Ten years have elapsed since I resolved to plunge into my memory the ensuing nose rag-like fourteen sonnets written by Garcilaso de la Vega (1503, Toledo, Spain; 1536, Nice, France), with which one can palliate the snot green begotten by the wrack-monger blind Hap, by stubbornness, by the bedeviled industrial Romanticism swilled in Germany and France, by the stilted deaf Providence philosophised by Christianity, and by the uncouth ever-seething heathenism concocted by the warp of our wits. Such are the main themes of his poetry, by the way.
There are, I think, six heads with which one can classify all literary genres, videlicet: Naturalistic Metaphors, Technical Depictions, Endogamic History, Pious Imperialism, Optimistic Evolutionism, Romantic Lyricism, Cosmological Atonement, and Accursed Anarchism. To placate every againsaying fluttering in the mind of my critics, I’ll explain in another text how I fetched these heads from Kantian founts. Garcilaso’s oeuvre orbs each of them. But since my purpose is not to offer an exhaustive study on the versification of the poet, in a breeze I am going to peruse, at least, the first two concepts applied to his well-wrought poetry.
A skald of note has the accruing sleight to clad compounded things in oneness. This literary sleight might be named “Naturalistic Metaphor”. One can say, for instance, “springtime” or “wintertime” in order to announce a change displayed by nature. But if I efface the hollow suffix “-time” and embrace that of “-tide”, as in “springtide” or “nighttide” (do ye remember this verse of Tennyson: “the great Sun-Star of morning-tide”?), then each flower, tree, star or shadow becomes a bit of the wholeness of a system. A second was transmogrified into a wave.
To read the full text with sonnets: Fourteen Sonnets of Garcilaso de la Vega
