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.