Literary Analysis: Garcilaso, Quevedo, and Bécquer
Analysis of Literary Works: Garcilaso, Quevedo, and Bécquer
Garcilaso de la Vega: Sonnet Analysis
Location: Lyric poem by Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish Renaissance author and prototype of the knight of the time.
Topic: The poet urges a young girl to love before time withers her beauty (Carpe diem).
Structure:
- The poet refers to the color and grace of youth (lines 1-8).
- The poet refers to old age (lines 9-14).
Analysis and Content Development
- This sonnet falls within the hedonistic doctrine, which seeks the enjoyment of life.
- The poem embodies the Renaissance ideal of female beauty.
- Recreation in the transcripts of the beloved’s physical appearance.
- The theme is the inevitability of time and brevity of life, approached with a Renaissance mindset.
Metric Analysis
This is a sonnet (two quartets plus two triplets) of heroic verse with rhyme. The triplets are chained.
Style and Stylistic Resources
- The imperative mood divides the poem into two parts.
- Three subordinate temporal clauses accentuate the importance of time in the poem (lines 1, 5, 10).
- The syntactic disorder in the second quartet contributes to describing the random motion of the hair (line 8).
- Abundant hyperbaton.
- Duplication and triplication of elements (lines 3, 7, 8).
- Epithets (lines 4, 6, 7, 9…).
- Metaphors (golden hair: blond, cheerful spring: young, beautiful snow on the summit: gray hair).
- Use of color imagery.
Francisco de Quevedo: Poem Analysis
Location: Poem by Francisco de Quevedo, a Spanish Baroque writer considered the highest representative of conceptism.
Topic: The poem reflects on the passage of time and the brevity of life, which he sees as a rapid and continuous march towards death.
Structure:
- Quevedo reflects on the meaning of life (lines 1-8).
- The author presents the relentless, untimely death (lines 9-14).
Analysis and Content Development
- In the opening lines, the poet explains the vanity of life, stating that we make plans and have ambitions without considering that our existence is fleeting.
- The next stanza develops the discussion in the two verses above, insisting on the brevity of life and pointing out the idea that your body is not helpful, but a grave.
- In the second part of the poem, the poet arrives at the conclusion that yesterday and tomorrow do not exist, and today passes so fast that it leads to death.
- In the last stanza, he concludes by writing that the same time that gives us life takes it away.
Metric Analysis
(Equal to the previous poem)
Stylistic Devices and Style
- Frequent ellipses from the first verse (life is a dream, earth, anything…).
- Several antitheses (lines 1, 2, 8, 9, 14).
- Common metaphors (life = dream, earth, smoke).
- Lyric exclamations in the first verses.
- Individualism of the author.
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Rhyme Analysis
Location: Rhyme by Bécquer, chief representative of the Second Spanish Romanticism.
Topic: The poet sees life as an experience of loneliness.
Structure:
- His experience of life in the past has been negative (lines 1-8).
- The future looks equally fatalistic (lines 9-16).
Analysis and Development of Content
- Each part of the poem is introduced by a rhetorical question that the poet asks himself.
- This question serves as a pretext to start Bécquer’s reflection addressed to an undetermined ‘you’.
- In the first part, the poet sees himself as a choice for pain. With typical hyperbole, he exposes a recurrent fear in the literature of this movement.
- In the second part, he accentuates the pessimistic attitude, showing romantic despair and anguish.
- The romantic subjectivism and sentimentality also find a place in this poem, although the author does not profess to be characterized precisely by an exalted romanticism.
Metrics
The poem combines hendecasyllables and seven-syllable verses. Assonance rhyming pairs and odd numbers are loose. This is an assonanced rhyme.
Stylistic Devices and Style
- Abundance of hyperbole (lines 1, 9, 11).
- Profuse adjectives.
- Use of a lexical semantic field belonging to the pain of death and feeling (bloody, tattered, oblivion, tomb).
- Expressive intensity reached its peak in the suggestive image of verse 5 (tattered soul).
- Rhetorical questioning (lines 1, 9).
- Syntactic parallelism at the beginning of both parts.
- Lyric interruption (line 1).