue al roxo despuntar de'l dia.
  Mas luego que ciñò sus sienes bellas
de los varios despojos de su falda,
(termino puesto al oro, i a la nieue)
  iurarè, que luciò mas su guirnalda,
con ser de flores, la otra ser de estrellas,
que la que illustra el cielo en luces nueue.
(Sonetos 57)

At the setting of the sun my nymph, divesting the green plain of flowers, as many as her lovely hand exchanged, so many her white foot would cause to grow. The wind made waves around her which caused the fine gold to run with gallant error, as the green leaf of a luxuriant poplar moves when the red sun starts out the day. But after she girt her beautiful temples with the various spoils of her skirt (forming a boundary between the gold and the snow), I would have sworn that her garland shone more, though made of flowers, than

that made of stars, with which the other one illuminates the sky with nine lights.

The first-person verb in line 12, iurarè , introduces an element of subjectivity into what is otherwise a nearly ekphrastic description, asserting that the poem reports something that the poet actually saw (thus García de Salcedo Coronel, in his 1644 commentary, subtitles it "con ocasion de aver salido su dama una tarde al campo, descrive D. Luis en este Soneto su hermosura" [on the occasion of his lady having gone to the countryside one afternoon, Don Luis describes her beauty in this sonnet], 2.367). The poem, however, is highly artificial; again, the linear narration is countered by a vertical accumulation of four separate agudezas (witticisms), one for each section of the poem. In the first quatrain the woman's passing creates as many flowers as she picks, in the second there is an ingenious description of her wind-blown hair, in the third there is another of the garland she places around her head, and in the fourth that garland is declared superior to Ariadne's crown of stars. Salcedo Coronel identifies as the principal sources for the poem Claudian's epyllion De raptu Proserpinae and Torquato Tasso's sonnet "Colei che sovra ogni altra amo ed onoro"; while the former provides the idea of plundering the ground of its flowers (pratorum spoliatur versus Tasso's coglier ), the latter is the source for her restoration of the blossoms ("ma non tanti la man cogliea di loro / quanti fra l'erbe il bianco piè n'apriva" [but her hand did not pick so many of them as her foot caused to open amid the grass]). Similarly, Salcedo Coronel names Claudian as the source for the flower garland binding her hair, while Hyginius, Ovid, and Prudentius are all cited for mentioning Ariadne's crown. Unlike the agudeza in the first quatrain, the final three, on a linguistic level at least, are more properly Góngora's own: Claudian does not describe the garland as a boundary between gold and snow (obvious metaphors for hair and forehead; see Brockhaus, 22), while none of the mythographers uses language particularly like Góngora's to describe Ariadne's crown.

Most interesting for us is the second quatrain. Salcedo Coronel correctly divides it into two parts: the description of the wind blowing her hair and the comparison to leaves in a breeze at sunset. For the first, he gives as a source Torquato Tasso's sonnet, "ondeggiavano sparsi i bei crin d'oro / ond'Amor mille e mille lacci ordiva"

(her beautiful golden locks were scattered in waves, where Love ordered a thousand knots). In addition, he cites the same lines by Bernardo Tasso given by El Brocense and Herrera as the source for Garcilaso's sonnet 23, "mentre che l'aureo crin v'ondeggia intorno / a l'ampia frente con legiadro errore" (while golden curls wave with light disorder around your wide forehead), and suggests places in Horace and Ovid's Metamorphoses as possible sources for both Tassos' poems. For the swaying leaves, he also cites descriptions from Ovid's Ars amandi and from Flavius Corippus. As in Herrera's commentary, this accumulation of source citations is not entirely to the point. The emphasis on sources for each section of the poem obscures the second quatrain's function as a unifying factor: the sunset and the green leaves recall the first quatrain, as does the play of colors, which in turn anticipates the first tercet (where the contrast between white and gold replaces that between green and red); the sunset also anticipates the nighttime of Ariadne's crown of stars.^[5] Salcedo Coronel's particular set of sources for the wind-blown hair also obscures a more obvious and appropriate chain, going through Garcilaso's poem (a model, as we have seen, for other early poems of Góngora's) to Petrarch and Virgil. Thus while Salcedo Coronel correctly underlines the artificiality of Góngora's sonnet, he ironically diminishes the poem's true originality, which lies not in the descriptive depiction of a real-life event but in the way that Góngora manipulates the very artifice he derives from the tradition.

Moreover, while the commentator gives no sources from Petrarch, the key elements of the poem—a vision of the beloved surrounded by flowers and with the wind blowing her hair, even the detail of her restoring the flowers with her footsteps—are clearly Petrarchan.^[6] This connection gives added significance to the metaphor of leaves waving in a red sunset—on the one hand they are a vehicle for the tenor, her hair waving in the wind, but on the other they suggest the leaves of the laurel tree waving, after Daphne's transformation, in the glare of a red sun burning with frustrated passion. Petrarch's descriptions of Laura walking on the flowers generally have an iconic dimension—she is caught in the act of moving—but a voyeuristic one as well, for the sight of her is all that Petrarch will ever enjoy. Through its mythological and textual allusions, however, Góngora's poem summons up more active lovers: Pluto, Apollo, and Bacchus. Like Garcilaso, Góngora revitalizes

the latent sexuality in Petrarchism, but transforms the lover into a predatory figure, possibly a rapist.^[7] Thus although on a textual level the poem is prompted by a convergence of details in Claudian and Torquato Tasso, its field of allusion is even broader than Salcedo Coronel suggests, while the poet subverts the very rules of decorum that give structure and coherence to the love-poetry tradition.

The gold and snow in line 11 of this poem are metaphors for hair and skin; by this time, the identification was so strong that its status as metaphor is almost lost and the words are functionally synonymous. Góngora exploits the strongly conventional character of Petrarchan metaphor in a sonnet from 1585, "Avnque a rocas de fee ligada vea / con laços de oro la hermosa naue" (Though bound to rocks of faith I see with golden knots the handsome ship; Sonetos 80). The poem is based on a familiar metaphor of the lover as a ship in a storm, here extended into an allegory about the inconstancy of good fortune in love, as Salcedo Coronel explains in his commentary:

Escriue Don Luis a algun amigo suyo este Soneto, y en metafora de vna naue descriue el incierto estado de qualquier amante, aun estando fauorecido, y el riesgo que en la mayor tranquilidad se puede prometer de la inconstancia de vn mar tan mal seguro, como el del Amor. Confirma esto con exemplo de las agenas calamidades, a cuya causa dize: que no le fiará dèl, sino le assegura del peligro, que reconoce aduertido, con razon, y discurso eficaz. (2.463)

Don Luis writes this sonnet to some friend of his, and through the metaphor of a ship describes the uncertain state of any lover, even when favored, and the risk that even in the greatest serenity can be foretold from such an uncertain sea as that of love. He confirms this with examples from others' calamities, which lead him to say that he will have no trust unless he is reassured about the danger, which he concedes he has been warned about, by reason and an effective discourse.

Interpretation of the poem, however, is more difficult than the commentator suggests; he is helped by reading it in terms of a sonnet by Torquato Tasso, which he declares Góngora "expressly imitated." In Tasso's poem the poet, speaking in the first person, indeed presents himself as a ship close to the shore, leery of the temporarily favorable wind. Góngora however objectively describes a handsome

ship linked by golden knots to the rocks of faith, raising a host of questions. Salcedo Coronel dutifully explicates the golden knots as "los dorados cabellos de la dama" (the lady's golden hair, 2.464), which they conventionally represent; but in this context the metaphor is unenlightening. Is the beloved the ship, apparently linked to fidelity but always in danger of slipping away? Or is the lover himself the ship, which would be better off sailing away from this false sense of security? Similarly, a few lines later he glosses "en el aspecto celestial se lea" (may in the celestial aspect be read) with "el hermoso rostro del objeto amado" (the lovely visage of the beloved object), conflating omens in the sky with the light reflected off the beloved's eyes. As a result, what seemed to be a straightforward allegory is refracted by Salcedo Coronel's commentary into a number of different interpretations, some of which privilege certain metaphors, some others.

The problem becomes even more acute in the closing tercets:

  he visto blanquéàndo las arenas
de tantos nunca sepultados huessos,
que el mar de amor tubieron por seguro;
  que del no fio; si sus fluxos gruessos
con el timon, o con la voz no enfrenas
ô dulce Arion, ô sabio Palynuro.
(Sonetos 80.9–14)

I have seen the sands whitened by never-buried bones of those who held the sea of love to be safe; thus I will not trust it, unless its great waves with rudder, or with voice, you restrain, oh sweet Arion, oh wise Palinurus.

The first two lines closely imitate Tasso's poem, but Góngora subreads in it its own Virgilian source, as the final lines indicate: in the Aeneid , the image of the bone-covered beach occurs in a description of the Sirens' home and immediately precedes the account of Palinurus falling asleep at the helm. Salcedo Coronel turns verbal somersaults attempting to explain these lines, first clarifying that "fluxos gruessos" means tempestuous waves and then interpreting these to mean that "no fiará del Amor, viendo escarmientos tales, sino le asegura su discurso, y su sabia providencia" (he will not trust Love, seeing such injuries, unless reassured by his speech and his wise foresight). Yet the cynical lover who mistrusts the beloved's

constancy and advises for himself a retreat may himself be fooled, for a reader knows more than to rely on Arion's candor or Palinurus's judgment: the connection to the Aeneid ironizes the final lines, for Palinurus did not prove to be an effective pilot, while Arion saved his own life through cunning as much as through sweetness. Thus the elegant chiasmus (rudder: Palinurus :: voice: Arion) disguises a reassuring but false set of analogies, which serve as object models of the dangers of trusting artful appearance instead of underlying reality.

According to Ciplijauskaité, the bones washed up on the shore reminded Gates of the soaked trophies in Garcilaso's sonnet 7, yet they also bear some kinship to the dead predecessors of his sonnet 38, "ejemplos tristes de los que han caydo^[*] " (sad examples of the fallen). Through these allusions Góngora asserts a link to the Petrarchist tradition, even as the suggestive but untelling metaphors and mythological allusions subvert the capacity of the tradition to generate new poetry on any level other than the stylistic. Here, as in the sonnet "No destroçada naue," he directs the warning as much to a prospective poet as to a recalcitrant lover: "A Dios Nympha crûel, quedaos con ella / dura roca, red de oro, alegre prado" (Good-bye cruel nymph, you may keep her, hard rock, golden net, joyful meadow, Sonetos 73.13–14). As Jammes put it, tears in the long run give way to rebellion (361); significantly, "Avnque a rocas de fee" is the last love sonnet in the Chacón manuscript before a nine-year hiatus.

Góngora's inversion of Petrarchist codes is not limited to his love sonnets; perhaps the most effective upending of Petrarchism in the Spanish Golden Age occurs in the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea , which recounts the myth, from Ovid's Metamorphoses , of the Cyclops Polyphemus and his unrequited love for the nymph Galatea, who in turn loves only the handsome shepherd Acis. In Góngora's version Polyphemus is constantly making noise, whether whistling to his animals, playing monstrous musical instruments of his own creation, or singing to Galatea, celebrating her beauty, boasting of his wealth, and imploring her to overlook his physical ugliness.^[8] It is precisely from him that Galatea flees when she finds a secluded pool and stops to take a nap. There she is discovered by Acis as he is having a drink; instead of waking her, he leaves her some gifts and pretends to fall asleep on the other side. Stirred nonetheless by

his noise, Galatea fears it is Polyphemus, but finding the gifts she realizes it must be someone else. She then sees Acis across the pond:

El bulto vio, y, haciéndolo dormido,
librada en un pie toda sobre él pende
(urbana al sueño, bárbara al mentido
retórico silencio que no entiende).
(lines 257–60; Góngora y el "Polifemo," 3.179)

She saw the form and, believing it asleep, balanced on one foot over him she hangs (urbane to sleep, barbaric to the mendacious rhetorical silence that she does not understand).

