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I N T E R P L A Y O F S Y N T A X A N D M E T R I C S I N G A R C I L A S O ' S S O N N E T S Elias L. Rivers State University of N e w York-Stony Brook "... the variation is beautiful because we hear it against the background of the imagined norm..." —C. S. Lewis In the Western tradition, ancient Greek grammarians were the first to study syntax, analyzing the parts of speech and the structure of phrases, clauses, and sentences; they applied their analysis primarily to written prose. Ancient grammarians, both Greek and Latin, also analyzed metrical practice in verse: the line was divided into feet, with different combinations of long and short syllables; different types of lines in lyric poetry were given names, and combinations of lines were identified as making up stanzas, which were also given names. Renaissance grammarians , concerned primarily with Latin and Greek literature, studied and continued the work done by ancient grammarians on syntax and on metrics, but always separately; none of them, either ancient or modern, combined the systematic analysis of syntax with that of metrics. Nebrija, for example, in his Gramatica de la lengua castellana of 1492, applies Latin models to Spanish versification in Book II and to Spanish syntax in Book IV, but he does not relate them to one another. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that the relation between syntax and versification is a fundamental aesthetic link between form and meaning in poetry. 1. Run-on lines, or enjambment It is not a simple matter to analyze the different relations possible between metrical units and syntactic units in poetic texts. An important beginning hasbeen made with the study of the special case of enjambment, or encabalgamiento, in which the end of a poetic line does not coincide with the end of a syntactic unit; enjambment is taken to be a deviation from the assumed classical rule, made explicit by neoclassical authorities such as Boileau, that such units should coincide1 . But enjambment alone, as narrowly defined, would not cover all the cases of such non-coincidence , for metrical units may be longer or shorter than the line, and syntactic units range from single morphemes to long, complex sentences. No one has yet attempted to correlate both full sets of variables in SpanCALlOPE Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (2000): pages 199-215 200 «5 Elias L. Rivers ish. Meter, like syntax, has language-specific surface structures; hence John Hollander's brilliant essay on enjambment in English, for example, although often suggestive, cannot be applied directly to Spanish.2 Consequently, the specialist in Spanish poetry would do well to begin with the running-on of lines, or enjambment, which has already received considerable attention, beginning in the sixteenth century, when Ronsard invented the French term enjambement, and when Herrera commented on the phenomenon in Garcilaso. In the twentieth century there have been at least three significant treatments written by Spanish philologians. The first of these treatments, which does not pretend to be systematic or exhaustive, is simply a series of remarks made by Damaso Alonso, especially with regard to a passage taken from stanza 9 (lines 6568 ) of Garcilaso's Third Eclogue, in his Poesia espanola of 1950 (65-75). Let us first read these four lines, with Alonso's one comma (as"in the editions of Navarro Tomas and Morros; the editions of Rivers and Alcina have no comma), followed by his commentary: Con tanta mansedumbre el cristalino Tajo en aquella parte caminaba, que pudieron los ojos el camino determinar apenas que llevaba. El secreto esta en el encabalgamiento. El adjetivo "cristalino" termina un verso, y su sustantivo, "Tajo", comienza el siguiente; el verbo "determinar" empieza verso, pero su objeto, "el camino", acaba el anterior . En los cuatro versos no hay mas que una pausa de sentido (tras "caminaba"). Quedan los cuatro versos divididos en dos largos brazos, cada uno de dos versos. Y para hacer las ligazones "cristalino-Tajo" y "el camino-determinar", es necesario disminuir la velocidad de los versos primero y tercero: prolongarlos, distenderlos dulcemente . . . (69-70) After this...

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