Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), 'De pura honestidad templo sagrado' (1582)

Although we know that Góngora wrote poetry while he was a student, the sonnet which follows, dating from 1582, is one of the earliest of his poems to survive.

De pura honestidad templo sagrado,cuyo bello cimiento y gentil murode blanco nácar y alabastro durofue por divina mano fabricado;

5 pequeña puerta de coral preciado,claras lumbreras de mirar seguro,que a la esmeralda fina el verde purohabéis para viriles usurpado;soberbio techo, cuyas cimbrias de oro

10 al claro sol, en cuanto en torno gira,ornan de luz, coronan de belleza;ídolo bello, a quien humilde adoro,oye piadoso al que por ti suspira,tus himnos canta, y tus virtudes reza.

(Góngora 2000: 20–21)

Juan López de Vicuña, the editor of the first printed edition of Góngora's poetry, tried to head off adverse reaction by excising from it some of the poet's more overt attacks on individuals. Yet it famously scandalized 'muchas personas religiosas y graves' when it went on sale to the public in January 1628, some seven months after the poet's death (Góngora 1963 [1627]: xxi–xxiii). Fr Juan de Pineda (1558–1637), with whom Góngora had crossed swords in 1610 at a Jesuit-hosted certamen poético to mark the beatification of Ignatius Loyola, singled out line 12 of this sonnet as a 'loca exageración de profanos poetas, que en boca de un sacerdote, y junto con otras demasías, se haze más intolerable, y menos digna de dissimularse'.¹ What Pineda may not have known from that first edition, in which the sonnet is entitled 'Descripción de las partes de una dama' (or what he may have elected not to know) was that it had been written when Góngora was just 21 years old and was not yet a racionero, let alone a priest; he took minor orders in 1585 and became a deacon the following year, by which time, as we know, his reputation as a poet had reached Cervantes.² And yet, as we shall see, Pineda's comments may have been triggered not only by the knowledge that this was a poet who had enjoyed a lifelong ecclesiastical career but also by a more generalized sense of unease and uncertainty about the twists Góngora here gives to Petrarchist manner and matter.³

The poem already shows a master sonnet-builder at work, as is apparent from the close relationship of the stress system in the various verses: the sudden shift of the regular stress to place the emphasis where he wants it to fall. In the first quatrain, after two lines where the stress is on the sixth syllable (honesti'dad, ci'miento), he shifts it in line 3 on to the fourth: on to the key word nácar ('flesh'). In the first line of the final tercet – so often in a sonnet the moment for a change of perspective – the opening stress on the first syllable draws to the reader's attention the word which sums up all the qualities he has so far been enumerating: ídolo. The structure of the imagery is characteristically balanced, each half-line tending to consist either of one of a pair of attributes (cimiento and muro, nácar and alabastro) or else of an attribute and its adjective (lumbreras and claras, mirar and seguro). That feature of Góngora's verse, part of what Dámaso Alonso more than half a century ago dubbed bimembración (1952; see also 1955: 583), is accompanied by other syntactical parallelisms: y in lines 2 and 3, de in 5 and 6. In the last line of each tercet there is also a typical use of parallel verbal statements without the copulative.

The subject of the sonnet is love, and it has been customarily treated by editors, ever since Chacón, as a 'poema amoroso'. The poet exalts his lady in terms of what was in Góngora's day a commonplace: the comparison of a woman's body...