These lines have been controversial since Góngora's own day, with critical attention focused on Galatea's exact posture in line 258. Other details, however, are also worth examining. Vilanova (Las fuentes , 2.212–14) quotes the commentators Salcedo Coronel and José Pellicer on the word bulto: both agree that it means something perceived indistinctly and that it is therefore a subjective description of Galatea's point of view.^[9] But Covarrubias's dictionary offers additional possibilities, defining the word as something hidden by a cloth, also as a supine statue or effigy. It was employed several times in pastoral romances to describe sleeping shepherdesses, and in Montemayor's Diana it refers specifically to the shape of the breasts beneath her clothing. Vilanova concludes that Góngora thus plays on the resemblance between Acis, extended over the grass, pretending to be asleep, and a statue or effigy. These meanings are suggestive: they emphasize Galatea's view of Acis as an inert body to be evaluated aesthetically and sexually for its vigor; just as Montemayor used bulto to refer to breasts, so too it can suggest that part of the male anatomy normally kept under clothing.

In this context, the last two lines of the quatrain also demand some attention. Vilanova argues that Góngora bases himself on the classic notion of bárbaro as "alien" (Las fuentes , 2.220), and from this developed the clever antithesis, in which Galatea is urbane to sleep because she is familiar with and kind to it, wishing to reciprocate the courtesy shown by the youth who did not wake her. Vilanova agrees with the commentators that she is a barbarian to "el mentido retórico silencio" because she has had no experience of Acis's silent eloquence, and he connects this passage with the established trope

of mute speech employed by Ovid, Petrarch, and Garcilaso. He does not, however, note the widely divergent emotional values such a trope elicited in these three writers, all of which Góngora recapitulates; nor does he comment on the accumulation of adjectives: Acis is not merely silent but also both deceitful and rhetorical. In this way his "technique" contrasts with Polyphemus's, which was neither mendacious nor silent. By means of his feigned sleep, Acis employs the only method that could in fact succeed with Galatea, because it does not frighten her off by making evident from the beginning his sexual desire. Yet his is a rhetorical silence, meant to persuade and to conceal the fact that he has as much desire as Polyphemus. As Dámaso Alonso notes, citing the commentator Andrés de la Cuesta, rhetoricians teach us not only how and when to speak, but when and where to keep silent (Góngora y el "Polifemo," 3.183). By practicing silence and pretending to be asleep, Acis also turns the tables on Galatea, who awakens and sees him sleeping just as he had spied her asleep; just as he peered at her and found her desirable, so she too examines him and discovers the incarnation of her fantasies. This seduction by the fountain thus invokes and, at the same time, inverts the Actaeon myth that had closed Petrarch's canzone 23 and the frustrated love scene in Garcilaso's second eclogue. By his pretended silence Acis seduces the girl denied to the more Petrarchist lover, Polyphemus.

Mute speech is meant to convey love through the eyes when silence for whatever reason had been imposed. Here, however, the "sleeping" Acis, with his closed eyes, transforms Galatea into a voyeuse, hovering over him like a hawk over a chick. Her actions are in line with Góngora's frequent representation of a predatory sexuality, further inverted by being ascribed to a woman. Jammes notes that traditionally Acis was the least interesting member of the sexual triangle, and that Góngora had succeeded, by presenting him as a hunter, in remasculinizing the somewhat effeminate presentation in Ovid (538). Yet Góngora actually goes further; as Paul Julian Smith puts it, "in the Polifemo we find an unregulated circulation of signs and, indeed, of sexes" (The Body , 66). On the plot level Galatea, represented earlier in the poem as a traditional ninfa esquiva ever in flight from her suitors, is masculinized when placed in the male role of penetrating Acis's bower and viewing the sleeping sex object; on the textual level, as Smith notes, Acis is feminized when his body

is described in terms of surfaces and details, using metaphorical techniques normally reserved for descriptions of women.^[10] Jammes is correct in noting how, by maintaining both Acis's and Galatea's silence, Góngora deprives this episode of dramatic power and turns it into a type of mime (543–45); but I would disagree with his determination that by inventing a 160-line scene absent from Ovid, Góngora shows how for him love is a strikingly profound and varied emotion (538) and that the scene proves the degree to which Góngora was seduced by the theme (543). Rather, I would agree with Smith that here Góngora accomplishes just the opposite, reducing love to "figures or commonplaces of love, not icons of authentic or instinctive sentiment" (The Body , 62), and furthermore inverting the ways in which these love and sex roles had previously been inscribed by the tradition. By opening a space for an inquisitive, active sexuality on Galatea's part, Góngora also makes possible all kinds of sexual behavior proscribed in the Petrarchist tradition and by extension in Renaissance Spanish society as a whole.

Late in his life Góngora returned to the love sonnet, and although these poems demonstrate his most mature style, they also preserve formal and thematic tendencies, such as indeterminate metaphor and a predatory sexuality, that we have observed in his earliest works. One example of his late love sonnets is "Prision de'l nacar" (Sonetos 97), written in 1620, describing a woman who pricks her finger while removing a diamond ring. Considering the poet's age at the time this poem was written, Jammes judged the poem a courtly exercise and asserted that Góngora could not have witnessed such a small incident without any interest, nor be in the habit at that age of playing the gallant lover (317); Blecua, by contrast, defended it precisely as a literary exercise that may have provided the author a poetic distraction from his travails. The opening quatrain consists of a violent hyperbaton that explains how a diamond, in its hardness a shining imitator of the poet's steadfastness, and like him imprisoned in gold, in turn was a prison for the beloved's "nacar articulado" (articulated mother-of-pearl)—that is, her finger. As Blecua and Brockhaus (30) both note, the quatrain has a circular structure like that of the ring itself, beginning and ending with a variant of the word prision , which suggests three prisons: of the finger in the ring, of the diamond in its setting, and of the poet himself caught in the net of hair. Salcedo Coronel explains the appropriateness of the met-

aphor "nacar articulado" in terms of references by Ovid and Juvenal to fingers as articulis , to mother-of-pearl as the site where jewels (gemma ) are created, and to articulos as the Latin word for the nodes on the vine from which flowers bloom, blossoms that are also called gemma and which resemble great gems on a finger. The poem thus describes a woman's knuckles adorned with a monstrously large diamond, but, as Blecua pointed out, the signified is nearly lost in the elaboration of the signifier, through the use of hyperbaton, of erudite vocabulary, and of allusions to precious materials. The rest of the poem continues these practices, adding enjambments and diereses (which Salcedo Coronel found excessive); the words ai and laton in the first tercet clash with this texture but do not really subvert it. Indeed, the final tercet redoubles the emphasis on beauty, as the effect of blood on her hand is compared to the red veins on Indian marble and to jealous Aurora dropping carnation petals on snow.

As Salcedo Coronel noted, the two final images, in this very combination, can be found in book 12 of the Aeneid in a description of Lavinia's face. By and large, however, he provides not so much sources for this poem as glosses explaining the images, often in terms of other poems by Góngora. Thus, for the first tercet, "Mas ai, que insidíòso laton breue / en los crystales de su bella mano / sacrilego diuina sangre beue" (But ouch! that insidious small piece of brass from the crystal of her beautiful hand sacrilegiously drinks divine blood, Sonetos 97.9–11), he zeroes in on the metal drinking in blood from her crystalline hands, and refers the reader to his comments on an earlier sonnet, "En el crystal de tu Diuina mano / de Amor bebi el dulcissimo veneno" (From the crystal of your divine hand I drank the sweetest poison [1609], Sonetos 93.1–2). There in turn he had declared that "en metafora de los vasos de cristal en que se suele beber, descrive D. Luis la blancura y belleza de la mano de su dama, que pudo enamorarle" (through the metaphor of the crystal glass from which he used to drink, Don Luis describes the whiteness and beauty of his lady's hand, which made him fall in love) and referred the reader to parallels not only in Virgil, Propertius, Terence, and other Latin poets, but also in Góngora's own Polifemo , specifically Galatea drinking in Acis's beauty. Thus the principal characteristics of the sonnet, to a Renaissance reader like Salcedo Coronel, are its somewhat overly artistic metrical structure

and erudite vocabulary; the imitation of a Virgilian trope describing the effect of red blood on white skin; and an allusion to Góngora's own earlier poems in which he describes drinking in the beloved's beauty as from a crystal glass. Salcedo Coronel's gloss is disconcerting because it focuses on a sanguivorous detail of the poem and suggests either a bizarre love by the inanimate of the animate (the ring had indeed been ripped off by its petrarchanly disdainful owner), or else that the poet's love increases as he takes aesthetic pleasure in the scene of her injury.^[11]

"Prision d'el nacar" thus continues the tradition of predatory sexuality, excessive metaphorization, and self-referentiality which can be traced back to Góngora's earliest love sonnets; the poet's style evolves, but the aesthetic principles remain remarkably constant throughout his career. Moreover, like early sonnets that lent themselves to a metapoetic interpretation (such as "De pura honestidad": construction of a temple / construction of the poem; "No destroçada naue": farewell to the nymph / farewell to Petrarchism), so too do these late ones. The ring drinking the blood of the lady's beauty, with its extensive field of intertextual references, suggests a gruesome revision of the digestive metaphor for imitation, used since Seneca. Similarly, the poem in which a bee, mistaking a sleeping nymph's lips for a flower, stings her but thereby rescues her from a prowling satyr recalls the apian metaphor and suggests a self-representation of the poet-as-bee as rescuer of beauty from a satyr who could well represent the notoriously ugly Quevedo. Góngora's imagery in these poems may seem decadent and, in Jammes' words, lacking in authenticity (317), but his self-representation, late in life, as the imbiber of the Italo-classical tradition competes in its implied metalepsis with Garcilaso's third eclogue.

In both practice and theory Góngora transformed Spanish lyric. Although precedents for his stylistic techniques existed in other poets, particularly Herrera and Camoens, Góngora developed them in an idiosyncratic manner that lent itself to analysis, imitation, and parody. His poetry also unleashed a torrent of critical commentary that, while drawing on late sixteenth-century critics such as Herrera, ultimately resulted in the highly sophisticated systems of Spanish Baroque poetics.^[12] Above all, Góngora transformed the subsequent perception of the canon. As Schulz-Buschhaus points out, Góngora from the very beginning of his career imitated well-known poets

who had been designated in the sixteenth century as representative of Italian literature; the result of these obvious imitations of canonical sources is an announcement of both his entry into a preexisting discourse and of his intention to compete with well-known predecessors, with the ultimate goal of autocanonization. Salcedo Coronel saw Góngora, in "Prision de'l nacar," primarily troping himself; by imitating himself Góngora, like Garcilaso in the third eclogue, raises his own poetry to the level of his classical and Italian predecessors. Yet while Garcilaso's self-referential poem opens a route of escape in the shepherds' concluding song, Góngora turns the Petrarchan tradition back on itself, and by placing both Petrarch and Garcilaso on the same level as Ovid, Tasso, and even Claudian, Góngora begins to end the privileged position of the Petrarchist model in Spanish lyric poetry. The result is what Sánchez Robayna calls a hypernorm in decadence. He goes on to say,

El canon técnico-formal e 'ideológico' del petrarquismo, su estética de la exasperación, el recuerdo y la irrealidad , pasa a una suerte de automatismo que es el estadio inicial de la caída de su funcionamiento como tradición literaria. (38)

The technico-formal and "ideological" canon of Petrarchism, its aesthetic of exasperation, memory, and irreality, pass on to a sort of automatism that is the beginning of its failure to function as a literary tradition.

Góngora breaks the metonymy between poetic and erotic frustration, transforming the old pose of masculine suffering and female indifference into a free zone for poetic play; from the beginning of his career, the discourse of denial rings false, for it coexists with a poetics of fulfillment. Yet as Sánchez Robayna further notes, Góngora would nonetheless preserve the Petrarchist system; "no existe en ningún caso un efecto destructivo de la tradición petrarquista . . . la parodia no está llevada por una intención absolutamente negativa " (there are no cases of a destructive effect on the Petrarchist tradition . . . the parody is not led by a purely negative intent, 43).^[13] By positing himself as the fulfillment of the preexisting poetic traditions, however, Góngora leaves little room for serious successors; only a radical return to Petrarch as a model can open new ground, though at the risk of destroying the now weakened state of Petrar-

chist lyric. For just such a final assault on Petrarchist poetry, we must turn to Quevedo.

