Natural Imagery and Poetic Stance in the Love Sonnets of Francisco de Rioja

Natural Imagery and Poetic Stance in the Love Sonnets of Francisco de Rioja by Edward H. Friedman* According to Pedro Salinas in Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, Garcilaso de la Vega—as his nation's supreme example of Renaissance poetic practice—converts impure reality into beautiful poetry, substance into concept, nature into the idea of nature.1 Jorge Guillen, in Language and Poetry, notes in the clearly Baroque Luis de Góngora an enthusiasm for the material world to the extent that "his whole soul is concentrated in his five senses, in a propensity toward all that sets up a resistance to be joyously conquered."2 Searching for obscurity of expression, Góngora relies on the very elements of the material world by describing one object in terms of another or others, thus transforming what might be called natural substance into poetic substance, or material reality into esthetic or poetic reality.} Francisco de Rioja, whose works are Baroque in form and to some extent classical in inspiration, conceives nature as neither delicately beautiful nor superreal. Rather, he contrasts the beauty of nature with its destructive aspect. Natural imagery represents not so much nature as human emotion, and while the obscurity which marks the works of Góngora is present in the poetry of Rioja, it is not as blatantly obscurity for its own sake as for poetic effect, as part ofa literary trend and an individual poetic structure. Rioja's particular use of natural imagery within a Baroque framework leads to what Angel Valbuena Prat designates as "la forma ... del estilo barroco personalísima del poeta."4 An examination of the use of natural imagery in the love • EDWARD FRIEDMAN is an assistant professor of Spanish at Ar¡70na State University, withdegrees from the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins Unncrsity. His research is primarily in the field of Golden Age literature, with emphasis on the ¡.omedia and Cervantes. •I would like to express my appreciation to Dr. Elias L. Rivers for his invaluable assistance in the preparation of this paper. 1 Pedro Salinas, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, trans. Edith Fishtine Helman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), pp. 80 and 93. !Jorge Guillen, Language and Poetry: Some Poets ofSpain (Combridge: Harvard University Press. 1961). ? 39. 'Salinas, p. 141. 'Angel Valbuena Prat, Historiade Ia literatura española, 7th ed.. 3 vols. (Madrid: Editorial Gustavo GiIi. S.?.. 1963), II, 260. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW|>) Sonnets of Krancisco de Rioja sonnets of Rioja5 provides a means of defining Rioja's specific poetic approach, not only to nature as a literary device, but to the conventions of his age. Rioja belongs to the Sevillian school of poetry, whose founder, Fernando de Herrera, offers a link between Renaissance and Baroque poetic techniques. An exponent of the Italianate style exemplified in Spain in the works of Juan Boscán and Garcilaso, Herrera at the same time foreshadows the cultista innovations of Góngora in what Elias Rivers calls "the color, the intellectualized density and complexity, and the chiseled forms of his poetic idiom."6 Adolfo de Castro, in his anthology of Golden Age lyric poetry, considers several of Rioja's sonnets as stylistic imitations of Herrera.7 Yet it is necessary to see the works of the two poets as part of the progression from the so-called second cycle of the Renaissance8 to Baroque poetry. In the seventeenth century poetic complexity, which began as a type of amplification of earlier conventions, becomes increasingly intricate. Within this context, Rioja's primary distinction is conceptual rather than stylistic, with a change in tone more evident than a change in expression. A clue to Rioja's poetic aims can be seen in his criticism of the poetry of Herrera. In the prologue to the 1619 edition of Herrera's Kétsos, Rioja says that human feeling and benevolence, while not lacking, "se asconden i pierden a la vista entre ornatos poéticos," and adds the following esthetic judgment: Los sentimientos del animo afectuosos, cuanto mas delgados i sutiles, se deven tratar con palabras mas senzillas i propias; solo porque se descubran a los ojos, i hieran el animo con su viveza: en fin...