Breaking into Tears: Salicio's Refrain in Eclogue I

"The End is the Beginning of the End"

—Smashing Pumpkins

In Garcilaso's Eclogue I, the single refrain, "Salid sin duelo, lágrimas, corriendo," ends fully ten of the twelve stanzas that comprise Salicio's lament. That the estribillo, in its repetitive insistence, demands the shepherd's lachrymose response to his lover's rejection has long been considered its assigned function. After all, tears must flow for poems to flower in the shepherd's blissful bower. Therefore, from the poem's start under the morning sun's rays until the "triste lloro" of the very last stanza, when the sun sinks behind the mountains, the shepherd's tears never stop flowing.

Yet, as we know, the identity of this shepherd as Salicio, the etymological root of whose name is salix, salicis, or weeping willow, encumbers the poem with much more than the poet-narrator's promise of the shepherds' sweet lament at the eclogue's opening: "el dulce lamentar de dos pastores /…/ he de cantar" (vv.1–3).¹

Indeed, the poem's lachrymosity has been a bone of contention among critics since Herrera, who, in his Anotaciones, praised the eclogue for its "pureza y sencillez y blandura y propiedad de lengua" against Sannazaro's "demasiada afectación" (457). Centuries later, when comparing the two shepherds' laments, Adrien Roig noted that of the two, it is Salicio who cries most throughout the poem:

paradójicamente el lamentar de Nemoroso se acompaña de menos lágrimas que el de Salicio, como lo revela la importancia reducida del campo de vocabulario termático del llorar, para Nemoroso, que cuenta apenas un total de 5 ocurrencias: llanto (3), lágrimas (1), llorar (1), cuando el total era de 47 para Salicio.

(165)

In contrast, Patrick Gallagher states that Nemoroso, although less strident than Salicio, is "scarcely less tearful" (193). He observes that just as Salicio remains "en eterno llanto," fate has condemned Nemoroso to "sempiterno llanto" (193). Gallagher also disagrees with Robert ter Horst, who—he says—took Salicio's grief seriously, while for him, it is nothing but "whipped up emotionalism" (199). Most critics, though, have interpreted the eclogue's lachrymose nature as grounds for the poem itself. I would instead like to focus on the refrain as an ending to Salicio's first ten stanzas. Most helpful for my purpose is Giorgio Agamben's notion that a poem's limits and endings are simultaneously defined and contested both by its sonorous units—its meter and rhyme—and its semantic units—that is, the poem's rationale.

For Agamben, all poems are born precisely at and of the tension and difference (and hence interference) between the semantic and the semiotic, between sense and sound.² Most importantly, he stresses that before its ending, the opposition between poetic sound and syntax, the poem's ability to make sense, is always marked through enjambment. The sound's continuation is what constitutes the poem's meaning, as the receptor must await the following line to fulfill the previous line's connotation. In questioning what happens at the end of the semantic unit, when opposition is no longer possible, Agamben concludes that a poem's strategy is to maintain its double animating language, allowing it to fall endlessly into silence, yet saying what it meant to say (115). Garcilaso's insertion of an estribillo after ten of Salicio's twelve stanzas anticipates and challenges Agamben's notion that the poem never reconciles sound with sense, as these stanzas capture the shepherd's emotive expression in poetic sound, even as the lines' enjambments break the meter to justify—and give meaning to—the poem.

Salicio's first stanza lashes out angrily at the absent Galatea with a series of harsh consonantal sounds ("que," "quejas," "quema") and long vowels (/u/, /e/, /a/) that weave the Petrarchan paradox of ice and fire with that of hard stone and the poet's tears.³ It is, however, the enjambment that enables us to make sense of the accusations, as the lines form a single sentence that ends by apostrophizing the traitorous...