Parodic Petrarchism in Canta Sola a Lisi

In his sonnet collection Canta sola a Lisi y a la amorosa pasión de su amante , Francisco de Quevedo once more attempts to redirect the course of Spanish lyric poetry so as to recover Petrarch's moral seriousness and correct Spain's continuing cultural inferiority. To do so, Quevedo appropriates Boscán's autobiographical pose, along with his pretense of instructing the reader about love and poetry; the Lisi poems, taken cumulatively and in order, teach the reader that beautiful poetry results not from noble sentiments but from efficacious rhetoric. By embedding echoes, imitations, and quotations from his major Spanish and Italian predecessors within his own discourse, Quevedo reveals the construction of the Petrarchan subject but also defamiliarizes it, making possible a new reading and a new rewriting of the Petrarchist tradition. The Lisi cycle begins with tightly organized sonnets built around a central idea or concepto , but soon decays into poems with elaborate metaphors and an erudite vocabulary that recall Góngora. The central poem, "Cerrar podrá," makes crucial allusion to the Orpheus myth in Garcilaso and Petrarch; from then on, the second part of the collection consists mostly of poems about death and decay that, in style and imagery, echo Boscán and the cancionero . Like Góngora, Quevedo imitates canonical sources, but unlike him, he does not naturalize them within his own discourse, instead embedding quotations and allusions so that they stand out and remain foreign. Although its moral content connects the Lisi cycle to Quevedo's metaphysical poems, the crucial lesson of the cycle is the absence of an authentic poetic voice and the breakdown of Petrarchan rhetoric, features that connect these poems to Quevedo's satirical and burlesque verse.

Revisionist criticism has tended to play down the distinction between Góngora and Quevedo, concluding, as does Warnke, that both poets "are rooted in the same habit of mind and the same conception of art" (59). Yet the opposition between these poets is not a misguided invention. Behind Quevedo's accusations against Góngora of heresy or covert Judaism, his major objections, as Col-

lard recognized, were that Góngora practiced obscurity for its own sake (69) and that he attempted to undo the bond between poetry and moral instruction which had been the former's traditional defense, overthrowing the old notion of the poet-prophet and substituting for it that of the poet-artificer who has made himself by dint of his talent and erudition (102). To Quevedo it seemed that Góngora cloaked trivial subject matter in overly elaborate rhetorical dress and violated the principles of clarity, as expounded in Herrera's Anotaciones: difficulty of thought along with simplicity of style is an ideal, and the sonnet, as the modern equivalent to the epigram, should have as its basis a single thought or concepto . The example of Góngora's poetry was particularly threatening to the continued practice of Petrarchism, which had been subverted not only by the Córdoban's sonnets but also by his most notorious poems, the Soledades and the Polifemo , hendecasyllabic compositions steeped in Petrarchism on both the stylistic and the narrative levels. If these poems were truly the culmination of Spanish Petrarchism, they could forever mark the incapacity of Spanish poetry to equal the moral seriousness of the Italian original. His opponents' task, then, was to develop a love poetry that recuperated the element of moral instruction present in Petrarch, and that through single-mindedness and austerity could embody traditional Castilian stylistic virtues. Quevedo composed love poetry throughout his life, but the major vehicle for his reformulation of Petrarchism is his love-poem collection, Canta sola a Lisi .

The Lisi cycle is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its very macrotextuality. While sonnet collections had become quite the norm in other European countries during the sixteenth century, in Spain, as we have seen, they remained the exception—perhaps, as Walters supposes (Poems , xiv–xv), because Spanish poets continued to shy away from publishing their own poetry and thus were unable to guarantee that their poems would appear in a particular order. Among Quevedo's predecessors, only Boscán and Herrera had composed and published such collections. Yet these are significant predecessors, for both poets are extremely important in Spanish literary history as self-conscious theorizers about lyric poetry and about the imitation of Petrarch. Boscán lamented the state of Spanish poetry and proposed the adoption of Italian verse forms in imitation of Petrarch as a way for Spain to attain a

poetic greatness to match its political and military achievements; Herrera, forty years later, still deplored the inferiority of Spanish poetry and blamed it on the lack of professional poets who, in imitation of Petrarch, would devote themselves to the study of letters and thus recover poetry from courtiers and other amateurs. Thus Quevedo, by also writing a collection, inserts himself into a rather short genealogy of self-conscious reformers, both of whom looked to Petrarch as their poetic father. Boscán and Herrera were not, however, the principal poets of the Spanish Renaissance; the best known were Garcilaso de la Vega and Góngora himself. As the "Prince of Castilian poets," Garcilaso in particular was responsible for the subsequent popularity of Petrarchist imitation among almost all of the poets from the Iberian peninsula, a line that could be construed as leading directly to Góngora. Thus by writing Petrarchan love sonnets, Quevedo also inserts himself in yet another, far larger genealogy of Spanish poets, asserting that the house of Petrarch has not come to an end and that there is yet room enough for another successor.

As noted above, few Spanish poets of the Renaissance published their own work, and Quevedo was not an exception in this regard. The Lisi collection poses a particular problem for critics because there is very little verifiable information regarding its composition and the arrangement of the poems. The bulk of them first appeared in the posthumous compilation of Quevedo's poems entitled El Parnasso español , published in 1648 by the poet's friend and literary executor, José González de Salas.^[14] In his preface to the Lisi collection, González de Salas notes the uniqueness of Petrarch's love for Laura and that this love, as recorded in the Rime sparse , was partly responsible for his fame:

Famosa es mucho la memoria, desde el segundo o tercero siglo antecedente, del ilustre y elegante poeta, entre los toscanos, Francisco Petrarca; y no menos aún también entre los latinos. Pero no creo que el esplendor que contrujo a su fama, de la celebración de su Laura tanto repetida, querrá ceder al que más le adorne entre sus muchos méritos. . . . [L]a vira que de Laura flecharon los ojos, ansí dentro introdujo su veneno, que veinte y un años permaneció constante, sin que su pasión se remitiese; que esos fueron los que desde el principio de su amor ella tuvo de vida, y diez ansimismo que él después sobrevivió igualmente su amante. (1.117)^[15]

For the past two or three centuries, the memory of the illustrious and elegant poet Francis Petrarch has been greatly celebrated among the Tuscans and no less among the Latins. But I do not believe that he would wish the splendor that induced his reputation, of praising his Laura repeatedly, to give way to any of the other merits that most distinguish him. . . . The dart from Laura that wounded his eyes introduced its poison within him, so that for twenty-one years he remained constant, without his passion diminishing; and those were the years after the beginning of his love that she had life, for he then survived her by ten years, as her lover just the same.

Thus González de Salas construes Petrarch's collection as having its basis in biographical facts, a single love to which the poet remained faithful throughout his life. González de Salas also ascribes to Quevedo a similar affection and takes partial credit for the final ordering of the poems in the 1648 edition, though following Quevedo's specific intention of imitating Petrarch in the "autobiographical" arrangement:

Confieso, pues, ahora, que advirtiendo el discurso enamorado que se colige del contexto de esta sección, que yo reduje a la forma que hoy tiene, vine a persuadirme que mucho quiso nuestro poeta este su amor semejase al que habemos insinuado del Petrarca. El ocioso que con particularidad fuese confiriendo los sonetos aquí contenidos con los que en las rimas se leen del poeta toscano, grande paridad hallaría sin duda, que quiso Don Francisco imitar en esta expresión de sus afectos. (ibid.)

I confess then that taking note of the love discourse that can be gathered from the content of this section, which I reduced to the form it now has, I came to persuade myself that our poet very much wanted his love to resemble that of Petrarch's we have already discussed. The person of leisure who were carefully to compare these sonnets with those which can be read among the Tuscan poet's works will doubtless find great similarities, for Don Francisco wished to imitate him in this expression of his affections.

Thus to Quevedo Petrarch was a double model, both for his twenty-two-year love for Lisi and for his determination to chronicle it in verse; equivocating between history and fiction, emotion and rheto-

ric, González de Salas concludes that "mucho parentesco, en fin, habemos de dar en estas dos tan parecidas afecciones, como en la significación que tienen los conceptos con que ambos las manifestaron en sus poesías" (in the end we must admit that there is a great family relationship between these two very similar loves, just as in the meaning of those concepts with which they both manifest their love in their poems, 1.117).^[16]

While the order of the Lisi poems in El Parnasso has not always seemed correct to every critic, with no other textual evidence to go on one is forced, if the collection is to be considered at all, to accept what Blanco Aguinaga called González de Salas's "orden magistral" (magisterial order, 317) as at least a tentative possibility.^[17] Just as complicated as the ordering of the poems is the question of their dating. Very few of the poems appear in any datable manuscripts; early versions of three (poems 3, 36, and 45) are in a manuscript compiled in 1627–28, while early, autograph versions of four more (poems 30, 42, 43, from El Parnasso and 3 from Las tres Musas ) are bound together with a poem datable to 1634. Thus there is no obvious correlation between the date of the poems and their order in the sequence, much less any reason to believe that they are actually autobiographical.^[18] But the general range (1620s–1630s) makes these poems relatively late ones and coincides with the period in Quevedo's life in which he edited the poems of Fray Luis de León and Francisco de la Torre, as antidotes to what was considered by opponents and supporters alike the excess of the Gongoristic school.^[19]

In view of the fact that at this time Quevedo was thus engaged in an attempt to redefine Spanish literary history for the preceding hundred years, it is not surprising that when one views the poems as a collection, one sees Quevedo not just telling a story of an unrequited love but recapitulating the course of Spanish Petrarchist poetry, and then proposing a correction of his own that approximates the love poems to Quevedo's so-called metaphysical or moral style. The Lisi collection opens with poems that suggest an attempt at a reformed Petrarchism. The very first sonnet, a type of enamoramiento poem, is built around the idea that his falling in love was not an act of free will; it is based on an antithesis between freedom, represented in the first quatrain by words such as libre and albedrío , and slavery, represented by prisión and conquistada:

  ¿Qué importa blasonar del albedrío,
alma, de eterna y libre tan preciada,
si va en prisión de un ceño, y, conquistada,
padece en un cabello señorío?
(L1/B442.1–4)

What is the use of boasting of free will, and of the freedom and eternity of the valued soul, if it can be imprisoned by a frown and, conquered, suffers the mastery of a lock of hair?

This antithesis is carried into the succeeding stanzas, where the poet associates his earlier, preamatory state with good government and his present condition with political tyranny; throughout, he alludes to Petrarchan details such as Lisi's face, hair, eyes, and mouth, as well as her absolute indifference to his poetic efforts, conventionally represented as gemidos (cries). Self-contained, like Herrera's Luz, she neither prides herself on her victory nor feels any pity for his suffering. The ideas of the poem are straightforward—at least to a reader familiar with Petrarchan conventions—and so too is their presentation.^[20] Most lines contain a complete thought, and enjambments, where they occur, only separate a verb from its subject or its object. The poet does employ hyperbatons, but generally they take the form of placing the subject at the end of a clause, and therefore closer to a second verb of which it is also the subject. The only exception is the first tercet, "Una risa, unos ojos, unas manos / todo mi corazón y mis sentidos / saquearon, hermosos y tiranos" (A smile, some eyes, some hands, lovely but tyrannical, pillaged all my heart and senses, 9–11), in which the epithets "hermosos y tiranos" are displaced to line 11, separated from the nouns they describe, "risa-ojos-manos," by the intervening "corazón y sentidos." Perhaps the slightly contorted syntax is meant to represent the moment of his enslavement; in any case the epithets thus form a bridge to line 13, where "risa-ojos-manos" remain the subject rather than the more proximate "gemidos."

Similarly, the third poem of the collection is also built around a single antithetical idea:

  Los que ciego me ven de haber llorado
y las lágrimas saben que he vertido,
admiran de que, en fuentes dividido
o en lluvias, ya no corra derramado.

  Pero mi corazón arde admirado
(porque en tus llamas, Lisi, está encendido)
de no verme en centellas repartido,
y en humo negro y llamas desatado.
 En mí no vencen largos y altos ríos
a incendios, que animosos me maltratan,
ni el llanto se defiende de sus bríos.
  La agua y el fuego en mí de paces tratan;
y amigos son, por ser contrarios míos;
y los dos, por matarme, no se matan.
(L3/B444)

Those who see me blind from weeping and know the tears I have poured out are surprised that, divided into fountains or deluges, I do not yet flow away spilled. But my heart burns in wonder (for by your flames, Lisi, it is ignited), at not seeing me scattered in sparks, and into black smoke and flames unfastened. Great high rivers do not in me defeat the fires that as enemies mistreat me, nor does weeping guard itself from their brightness. Water and fire have made a truce in me and become friends, in being my adversaries; the two, to kill me, do not kill each other.

Here Quevedo plays with the reader: the first quatrain is devoted to water and the second to fire, but the tercets resolve the apparently divergent topics by taking as their theme the reconciliation of these opposites, for rivers cannot vanquish his fire, and his tears are impervious to flames; fire and water have struck a truce, together they wage war against him. The playful ingenuity of the poem is reinforced by the structure. Both quatrains are worded in terms of the surprise of viewers at his resistance to dissolution. In the first one, unfamiliar spectators remark that he fails to divide into twin fountains or rainstorms, and the verbal juxtaposition of opposites in the first line ("ciego me ven") suggests the ambiguity of association: he is blinded by his weeping, but they are blind in their incomprehension. The second quatrain repeats the basic structure but shifts the locus of the gaze from outside to within; now it is his burning heart that is surprised at the poet's not scattering into sparks, or disintegrating into black smoke and flames.^[21] Through his use of two opposing themes in the quatrains, Quevedo at first prompts the reader's censure, only to resolve this disapproval at the recognition, in the tercets, of the single antithesis. The reversal makes the reader

aware of the reading process and turns the poem in on itself, an effect also achieved by the artful, parallel structure of the quatrains.

Self-consciousness about the reading of an artistic text is also achieved by the poem's conventionality: González de Salas points to its source in Sannazaro's Miraris liquidum , quoted by Herrera in the Anotaciones as a gloss on the word "contrarios" in the final line of Garcilaso's second elegy ("y assí, diverso entre contrarios muero" ([and thus divided amid opposites I die]). As Herrera shows, by Garcilaso's time the mutual canceling out of the lover's tearful eyes and his fiery heart had become a commonplace. Consiglio, however, notes a further debt to a ballata of Petrarch's:

Qual foco non avrian giá spento et morto
l'onde che gli occhi tristi versan sempre?
Amor, avegna mi sia tardi accorto,
vol che tra duo contrari mi distempre,
  et tende lacci in sí diverse tempre
che quand' ò più speranza che 'l cor n'esca,
allor più nel bel viso mi rinvesca.
(Rime sparse 55.11–17)

What fire would not have been put out by the floods that my sad eyes are always pouring forth? Love, though I have been tardy in seeing it, wishes me to be untuned between two contraries; and he puts out snares of such different temper that, when I most hope that my heart can get free of them, then he most enlimes me again with that lovely face.

This is the source for the closing conceit of Quevedo's poem: these two opposites not only cancel each other out but are so arranged by love as to prolong the lover's life and thus his suffering. This life-and-death issue will become a key theme throughout the Lisi cycle. Through his imitation of Petrarch and Sannazaro, Quevedo locates his poem in the Italian love-lyric tradition, and like Boscán a century earlier uses this context to create tension between the reader's expectations and the actual poem. In contrast to Petrarch's drawing out of the consequences of the fire/water antithesis, Quevedo's conclusion, that the two instead of killing each other will kill him, seems abrupt; Quevedo depends on the reader's complicity in understanding that the concise reference to death is to be taken as a metonymy for the sufferings of love, yet frustrates the reader's desire for and expectations of a more poetic exposition, such as those

in Petrarch and Sannazaro. Moreover, the word matar , used twice in the final line of Quevedo's sonnet ("y los dos, por matarme, no se matan"), is from a relatively lower stylistic register than the rest of the poem, and thus anchors it to a Castilian alternative, the cancionero tradition.^[22]

The combination of Petrarchist and cancionero features suggests other Spanish predecessors, notably Garcilaso, whose "Hermosas ninfas" is echoed in Quevedo's fountain of tears. But Quevedo's "blind" viewers in the first line, who do not understand why the poet does not melt, particularly recall Boscán's semiotically unqualified interpreters, ignorant about the nature of true love. As in Boscán's collection, the deficient interpreters stand for unqualified readers, who need instruction in the nature of love poetry; and as in Boscán the intent is ironic, though in a different way. Boscán pretended to address readers ignorant of Petrarchism even while imitating Petrarch in ways that well-versed readers would recognize. Quevedo forces readers to constitute themselves in the same way, even while depending on their recognition of Petrarchist subtexts to help them understand the poem. By imitating Boscán, Quevedo suggests, a century later, that the Spanish have never learned their lessons and need to be reinstructed. In its thematic concern with fire and water, its self-consciously artful construction, and its clear designation of subtexts in terms of which the poem must be read, this sonnet is typical of the Lisi cycle and, as much as the opening poem, it sets the tone for what is to follow.

The reader in need of instruction about love is directly addressed in the very next poem:

  Tú, que la paz del mar, ¡oh navegante!,
molestas, codicioso y diligente,
por sangrarle las venas al Oriente
del más rubio metal, rico y flamante,
  detente aquí; no pases adelante;
hártate de tesoros, brevemente,
en donde Lisi peina de su frente
hebra sutil en ondas fulminante.
(L4/B445.1–8)

You who molest the peace of the sea, oh navigator both greedy and diligent, so as to bleed the veins of the Orient of the blondest metal, rich and flaming, stay here; go no farther; sate yourself with treasures,

quickly, where Lisi combs from her forehead delicate fibers into fulminating waves.

Here the reader is fictionalized as a member of the Spanish ruling class, engaged in the recovery of riches from the New World. The animating trope in these lines is the conventional comparison of Lisi's hair to gold; the third line recalls, in a distant way, Garcilaso's "cabello, que'n la vena / del oro s'escogió" (hair culled from a vein of gold, 23.5–6) as well as Petrarch's "Onde tolse Amor l'oro et di qual vena / per far due treccie bionde?" (Where and from what mine did Love take the gold to make two blond tresses? Rime sparse 2.20.1–2). But the paronomasia (veins of gold, veins of blood) reads a monstrous dimension back into the Petrarchan tradition and into the imperial enterprise, ripping and bleeding gold from the earth of Spain's overseas possessions. The use of navigation images in this context also undermines one of the key Petrarchan tropes, that of the lover as sailor, while giving the poem a Horatian dimension (see Walters, Franciso de Quevedo , 91–94; and more generally Lerner, "Quevedo"). Yet the physicality of this description, far greater than Garcilaso's much-criticized "entre las yervas degollada" (eclogue 3.230), breaks the decorum of the collection even more strongly than the "por matarme, no me matan" of the preceding poem. Prosodic decorum is also broken by the repeated caesuras and irregular rhythms of the first six lines, which disturb the flow of the verse; not until lines 7–8, with their timeworn comparison and Latinate vocabulary, do the hendecasyllables flow smoothly.

The rest of the poem dissipates the tight focus of the quatrains, asserting that not only gold but pearls, dyes, flowers, and even stars can be had, respectively, from Lisi's laughter, lips, cheeks, and eyes. The idea behind the poem thus shifts away from the hair / gold conceit to a series of metaphorical celebrations of Lisi's body; as a catalog, it recalls poems such as Góngora's "De pvra honestidad templo sagrado" (Sonetos 55). A specific reference to Columbus underlines the contrast between love and empire, which, considering the highly formalistic nature of the poem, can itself be taken as the opposition between letters (the production of metaphorical riches through the celebration of Lisi) and arms (actual conquest, exploration, and exploitation overseas). The degeneration into Gongorine tropes, as well as the exaltation of literature, and thus of verba over res , suggest

that the true intended reading is an ironic one; what is striking about the poem is not the second half, with its smooth progression of Gongorine metaphors, but the violent verses of the beginning. The true lesson of the poem is not that love is preferable to empire and that poetic riches are better than material ones, but the opposite. As both an example of the Gongorine approach to Petrarchist poetry and a critique thereof, the sonnet forms a bridge to the elaborate poems typical of the first half of the Lisi cycle.

An example is the seventh sonnet of the collection, "Si mis párpados, Lisi, labios fueran" (B448). The key conceit here is a comparison between the poet's eyelids and his lips; were this only true, it would allow him to be constantly kissing Lisi by means of the invisible rays through which lovers communicate; denuded, they could be secretly united in public. To Paul Julian Smith (Quevedo , 165–68), the poem is grounded in the simplest kind of metaphor, that based on resemblance, thus fulfilling contemporary criteria of brevity, clarity, and novelty (although the latter is somewhat strained, in view of the parallels in Ovid and Marino). It also plays on a Neoplatonic notion that formed the basis of a Garcilaso sonnet, "De aquella vista pura y excellente" (8). Yet much of the vocabulary is alien to Garcilaso, either because of excessive physicality (labios, besos ), or of excessive erudition (hidrópicos ), features that suggest an affinity with Góngora; line 5 ("tus bellezas, hidrópicos, bebieran") specifically recalls Góngora's "en el crystal de tu Diuina mano / de Amor bebi el dulcissimo veneno" (in the crystal of your divine hand I drank the sweetest poison of love; Sonetos 93.1–2). The Ovidian tone of the poem is also alien to the unusually serious Neoplatonism of the Garcilaso sonnet. Quevedo instead takes the trope of lovers' silent speech and returns to it the comicality of Ovid in the Amores signaling to his mistress in her husband's very presence: "De invisible comercio mantenidos, / y desnudos de cuerpo los favores, / gozaran mis potencias y sentidos" (Maintained by invisible commerce and denuded of body, my powers and senses will enjoy your favors, L7/B448.9–11). "Desnudos de cuerpo" refers to the spirits that have shed their bodies, but the phrase cannot help suggesting naked bodies invisibly cavorting as they enjoy paradoxically secret but public sexual relations, an element exacerbated by the words gozar, potencia , and sentidos in the final line (see Elias Rivers, "Language and Reality," 28–29). Similarly, Quevedo exploits all the implications of co-

mercio: though ostensibly a description of the lovers trading glances, it suggests sexual intercourse and even the exchange of money for sexual favors. Indeed, the prostitute too enjoys a status both furtive (because illegal) and public (because she is available to all). These insinuations of irregular sexuality, as much as the stylistic echoes, suggest the approximation to Góngora.^[23]

The immediately following poem works in a similar fashion:

  En crespa tempestad de el oro undoso,
nada golfos de luz ardiente y pura
mi corazón, sediento de hermosura,
si el cabello deslazas generoso.
  Leandro, en mar de fuego proceloso,
su amor ostenta, su vivir apura;
Icaro, en senda de oro mal segura,
arde sus alas por morir glorioso.
  Con pretensión de fénix, encendidas
sus esperanzas, que difuntas lloro,
intenta que su muerte engendre vidas.
  Avaro y rico y pobre, en el tesoro,
el castigo y la hambre imita a Midas,
Tóntalo en fugitiva fuente de oro.
(L8/B449)

In a curly tempest of wavy gold my heart, thirsting for beauty, swims gulfs of pure burning light, if you unfasten your abundant hair. Leander in the sea of tempestuous fire, it [the heart] displays its love and expedites its life; Icarus on an unsure golden path, it burns its wings, more gloriously to die. With pretense of a phoenix, its hopes (whose death I weep) aflame, it intends its death to engender lives. Avaricious and rich and poor, in its treasure, its punishment, and its hunger it imitates Midas, and Tantalus in a fleeting fountain of gold.

This sonnet is based on the conceits that the beloved's blond hair is like gold in color and like waves in form.^[24] By combining these two images, Quevedo sets his heart swimming through a curly tempest of wavy gold and through gulfs of pure burning light; in so doing his heart is like Leander risking his life in a sea of fire and like Icarus burning his wings on the golden path. Together, these images and allusions recapitulate Spanish Petrarchan poetry. Garcilaso, as we have seen, compared the beloved's hair to gold, and Góngora used the image in the first line of his imitation of Garcilaso, "Mientras por competir con tu cabello." The radiance of golden hair made

it a key concept for Herrera, who organized his sonnet collection around the allegorical value of Luz, the beloved's name, and Lope de Vega had made a sea of the beloved's hair and a boat of her comb. Similarly, the mythological allusions recall other poetry. The Hero and Leander myth formed the basis of an epyllion by Boscán, and Garcilaso has a sonnet on the same theme; Icarus too was the subject of a poem by Garcilaso and was invoked by Herrera in the opening lines of the first sonnet in his collection. The myth of the phoenix was also employed by Herrera, but most famously by Góngora in the first Soledad; in addition, it anticipates the very next sonnet in the Lisi collection. In this regard it is like the myth of Midas, as both refer externally to subtexts and internally to the Lisi cycle itself, where they serve as key, recurrent mythological allusions.^[25] Above all, Quevedo's poem alludes, though indirectly, back to Petrarch, who often used onda as a metonymy for the sea or for his tears, but never as a metaphor for Laura's hair, and who frequently employed the stormy sea as a metaphor for his emotion:

Non d'atra et tempestosa onda marina
fuggio in porto giamai stanco nocchiero,
com' io dal fosco et torbido pensero
fuggo ove 'I gran desio mi sprona e 'nchina.
(Rime sparse 151.1–4)

Never did weary pilot flee to port from the black tempestuous wave of the sea, as I flee from my dark and turbid care to where my great desire spurs and inclines me.

Quevedo reads these lines of Petrarch's through the lens of the subsequent metaphorization of onda by the Spanish Petrarchist tradition; the navigator tossing on the black waves of despair is rewritten as the poet's boat on Lisi's golden curls. Petrarch's presence also establishes a link to Quevedo's own navigation poems, the preceding "Tú, que la paz del mar" and the subsequent Petrarchist tempest poem, "Molesta el ponto Bóreas" (L13/B454).

Moreover, it is not only through intertextual references that the sonnet points to earlier poetry; its very style is reminiscent of Góngora's excesses, generally so despised by Quevedo. The entire poem is based on rather trivial, time-worn comparisons, hyperbolically expanded and compounded by mythological allusions. The hyperbatons of the first quatrain disguise the subject— corazón —which,

as González de Salas himself pointed out, is through appositions the unspoken subject of all of the succeeding sentences as well, while the metaphorical referent of the first line (hair) is not identified until the fourth. Grammatically, lines 5–6 and 7–8 are parallel, while line 6 breaks down into a bimembre , Góngora's trademark device. Line 10 confuses the reader by having the poet himself as the subject of the verb, lloro , while line 12 contains a polysyndeton, another culteranista feature. The closing allusion to Tantalus recalls the word sediento ("thirsty") in line 3 and thus invokes a sensation that plays an important part both in Góngora's poetry and throughout the Lisi collection.

The technique of embedding quotations, imitations, and allusions within his poems is one Quevedo employs throughout the Lisi cycle, and it frequently serves, as in the preceding poems, to recapitulate the course of Petrarchist poetry. Sonnet 10, "¿Cómo es tan largo en mí dolor tan fuerte" (How can such a strong pain last so long in me, B451), begins with a direct quote from Boscÿn and proceeds through a series of rhetorical questions to the subject of mute speech. As Close puts it, "by introducing his sonnet with a quotation from Boscán Quevedo makes each of the rhetorical questions in the first six lines an echo of Boscán's question. What I believe that Quevedo has done is to adapt Guarini ('Amante poco,' # 54) in such a way as to recall the plainness, paradoxical point, and latent despair of Boscán's lines" (846). To her, Quevedo forms a pastiche of Boscán's plain style but sharpens it, then meditates on silence in a Petrarchan manner, and concludes with a series of Gongorine agudezas: "Suspiros, del dolor mudos despojos, / también la boca a razonar aprende, / como con llanto y sin hablar los ojos" (Sighs, those silent spoils of pain, the mouth also learns to recite, as do the eyes with tears but no speech, L10/B451.12–14). Similarly the twenty-fourth sonnet, "En breve cárcel traigo aprisionado" (B465, discussed by Blanco-Morel and by Olivares, 67–74), also recalls the Petrarchan tradition. The poem describes a portrait of Lisi that the poet carries in a ring; as a poem about a memento, it belongs to the same genre as Garcilaso's "Dulces prendas." But whereas that poem concentrated on the poet's evolving emotional reaction to this enduring reminder, Quevedo's is devoted to the paradox of the entire universe, in other words, what Lisi is to him, being contained in such a small space. The ring specifically recalls Góngora's sonnet

"Prision de nacar" (Sonetos 97), while the description of the heavens in the fourth and fifth lines contains a blatant echo of the opening of Góngora's Soledades ; the pearls, diamonds, and rubies contained in the ring (and ingeniously in a single line: "perlas que, en un diamante, por rubíes" [pearls that, in a diamond, through rubies], 10) are metaphors for Lisi's teeth, disdain (see the note by González de Salas), and lips, recalling the earlier allusions to imperial wealth and the catalogs of Lisi's body in sonnets 2 and 4. The sonnet's most famous line, "relámpagos de risa carmesíes" (carmine lightning-bolts of laughter, 13), imitates Petrarch's "e 'l lampeggiar de l'angelico riso" (and the lightning of the angelic smile, Rime sparse 292.6).^[26] Yet again, sonnet 29 (B470), which opens with an elaborate hyperbaton, is dedicated, as González de Salas pointed out, to a comparison between Lisi and a magnet; in both style and content it recalls the description of Galatea as a magnet in Góngora's Polifemo (stanza 25), in which she attracts (and arouses) Acis, "venablo de Cúpido" (Cupid's javelin), itself a subversion of Petrarch's "e 'l colpo è di saetta et non di spiedo" (and the blow is from an arrow, not a spear, Rime sparse 174.11).

The result of these imitations is, on the one hand, self-canonization into the Petrarchan tradition, coupled with, on the other hand, a dismemberment of Quevedo's own texts. Canonizing commentary, such as that performed by El Brocense on Garcilaso or by Salcedo Coronel on Góngora, is unnecessary, for the sources are neither obscure nor concealed, but both canonical and obvious; the poet will not allow any mistakes concerning the tradition to which he belongs. The predecessors' texts appear undigested, and the bee metaphor for imitation would be inapplicable here, for what Quevedo presents within the poems of his own collection is more like a bouquet or anthology of the Petrarchist tradition. Quevedo's use of this preexisting material is not merely a case of his employing Petrarchan commonplaces, or of the rifacimento of poems by obscure Italian or Spanish predecessors (although (Quevedo also does both of these things). The borrowings stand out, undigested. If to a degree the poems succeed in creating the impression of a strong poetic voice actively recounting deeply felt emotion, they also underline the conventionality of such an emotion, which can only be expressed secondhand, using time-worn tropes borrowed from other poets. The excesses of the rhetoric make them difficult to read,

drawing further attention to their status as products of a rhetorical tradition. Their ludic value is emphasized, and Quevedo is able to show himself a master of the very styles he most disdained.

The process of recapitulation culminates in the most famous of all Quevedo's poems, "Amor constante más allá de la muerte" (Love loyal even beyond death):

  Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera
sombra que me llevare el blanco día,
y podrá desatar esta alma mía
hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;
  mas no, de esotra parte, en la ribera,
dejará la memoria, en donde ardía:
nadar sabe mi llama la agua fría,
y perder el respeto a ley severa.
  Alma a quien todo un diós prisión ha sido,
venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado,
medulas que han gloriosamente ardido,
  su cuerpo dejarán, no su cuidado;
serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido;
polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.
(L31/B472)

That final shadow which will take white day from me may close my eyes, and it may unfasten this soul of mine, flattering at that hour my anxious desire; but it will not, at that other shore, leave the memory in which it burned, for my flame knows how to swim the cold water, and how to lose its respect for harsh laws. A soul which has imprisoned an entire god/which has been entirely imprisoned by a god, veins that have brought humors to so much fire, marrow that has gloriously burned, will leave behind their body but not their care; they will be ash, but it will have feeling; they will be dust, but dust in love.

The poem has been praised as the most beautiful sonnet in Spanish; the vibrant first and last lines, in particular, most exemplify Quevedo's mastery of the rhetoric of presence. Much of its force derives from Quevedo's deployment of stylistic resources, achieving a careful balance of parallels and antitheses which mimics argumentation while moving, rather than persuading, the reader.^[27] Yet as Close put it, "The form of the logical argument is strong—indeed, it is sustained by the repeated use of verbs in the defiant future indicative . . . the argument, however, is fallacious" (854). Throughout the

poem hyperbatons and enjambments separate nouns from adjectives and verbs from their subjects and their objects, so that, as Lázaro Carreter noted, the poem is not so much about triumph over death as about decay. This theme is mirrored in the decomposing grammar of the sonnet's sentences, which contrasts with the highly Latinate syntax of the early poems which, while sometimes difficult, could always be straightened out. The poem begins with a verb in the infinitive, so there is necessarily a hyperbaton. Although the phrase "mis ojos podrán cerrar" (my eyes might close) would make grammatical sense, ojos , being plural, can only be the object of the verb cerrar , because podrá is in the singular. Sombra , shadow, seems to be the next best candidate for a subject, but it opens another ambiguity: what then is the subject of the verb in line 2? Is the final shadow taking away the white day, or the other way around? The main verb in line 3 is again podrá , so the shadow might again be the subject here, or it might be hora , while line 4 might describe sombra, día , or alma . Sombra or alma might be the subject in line 6 (although Lázaro Carreter believes it to be hora , from line 4), leaving memory behind in a place made somewhat obscure by the use of three prepositional phrases (de esotra parte, en la ribera, en donde ardía) in two lines. Line 9 again presents a problem: has the soul imprisoned a god, or vice-versa, or both? The first tercet contains, as Lázaro Carreter characterized it, three subjects in search of a predicate: the principal nouns of lines 9–11 (alma, venas , and medulas ) together seem to be the subjects of the verb in line 12, dejarán , which is appropriately plural, save that while one may talk of the soul leaving behind the body, veins and marrow are parts of it and certainly do not leave after death.^[28] The latter two seem to be the appropriate subjects for the final two seráns , but what is one to make of the apparently freestanding "mas tendrá sentido?" It may be a description of the soul, or of the body, or of ceniza , or, like "perder el respeto" in line 8, a colloquialism, here meaning simply "it will make sense."

There is a contradiction, then, between the poem's tight rhetorical structure of parallels and oppositions, which suggest an almost dialectical presentation of meaning, and a syntactic structure that challenges any facile interpretation.^[29] Yet its position in the collection facilitates its interpretation: many of the tropes come not only from the Petrarchan tradition in general, but from the Lisi cycle itself, where "Cerrar podrá" follows immediately after the sonnet marking

the tenth anniversary of his meeting with Lisi, and thus the halfway point in the affair. As we have already seen, the key antithesis of fire and water was the topic of one of the first sonnets in the collection, while the references to flames and ashes prompted Naumann to assert that this poem, like "En crespa tempestad," invokes the myth of the phoenix. Other poems too anticipated themes in "Cerrar podrá" (see Walters, Francisco de Quevedo , 124–27). In sonnet 19, the poet wishes that love truly engendered death; then his cold ashes would continue to burn, while his soul would keep the flame and carry it across Lethe, achieving a kind of immortality:

  De esotra parte de la muerte dura,
vivirán en mi sombra mis cuidados,
y más allá del Lethe mi memoria.
  Triunfará del olvido tu hermosura;
mi pura fe y ardiente, de los hados.
(L19/B460.9–13)^[30]

On the far side of harsh death, my cares will live in my shade, and memory will survive beyond the Lethe. Your beauty will triumph over oblivion, my pure and burning faith, over the fates.

The immediately following poem, which marks the sixth anniversary of his falling in love with Lisi, employs much of the crucial vocabulary of "Cerrar podrá" (such as postrer, desatar ), as the poet combines an anticipation of his poetic immortality with a Boscán-like warning to those reading the poem in hope of instruction about love. Even the poem immediately preceding "Cerrar podrá" anticipates it. There the poet writes of the sweet fire that courses through his veins, proclaiming that this love will grant him immortality: "Llama que a la inmortal vida trasciende, / ni teme con el cuerpo sepultura, / ni el tiempo la marchita ni la ofende" (That flame which transcends to immortal life neither fears interment with the body nor that time will diminish or harm it, L30/B471.12–14). The word marchita is important, for it figures prominently in the closing tercet of Garcilaso's carpe diem sonnet, "En tanto que de rosa" (23). The connection is a crucial one, for the trope of constancy in love is precisely the antithesis of the notion of endless mutability inherent in the carpe diem ; as Garcilaso put it, "todo lo mudará la edad ligera / por no hazer mudança en su costumbre" (the light age must change everything so as not to change its habit, 13–14). Indeed, as

Blanco Aguinaga observed (316), "Cerrar podrá," launched in defiance against the "severe law," is also equally directed against the most common expression of that law in the seventeenth century, Góngora's verse, "En tierra, en humo, en poluo, en sombra, en nada" (Into earth, into smoke, into dust, into shade, into nothing, Sonetos 151.14), which Quevedo himself echoes in his closing line. The power of this poem, then, resides in part in the gathering of tropes that had been scattered throughout the first half of the Lisi cycle, but also in its upending of the earlier facile correlation of love and death. As Paul Julian Smith concludes, "if Quevedo has become a 'famous lover,' if his monument has achieved immortality, it is not because of the authenticity or originality of his sentiment, but because of the consummate skill of his expression. Others may have loved more sincerely, few have loved so eloquently" (Quevedo , 175).

Debts to other poets have also been recognized: while according to Borges the final agudeza is taken from Propertius (61), María Rosa Lida de Malkiel has shown very close affinities between Quevedo's sonnet and poems by Herrera and Camoens ("Para las fuentes," 373–75). Yet there is also an important allusion to Garcilaso's third eclogue:

Y aun no se me figura que me toca
aqueste officio solamente'n vida,
mas con la lengua muerta y fria en la boca
pienso mover la boz a ti devida;
libre mi alma de su estrecha roca,
por el Estygio lago conduzida,
celebrandot'irá, y aquel sonido
hará parar las aguas del olvido.
(9–16)

Nor does it seem to me that this is my duty only in life; for with my tongue dead and cold in my mouth I plan to move the voice I owe to you. When my soul is freed of its narrow rock, and along the Stygian lake is led, it will go praising you, and that sound will force a halt to the waters of oblivion.

Quevedo uses these lines as the kernel of his own poem: he too will continue, after death, to remember his love for Lisi; the flame crossing the cold water is not just a repetition of the icy fire motif but an assertion of a memory that survives the passage of Lethe. Yet, as Naumann noted, Quevedo also changes the emphasis from the

power of the beloved to inspire emotion that endures after death to the lover himself, and from the power of poetry to immortalize to the power of love to endure. Yet that lover will die; whatever the ameliorating effect of the final conceit, his body will decay into ashes and dust. As these semantic fields elsewhere in Quevedo's poetry are associated with death, the memento mori is directed not at a resistant love object but at the poet himself.

Garcilaso's lines mediate between Quevedo's poem and its true mythological roots; in them Garcilaso pretends that even after death he will, like Orpheus, continue to celebrate, in the underworld, the beauties of María de Toledo, the vicereine of Naples to whom he dedicates his poem. Although Garcilaso here reduces the myth to a decorative device that allows him to play at being Orpheus to María's Eurydice, the allusion gains depth from Garcilaso's other Orpheus poems; the language in them includes imitations of numerous classical and Italian sources, including Virgil, Ovid, Poliziano, and Sannazaro, which is not surprising in view of Garcilaso's eclectic approach to imitation. But the presentation of Orpheus as ancestral ur -poet and ur -lover echoes Petrarch, for whom Orpheus is the "ultimate prototype" (Sturm-Maddox, 93) because his dedication to Laura outlived her death. Petrarch often alludes to the myth, and he directly invoked it in sestina 332, a poem that—like Quevedo's—deals with the failure of poetry and specifically with the incapacity of love poetry to transcend death:

Ove è condutto il mio amoroso stile?
a parlar d'ira, a ragionar di morte.
U' sono i versi, u' son giunte le rime
che gentil cor udia pensoso et lieto?
Ov' è 'I favoleggiar d'amor le notti?
Or non parl' io né penso altro che pianto.
(Rime sparse 332.13–18)

Where has it been led, my amorous style? to speak of sorrow, to talk about death. Where are the verses, where are the rhymes that a noble heart used to hear thoughtful and glad? Where is that talking of love all the night? Now I speak and think of nothing but weeping.

The word giunte in line 15 is important because it shows how, in retrospect, Petrarch sees his poetry once joined together where now it is scattered (rime sparse —the title of the collection). Although Pe-

trarch laments that his poetry is unlike Orpheus's in being unable to bring back the beloved, in fact the Creek poet too failed; by looking back at Eurydice he lost her, and his own subsequent death was due to the dismemberment and scattering of his body.

Yet still to be explained is the notable absence from Quevedo's sonnet of the Orpheus myth. Quevedo tropes Petrarch's lines by alluding to them through Garcilaso's bridge text but eliminating any reference to the power of poetry somehow to immortalize and free both the poet and the object of the poetry from the inevitable decay that is the other side of the carpe diem . If the poet is to turn to ashes and dust, so too certainly will Lisi, and so too will the pages on which the poem is written. The here-and-now eroticism of the early poems proves to be only an illusion, no defense at all against the fact of the poet's own mortality. It is thus appropriate that Quevedo's crypto-Orphic poem should be entitled "Love faithful even after death" and should begin with references to eyesight (the cause of Orpheus's failure) and an unfastened body (Orpheus torn limb from limb). Yet the death invoked in Quevedo's poem is not Lisi's but his own. Thus this poem marks the beginning of that part of the sonnet cycle which might be called in morte , save that Lisi is almost forgotten and the poems are concerned almost exclusively with the poet's own impending death.

As Blanco Aguinaga noted, the majority of the poems that are "approximations" of "Cerrar podrá" come before it, while in those which follow the fire dissolves into ashes (317 n. 33). The next poem ("Éstas son y serán" [These are and will be], L32/B473), for example, repeats some of the key images and words from "Cerrar podrá": the word postrera itself, the beach, the notion of love surviving death. But the nature of love, and thus of the poem, has changed. Death is no longer something to be defied, but something to be anticipated as it brings a purification; it is for that reason that these are the final tears he will waste (perderé," line 3) on Lisi. Instead, he will soar in spirit and burn above the sun, while back on earth his lifeless visage will serve as its own epitaph, proclaiming wordlessly to all travelers, "Ya fue gloria de Amor hacerme guerra" (It was Love's glory to have made war on me, 14). The poem is something of a failed palinode: on the one hand it leads the reader to expect a new attitude to love, but on the other hand its Neoplatonism seems forced and the heroic closing line a poor and derivative

cousin to the final line of "Cerrar podrá." Moreover, the closing has no organic relationship with the rest of the poem, which lacks a central image, a single clear thought to animate it, in contrast to the highly focused poems at the beginning of the collection. Several phrases recall Garcilaso: for example, there are the otherwise unexplained foreign beaches, "playas extranjeras" (5) which suggest the "tierra ajena" (foreign land) of Garcilaso's third canción (16), and above all the phrase "espíritu desnudo" (naked spirit, 9), used by Garcilaso in the final line of sonnet 4 and copied, in turn, from Petrarch's canzone 37. For Garcilaso, too, the phrase indicated a determination to love even after death, but it did not suggest a spiritualization of his emotion or a devaluation of physical desire. In its tone of heroic defiance, Garcilaso's sonnet was closer to "Cerrar podrá"; Quevedo, by contrast, uses the phrase to launch the second half of the Lisi cycle, which focuses on the consequences of bodily deterioration, anticipated in the closing line of "Cerrar podrá." By doing so Quevedo corrects both Garcilaso and his own earlier, erotically suggestive phrase "desnudos de cuerpo" (L7/B448.10). In contrast to those earlier poems, however, this one seems weak and unconvincing, and it soon gives way to a direct contemplation of decay. Where the body and its appetites had earlier been positively valorized through eroticism or a "thirst" for Lisi's beauty, these same words are now turned against the poet, as the forces arrayed against him eat and suck away his vitality. At the same time, the later poems lack the tight organization and unifying vision that characterized the earlier ones, underlining the poet's dissolution and failure.

In the second section of the Lisi cycle Quevedo also continues to employ the imitative technique that characterized the first part, but with a change in diction and rhetoric, and with a shift of subtexts away from Góngora, toward Boscán and the cancionero .^[31] In the following poem ("¿Qué buscas, porfiado pensamiento" [What do you seek, obstinate thought?], L33/B474), as Close has shown, Quevedo addresses thoughts that are absent because they have gone in search of Lisi; the theme is derived from the cancionero , and was employed by Boscÿn, Garcilaso, and Herrera. The line "Yo muero, Lisi, preso y desterrado" (I die, Lisi, imprisoned and in exile, 9) again recalls Garcilaso's third canción , and once more the poem strings together motifs without a central idea. Similarly, the next poem personifies death and represents life as a journey:

  ¡Qué perezosos pies, qué entretenidos
pasos lleva la muerte por mis daños!
El camino me alargan los engaños
y en mí se escandalizan los perdidos.
(L34/B475.1–4)

What indolent feet, what inattentive steps death takes, for my misfortune! Deceits lengthen my journey and the damned are scandalized by me.

These too are cancionero themes previously employed by Boscán and Garcilaso, and in this poem Quevedo twice directly quotes Boscán (see Close, 851). What is ingenious about the sonnet, however, is not the worn-out prosopopoeia with which it opens, but the way Quevedo draws out its implications: if death is like a person, then it has feet, it can be lazy or diligent, and its delays are as much the result of whimsy as an intentional prolongation of the poet's suffering. This poem also contains the following lines: "Y por descaminar mis desengaños, / me disimulan la verdad los años" (And in order to dis-walk my disillusion, the years dissemble the truth to me, L34/ B475.6–7). Underlying these words are again the conventional ideas of life as a journey and of life prolonged through hopes that verge on fantasy. To combine them, Quevedo seizes on the word desengaño (a key concept in the Spanish Renaissance), borrows the prefix, and then attaches it to caminar , creating a neologism that implies living life backward, undoing the process of enlightenment and falling back into deception. As an image it recalls details such as Garcilaso's sonnet 38 ("si me quiero tornar para hüyros, / desmayo, viendo atrás lo que he dexado" [if I wish to turn to flee you, I faint, seeing at my back what I have left behind], 7–8) and sonnet 6 ("si a mudarme a dar un passo pruevo, / allí por los cabellos soy tornado" [if I try to turn to take a step, there by my hair am I pulled back around], 3–4); while the play on the sound des - is a technique that again recalls the cancionero , it also contributes to the semantic field of decay, destruction, falling apart. It reappears a few poems later in yet another journey sonnet with affinities to Boscán and Garcilaso, "Cargado voy de mí" (I am weighed down with myself, L37/B478; as Fucilla, 200–201 and Close, 851 point out, the opening line is a direct quote from Boscán), in words such as desdichada, desordenado , and in the phrase "por no desandar lo caminado." Both "Qué perezosos pies" and "Cargado voy de mí" demonstrate a concern with

educating the reader about love, and in this regard they recall earlier poems in the Lisi cycle such as "Tú, que la paz del mar"; however, they are meant to serve as warnings against love, and thus Quevedo copies Boscán's pose: "don't love as I do" translates into "write as I do."

Many of these tendencies come together in the forty-fourth sonnet of the collection:

  En los claustros de l'alma la herida
yace callada; mas consume, hambrienta,
la vida, que en mis venas alimenta
llama por las medulas extendida.
  Bebe el ardor, hidrópica, mi vida,
que ya, ceniza amante y macilenta,
cadáver del incendio hermoso, ostenta
su luz en humo y noche fallecida.
(L44/B485.1–8)

In the cloisters of my soul the wound lies quiet; but hungrily it consumes the life that in my veins feeds a flame that extends through my marrow. My dropsied life drinks the fire as now, emaciated and loving ash, the remains of the lovely fire, it displays its extinguished light in smoke and darkness.

Close sees the basis for the quatrains in the motif, often employed by Petrarch, of the heart consumed by fire (for instance, Rime sparse 202 and 207); one could also note here echoes of "Cerrar podrá," including the word venas and the phrases "llama por las medulas extendida" and "ceniza amante." The tone of this poem, however, is completely different, with no sense of triumph over death. The flame is directly opposed to life, which is consumed by a spiritual injury, in its silence inimical to poetry. Here, for the first time since "Cerrar podrá," there is a sense of struggle against overwhelming odds, yet now it ends in defeat: his life, after feeding the flames of love, is reduced to a cadaver and ashes at once sickly and loving, vainly attempting to shine through the smoke and gloom. Most striking of all is the opening line: the cloister of the soul implies a central space but also a void, a wall pierced by arches, emptiness, nothing. Without recourse to verbal echo the poem, as much as "Cerrar podrá," suggests Góngora's "En tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada," stripped of carpe diem eroticism and turned in against the poet himself (the very move Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz

would make). Caesuras, enjambment, and irregular rhythm stand in the way of smoothly flowing hendecasyllables, and the poet's power seems exhausted as his verse decays into prose.

After these quatrains, the tercets seem a disappointment:

  La gente esquivo y me es horror el día;
dilato en largas voces negro llanto,
que a sordo mar mi ardiente pena envía.
  A los suspiros di la voz del canto;
la confusión inunda l'alma mía;
mi corazón es reino del espanto.
(L44/B485.9–14)

I flee people and am horrified by the day; I extend in long cries my black weeping, which to a silent sea my burning pain sends. To cries I gave the voice of song; confusion floods my soul; my heart is a realm of terror.

This conclusion contains several of the most formulaic and trite of Petrarchist figures. Yet paradoxically this weakness is also the poem's strength; by ending the poem in this manner, Quevedo achieves several important goals. First, he demonstrates the exhaustion that was only described in the opening of the poem; the effort necessary for the production of the strikingly original opening line, the metaphorical illness sapping his poetic vitality, leaves him unable to continue, so he must resort to an almost schoolboy Petrarchism in order to bring the poem to a conclusion. Second, these lines give us a lesson about how to read Petrarch. The countless imitations of the preceding hundred years, and particularly the mock horrors of Góngora, from the jealous Cyclops to the bee's sting, have inured readers to the true horror of Petrarch's emotion, the confusion in his soul and the anguish in his heart that are complementary to his poetry, the sighs not yet sublimated into song. By placing this Petrarchan imitation at the conclusion of the sonnet, Quevedo tries to get us to read it anew, to defamiliarize it and thus make possible a new reading, and a new rewriting, of Petrarch.^[32] The poet is not merely suffering because of sexual frustration, or even because of unrequited love; rather, he suffers because it is in the nature of passion to induce suffering, regardless of reciprocation or consummation. The love he feels for Lisi is a cancer eating him from within, and unlike Boscán's poem collection, this one will not end with a

declaration that love is in itself good. By taking this position, Quevedo undermines the amoral presuppositions of Spanish Petrarchist poetry, which had never questioned the lover's right to love. What torments the poet is not Lisi, but a love he himself should have rejected.

In this poem Quevedo also gives the reader a lesson in understanding poetry. Quevedo's use of quotations is worth comparing to Garcilaso's; both use them intertextually, but in different ways. When Garcilaso quoted Petrarch, as in the last line of sonnet 22, "non esservi passato oltra la gonna" (not having penetrated the gown), he initiated a dialogue with the Italian writer, highlighting the foreignness of the quotation by keeping it in Italian. This foreignness, most obviously a matter of language, was also a matter of ideology, and the quotation continued to focus in on its original context, serving as a reminder of Petrarch's virginity. But when Garcilaso worked the quotation syntactically into his own poem, he also appropriated it into his own discourse and ideology. The result was a joke, what Castiglione in his second book called "pronta acutezza," and as the butt of the joke was Petrarch, it is also something of a light-hearted polemic or parody; in Bakhtin's words, it "introduces into that discourse a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one" (Problems , 193; see also Todorov, 70).

Quevedo incorporates quotations into his poems much more polyphonically; they appear here and there, disguised in the warp and woof of his own discourse, unmarked but not unrecognizable. The results range from stylization to parody to what Bakhtin (ibid., 197) called "hidden polemic," in which others' words influence the author's speech, forcing it to alter itself. In Quevedo the original voices continue to speak through his text, even to determine what he can say and how he says it. He also speaks, however, through the alien voices: the authentic voice of the Lisi cycle is impossible to distinguish from the incorporated voice of the predecessors, because it largely consists of the amalgamation of those voices. The relation of the tercets (in "En los claustros") to the entire poem is like that of the ekphrastic descriptions of tapestries to Garcilaso's entire third eclogue: they stand out like quotations, seemingly not a part of the poet's own voice, his authentic discourse. In reality, however, both poems are rhetorical constructions, the description of the Tajo circling Toledo no less so than the ekphrases, the quatrains

no less than the tercets (see Johnson). To think one encounters the poet any more in the one than in the other is to allow oneself to be deceived, to fall into the trap of looking for (and thinking one has found) poetic presence. Poetry, Quevedo teaches us, is really about absence, about the poet hiding rather than revealing himself through rhetoric.^[33]

A few poems later death brings the collection to an end; the only surprising thing about this event is that it is Lisi rather than the poet himself who dies. Her death, coming immediately after the sonnet marking the twenty-second anniversary of the poet's love, is the only biographical "fact" about her in the entire collection, and in the last few sonnets the reader nearly forgets her independent existence as the poems dwell more and more on the poet's state of mind. The same can even be said of the sonnet marking her death, which mostly dwells on the poet's own suffering, closing with an ingenious paradox about his continuing inability to see her: "Celosa debo de tener la suerte, / pues viendo, ¡oh Lisi!, que por verte muero, / con la vida me estorba el poder verte" (I must have a jealous fate, for seeing, oh Lisi, that to see you I die, with life it keeps me from seeing you, L51/B492.12–14). Lisi's death, like everything else in the collection, was determined by the model; as González de Salas himself observed, Quevedo loved her a year longer than Petrarch loved Laura, yet wrote no poems after her death, and the absence of such poems suggests a failure to fulfill the very vows he made in "Cerrar podrá." Where the reader most expects, as in Petrarch and Boscán, a spiritualization of love, the poet provides instead a cheeky epitaph in the form of a madrigal on a sculpted portrait of Lisi. There Quevedo compares the sculpture to nature's own portrait; while both have made Lisi white and cold, the sculptor did a better job, for "vuelta te advierte en piedra ingrata, / de lo que tú te hiciste te retrata" (he proclaims you turned into ungrateful stone, of what you made of yourself, he portrays you, B507.13–14; see Moore). With its levity and its focus on an ingenious comparison of Lisi's character to that of a statue, this poem harks back to the first half of the collection, as well as nodding in the direction of Garcilaso's fifth canción . But there is more to it than at first meets the eye: by declaring the sculptural representation superior to nature's, "que no sabe / del jazmín distinguirte y de la rosa" (which knows not how to distinguish you from jasmine or rose, B507.11–12), Quevedo undoes the

colorist metaphorization prevalent not only in Garcilaso, Herrera, and Góngora but in the first poems of the Lisi cycle itself. In stressing the appropriateness to Lisi of the statue's cold, white hardness, Quevedo alludes to the discourse about the relative superiority of painting and sculpture which had its Spanish locus classicus in Boscán's translation of Castiglione, and which has important ramifications for poetry, identified with painting by Garcilaso, Herrera, and Góngora. Quevedo rejects their easy pictorialism, and as he himself is the true sculptor who made the appropriately harsh portrait of Lisi, he lays claim to the rhetorical virtue of conceptual hardness, a line that stretches (in the vernaculars) from Dante, through Petrarch, to the cancionero .

The Canta sola a Lisi can be read, then, as an effort once more to rewrite Spanish literary history and to correct its relation to Italy's. To do so, however, Quevedo first has to undo the journey Spanish poetry has taken for nearly 150 years; after Góngora, Quevedo understands that it is not enough merely to present an alternative. The Lisi cycle, containing undigested quotations of earlier poetry within its own highly rhetorical texture, transforms the quotations into synecdoches of their sources and raises readers' awareness that those too were rhetorical. Just as a strong metaphor can alter the perception of reality, so that one never sees the tenor without thinking of the vehicle, so Quevedo would have readers' perceptions of literature changed so that one cannot read the originals without thinking of their dismemberment and incorporation into the Lisi cycle. By doing so Quevedo runs two risks. The first is that of being too representational; in terms of the final madrigal, of reproducing too well the flowers of amatory rhetoric and thus having his imitatio mistaken for mimesis. The second danger, however, is of being too hard, with the result that Petrarchism will lose its capacity to generate new amatory texts and that the entire edifice of Spanish Renaissance poetry will be destroyed. Yet this second peril may well have been his goal; as Claudio Guillén put it (amplifying Rafael Alberti), "Sí, Quevedo agota el idioma, se alabanza sobre el lenguaje y construye mundos verbales, pero no para que los hombres mejoren, sino por cuanto la realidad . . . no admite mejoría, cambio, transformación ni alivio" (Yes, Quevedo wears out speech, prides himself on being above language and constructs verbal worlds, not to better

humanity, but because reality . . . admits no improvement, change, transformation, or relief, 505).

Thus the destruction of amatory rhetoric is an integral part of Quevedo's larger project, that of representing a human reality that is in its essence both abhorrent and unalterable. In the final section we will examine the relationship of Petrarchism, the Lisi cycle, and Quevedo's so-called metaphysical and burlesque poetry, and assess his success at redirecting, one last time, the perception of literary history.

Conclusion: The End of Petrarchism in Spain

Within the Quevedo canon, the Canta sola a Lisi occupies a special place, seemingly distanced from the pessimism of many of his other works. Yet its emphasis on death and decay makes it thematically similar to his metaphysical poetry, while his reliance on the rhetoric of absence results in its having much in common with his burlesque works. In the latter one can see, in a harsher light, the same insistence on the meaninglessness of amatory rhetoric, as well as his attempt to explode its privileged position in the imperial literary system by introducing into the sonnet the un-Petrarchan, but otherwise prevalent discourses of anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia (see Mariscal, 38).

Many critics have observed the community of style between the poems in the second half of the Lisi cycle and Quevedo's so-called metaphysical poetry, including his earlier macrotextual collection, Heráclito cristiano (1613).^[34] The similarities include the emphasis on thirst, death, and decay, along with the technique of ending or beginning a poem with a striking agudeza . Moreover, these coincidences do not exist only because Quevedo consistently wrote similar poetry over the course of twenty years; there are enough specific verbal echoes of the Heráclito in the Lisi cycle to show that the poet was imitating and cannibalizing his own earlier poetry as much as he was that of Petrarch, Boscán, Garcilaso, Góngora, and others. The coincidences also exist because the Heráclito was Quevedo's first attempt at a reformed Petrarchist poetry collection: that is to say, in the Heráclito , as in the final poems of the Lisi cycle, he attempted to

use motifs drawn from the Petrarchan tradition toward moral rather than erotic ends. Perhaps the most striking instance is the opening of Psalm 9, "Cuando me vuelvo atrás a ver los años / que han nevado la edad florida mía (when I turn back to see the years that have snowed upon my florid time, B21.1–2). In the context of the Rime sparse alone, the topics of life as a journey and youth as the floral season of one's life are merely recognizable; in the context of subsequent Spanish Petrarchist poetry, they are paramount, canonized as such by Garcilaso and Herrera.^[35] Yet he also introduces his own variation, the notion of the years falling like snow on the flowers of his youth. On the textual level, the image combines reminiscences of flower petals gently falling on Laura in "Chiare fresche et dolci acque" (Rime sparse 126) with Laura "più bianca et più fredda che neve" (whiter and colder than snow) from "Giovene donna" (Rime sparse 30.2). The image shifts the focus away from spring and youth to winter and old age, but it also suggests the snow of Quevedo's own cold style blanketing over the poetry of his florid Spanish predecessors so that there will be no trace of it, thus allowing him to return to the original Petrarchan image-hoard. Through techniques such as these, Quevedo attempts to locate his Heráclito in the Petrarch/Garcilaso tradition, but the discontinuities are too great, and as an effort to reform that tradition the collection failed. Moreover, such obvious allusions to Petrarch and Garcilaso are relatively rare in the Heráclito , composed before the widespread circulation of Góngora's great poems and before the publication of Herrera's Versos , at a time when Quevedo perhaps felt less keenly the challenge of reclaiming literary history.

Less often noted than the resemblance of the Lisi cycle to the moral poetry is its approximation to the satirical verse.^[36] Many of these poems are constructed using the very techniques of metaphorization associated with Góngora and culteranismo . For example, the famous poem about a nose, "Érase un hombre a una nariz pegado" (There once was a man stuck to a nose, B513), consists of a series of metaphorical elaborations of a large nose: it is a sword, a sundial, an elephant lying on its back, a pyramid, and so forth. Only the metonymic eleventh line, "los doces tribus de narices era" (twelve tribes of noses was it), reveals that his true intention was not only to impress the reader with his wit but to impugn someone's (Góngora's?) purity of blood.^[37] Similarly, the poem about a woman

in a large dress, "Si eres campana, ¿dónde está el badajo?" (if you are a bell, where is the clapper, B516), likewise consists of a series of metaphorical vehicles based on a single tenor: she is a bell, a pyramid (again), a sugar loaf, a capital, a surgeon's case, and so on (see Lerner, Metáfora ). Other poems deal with metaphor in a more oblique and deconstructive manner:

  Si no duerme su cara con Filena,
ni con sus dientes come, y su vestido
las tres partes le hurta a su marido,
y la cuarta el afeite le cercena;
  si entera con él come, y con él cena,
mas debajo del lecho mal cumplido
todo su bulto esconde, reducido
a chapinzanco y moño por almena,
  ¿por qué te espantas, Fabio, que, abrazado
a su mujer, la busque y la pregone,
si, desnuda, se halla descasado?
  Si cuentas por mujer lo que compone
a la mujer, no acuestes a tu lado
la mujer, sino el fardo que se pone.
(B522)

If Filena does not sleep with her face, nor with her teeth eat, and if her clothing robs three-fourths of her from her husband while the rest her makeup shears away, and if she eats whole with him and with him dines, but beneath the unconsummated bed all her bulk is hidden, reduced to a shoe heel with a wig for a roof, why does it frighten you, Fabio, that embracing his wife, he looks and calls for her if, when she is naked, he finds himself unmarried? If you count as woman what woman is made of, don't lay a woman next to you, but instead the bundles that she wears.

One could read this sonnet as the intersection of two common themes in Quevedo's satirical poetry: on the one hand, derision of women who wear too much makeup, which, when removed, reveals ugliness (see Mas, 34–41); and on the other, a critique of marriage wherein husbands are generally victims of their wives' deceptions (Mas, 85–124). Filena's disappearance, however, also turns this into a poem about absence, and features such as the Latinate names, the hyperbatons, and the genre itself suggest that it be read in terms of the Petrarchan tradition. What causes her husband to seek and call out to her is that when her ornaments—her clothes and her cosmet-

ics—are removed, he finds neither a naked beauty, as he expects, nor an ugly woman, as the reader of Quevedo's other poems on the same theme would expect, but instead nothing at all. The very terms used here to describe Filena's behavior, painting her face and overdressing, resonate in the critical debate over lyric poetry, for they were also used, metaphorically, by the opponents of a style they found excessive, ornate, even effeminate. When Filena removes her adornments, she is revealed as the ultimate figure of absence, leaving her husband unmarried and frustrated, reduced to the status of a Petrarchan lover. Like Góngora's poetry she is all signifier and no signified, all verba and no res . By satirizing these practices, Quevedo seeks to rescue lyric poetry from the feminized realm of decorative poets to the sinewy world of masculine action and empire.

The need to redeem poetry from mere verbal beauty is a constant in much of Quevedo's lyric, and his violent anti-Petrarchism often takes the form of de-idealization of language, of love, and of the body. In the Lisi cycle, it was expressed, as we have seen, through a parodic subversion that forced the reader to question the very nature of love poetry. In other poems, the attack is much more direct as Quevedo violates the stylistic and thematic registers associated with the sonnet. Petrarchism's ur -myth is upended when Apollo, chasing Daphne, is reminded that Danae raised her skirt for a shower of gold, and advised that "si la quieres gozar, paga y no alumbres" (if you want to enjoy her, pay up instead of shining, B536.4).^[38] All women become whores, good for nothing but sex in return for pay ("¡Oh barata y alegre putería!" [Oh cheap and delightful whoredom!]; see Mas, 30–31, 134–36); poems about prostitution and ugliness lead to poems in which the body, tenor of the most famous Petrarchan metaphors, is revealed in all its corporality (see Read). There are sonnets about eating food and sonnets about worms eating dead bodies; sonnets about farts and assholes, sonnets about sodomy. Every time Quevedo uses words like ojo de culo and pedo, puto and coño , he transgresses the rules of sprezzatura and decorum and soils the genre of Castiglione, Boscán, and Garcilaso. This technique is especially clear in a poem such as "Este cíclope, no sicilïano" (This Cyclops, not Sicilian, B832), which begins with ten lines of Gongorine stylistic devices and mediates through "esta cima del vicio y del insulto" (this mountaintop of vice and insult, 11) to a conclusion, "éste, en quien hoy los pedos son sirenas, / éste

es el culo, en Góngora y en culto, / que un bujarrón le conociera apenas" (this one, in whom today farts are sirens, this is the asshole, in Góngora and in cultish, which even a Sodomite would scarcely recognize, 12–14). What is shocking here is the quick transition from cultismos to obscenities. Yet the theme of homosexuality (an Italian vice; see Mas, 185) in the final line resonates back through the entire poem, in the various allusions to Italy and in the metaphorical disguising of the anus, suggesting that Góngora too obscures the same vice. This attribution of concealed homosexuality has implications on both the biographical level, as an insult, and the rhetorical, as a denigration of Góngora's style (recall Morales's complaints about effeminate men). The violation of the decorum is only more obvious here because of the context of the cultismos , but it is present whenever obscene language was used in a sonnet, the privileged genre of Petrarchism and of imperial culture.^[39] Moreover these violations are not merely lexical; they are ideological as well, for however prevalent the social attitudes they represent may have been, they had no place in the Petrarchist tradition.

Although both Góngora and Quevedo satirized the court in verse, they were also ambitious courtiers who used their fame as poets to advance their careers (the former rising to the post of honorary royal chaplain to Philip III, the latter enjoying a diplomatic career until the fall of his patron, the duke of Osuna, in 1621). They also experienced a similar reversal of fortune, their ultimate desengaño motivated in part by personal poverty and disappointment. As Bloom expressed it (Breaking , 13), the struggle to rewrite one's predecessors is parallel to the quest for wealth, for professional advancement, and for sexual fulfillment; all four, directly or indirectly, are the objects of Góngora's and Quevedo's poetic desire. Petrarchism, however, privileges the relationship of eros with poetry, expressing other desires through metonymy. Thus we return to the quotation from Kerrigan and Braden at the end of the introduction, equating sex and poetry: "Artistic and sexual ambitions are interchangeable; they can be substituted for each other in the course of reaching countless bargains. A solitude stocked with images may be preferable to having an amorous partner. The value of postponement, hedonistic as well as moral, is considerable" (188). By throwing out the Petrarchan sexual myth, Quevedo throws out with it the particular historical form of the Renaissance search for priority.

From Boscán's profeminist writing to Herrera's love for the countess of Gelves, the legitimacy of lyric love, on its own terms, went unquestioned because it was part and parcel of a system of legitimization that included classical and Italian literature, Spanish culture, and even the state. If implicit in the Petrarchan pose there was a plea for fulfillment, autonomy, and priority, it was also quite clear that these desires could only be attained within the privileged grounds of the poems themselves. Góngora tested the system as far as it would go, but his intention was not to destroy it. Quevedo does take that step, calling into question all forms of legitimacy, sexual, literary, cultural, and political (see on this point McCallum and Zahareas); and by merging Petrarchism and the burlesque he tosses out one of the few vehicles for establishing one's legitimacy as a lover and as a poet. By making the Petrarchan erotic dream seem illegitimate, he dismisses other fantasies as well. The sonnet about verbal and mineral wealth, "Tú, que la paz del mar" (L4/B445), is particularly instructive in this regard: read with the proper irony, it teaches that words do not create wealth, only the blood and labor of the mines do, and Spain's gold now comes from abroad, not from the sands of the Tajo. Quevedo is not opposed to the Spanish empire per se, but he wants it seen for what it is. Finally, by undermining the Petrarchan sonnet, Quevedo also calls off the cultural competition with Italy, which in the age of Philip IV he deems irrelevant. Read symbolically, the split between Quevedo's amorous sonnets and his satirical ones is neither as great nor as inexplicable as it might seem: his women are garrulous because of the logorrhea with which the muse infected Góngora (and, truth be told, Quevedo himself); they are wanton because the muse has given herself to every male poet for 150 years: to Encina, to Boscán, to Garcilaso, to Herrera, even to celibate churchmen like Fray Luis de León and to rhetorical pederasts like Góngora. But Lisi is cold and hard because the muse is to him always diamondlike and stony, because language always resists, and because poetry is always a struggle.

Quevedo's moral reading of Petrarch is not necessarily superior to previous ones, and if it seems superior, that is only because its very belatedness allows it to subsume the linguistic, thematic, generic, and stylistic readings of his predecessors. At the same time Quevedo uses his moral deconstruction of Petrarch to invalidate all

of those previous readings. In contrast to Góngora, whose stylization was inclusive, Quevedo's parody highlights difference and breaks down the tradition into its components. He thus challenges the validity of a stylizing metalepsis; in contrast to Garcilaso and Góngora, he is come not to fulfill the Petrarchan tradition but to destroy it. His own aim is to effect a retrospective clinamen stronger than Góngora's metalepsis, which would allow the pretense of a direct return to the source. In his more mundane moments, this desire takes the form of an attempt to reclaim Petrarch and Garcilaso as his own, rather than as Góngora's, predecessors, by rewriting literary history through activities such as editing the poetry of Fray Luis de León. On a more fantastic level, the intention is to replace Boscán, Garcilaso, Herrera, and Góngora and to set himself up at the head of the Spanish Petrarchist tradition (hence perhaps the unseemly obsession in the Lisi cycle with the second-rate Boscán). The fantasy can be seen in a satire, written after purchasing the house where Góngora lived, in order to evict him:

Y págalo Quevedo
porque compró la casa en que vivías,
molde de hacer arpías;
y me ha certificado el pobre cojo
que de tu habitación quedó de modo
la casa y barrio todo,
hediendo a Polifemos estantíos,
coturnos tenebrosos y sombríos,
y con tufo tan vil de  Soledades ,
que para perfumarla
y desengongorarla
de vapores tan crasos,
quemó como pastillas Garcilasos:
pues era con tu vaho el aposento
sombra del sol y tósigo del viento .
(B841.121–35)

Quevedo pays for it because he bought the house in which you lived, that mold for making harpies; the poor lame man has certified to me that your bedroom, like the house and the entire neighborhood, reeked of stagnant Polifemos, dark and shadowy buskins, and with such vile fumes of the Soledades , that to perfume it and degongorize it of such crass vapors he burned pills of Garcilasos: for the room was, with your breath, a shadow of the sun and a poison for the wind .

Burning Garcilaso like incense may produce a better perfume than Góngora's feet and breath, but it also sacrifices and destroys him, leaving a direct conduit from the great Italian father to this the last of his orphans. This is how Quevedo would have written himself into literary history; whether he achieved it is a different question, to which one can only give a historically conditioned answer. Different ages have held different evaluations of Góngora's, Quevedo's, and even Garcilaso's relative stature. Any judgment rendered on Bloom's strategies is ultimately dependent on the historical process of canon formation; for indeed, the Bloomean paradigms are in the end only models for trying to describe and understand the hermeneutically circular process of canonization. Aesthetic and historical evaluation are ultimately the same; canonized poets are read as strong, because strong poets constitute the canon. To an amazing degree, Spanish Renaissance poets succeeded in writing themselves into the canon as they saw fit, such that what we think of them today is what they wanted us to think; this determination is the sign of their strength. This very strength, however, can interfere with their being read as anything but our own poetic fathers. Only with conscious effort can we displace ourselves to see them again, like Herrera, as orphans excluded from the shade of the laurel tree. Only then can we appreciate the enormous hermeneutic freedom derived from their status as orphans, to sidestep proximate models and to use the cultural belatedness of the Renaissance humanists as a defense against poetic belatedness vis à vis their most immediate predecessors.