Ecphrasis in Garcilaso's "Egloga Tercera"

Author(s): Alan K. G. Paterson

Source: The Modern Language Review , Jan., 1977, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 73-92
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3726297

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 ECPHRASIS IN GARCILASO'S 'EGLOGA TERCERA'

A major feature of Garcilaso's Egloga tercera is the poet's use of ecphrasi

'the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art,. . . the re
through the medium of words of sensuously perceptible objets d'art', to
Spitzer's formulation.1 There may be many ways, equally valid, of readin
as complex as the third eclogue; my intention here is to work around th
feature, a central organizing principle, drawing towards it other o
aspects of composition. For us to prepare for the possibilities of the
device as used in a sixteenth-century poem, Spitzer's formulation req
readjustment. Ecphrasis, as its etymology suggests, implies digression
three examples of ecphrasis from classical and Renaissance poetry, they
conform to a pattern: the description of the artefact is a digressionary
In Moschus's Europa, the heroine's basket has a depiction, wrought in me
transformation into a heifer and of her crossing the sea to her love
description is an inset, or digression, within the main account. In Catullu
and Thetis, the tale of the two lovers is interrupted by a description of th
their marriage-bed, which shows the story of Ariadne. In the final canto
Orlando furioso, the account of the nuptials of Ruggiero and Bradamant
by a description of an embroidered pavilion, showing the birth, educatio
cardinalship and soldiery of Hippolytus of Este, the poet's patron. The 'f
a frame' technique is not the only feature which these examples have in
each case, the inset is on the scale of a minor epic, or epyllion. In all
structions, a similar problem of composition is at issue. Is the digression
with the main narrative? Can there be a change of attention withou
balance over the whole ? Garcilaso's Egloga segunda indicates that he wor
basis of such an anthology of models; how tentative was his first attemp
structure of feeling, in the eclogue, seems to be borne out in the w
jettisoned available forms of pastoral in favour of a controlling ecphr
inset between the two sections of pastoral narrative there is the descript
artefact, the decorated urn inside the cavern of the river-god Tormes, w
the epic progress of the House of Alba.
The foregoing amplification of Spitzer's definition is a reminder that t
sance poet was sensitive to traditional forms. Quoting Catullus's Peleus an
a pertinent model for the 'frame within a frame' technique is consistent
Renaissance poet's allegiance to the doctrine of imitation. The degr
imitation influenced composition in Garcilaso's age can be gauged from a
son of attitudes. Whereas Petrarch was dismayed when a Virgilian
ending was pointed out to him in one of his Latin poems, the important
Garcilaso's contemporary, Marco Girolamo Vida, return with insist
practice of imitation. Imitation is a calculated aspect of apprenticeship an

1 Leo Spitzer, 'The "Ode on a Grecian Urn", or Content vs. Metagrammar', CL, 7 (
2 L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge, I969), p. 291, note, makes thi
parison between Petrarch (Ep. Fam. 22. 2) and Vida. Although Petrarch recognizes th
literary models (Ep. Fam. 23. I9). his circumspection over borrowing detail is in con
enthusiasm. In the latter's poetics (Marci Hieronymi Vidae Cremonensis de Arte Poetica L
I527)), verbal imitation is seen as a central drill in composition; for example, he re
poet to keep a quotation-book for a supply of words and images ('digna supellex/verbor
- A3v).

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74 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

At the same time, Vida's systematic references to Helicon, to drinking at the Muses'
spring, to venerating the succession of 'vates' from Greece, Rome and Tuscany
(i.e. Homer, Virgil and Lorenzo the Magnificent) hold a deeper notion of the
contemporary poet's ordination into a rite which has a permanence set against
the successive declines of particular cultures; imitation secured for the poet a place
in an unbroken continuum of poetry-making.' Both vernacular and Neo-Latin
poetry of the age bear out how closely Vida's prescription on imitation corresponded
to actual practice. If imitation entered thus strongly into composition, in what way
does it effect the reading of poetry? It would be wrong, I think, to look upon the
doctrine as if it provided a temporary scaffolding from which the craftsman addres-
sed himself to his work, to be subsequently dismantled and stowed out of sight.
Early sixteenth-century poetics are directed more to the poet than to the reader;
however, Nicolao Beraldo, for one, in the introduction to his commentary on
Angelo Poliziano's Rusticus, dwells on the function of criticism. His first grandilo-
quent requirement for the 'interpres' to possess 'universal knowledge' and his
accrediting of divine fury to the critic as much as to the poet, suggest overstatement
prompted from within the Neoplatonic circle of Florence. But on imitation in the
Rusticus Beraldo speaks to the point: 'The poetry of Poliziano cannot be understood
save by one who is skilled in reading the ancients. This is especially true of our
Silva, which is scattered with the liberal fruits of ancient readings .. .'2 Beraldo sees
the 'interpres' as a mediator between poet and reader; the 'lamp of the interpreter'
clarifies the mysteries of poetry, the 'hidden doctrine';3 since, as it turns out,
Beraldo's lamp seems to do little more than identify and explain classical loci, it is
easy to downgrade his annotations to mere archaeological spadework, influential
along with others in setting the pedantic example to be followed, in the case of
Garcilaso's poetry, by Spanish excavators such as El Brocense and Herrera. Yet,
seen positively, Beraldo is arguing for 'veteres lectiones' to be recognized as a
dynamic element in a poetry which he acknowledges as being neoteric ('quod
poema sit neotericum atque seculo hoc nostro natum').4 It is such an attitude
towards tradition in new-made poetry that can open up far-reaching perspectives in
our reading of Garcilaso's Egloga tercera. Indeed, the fulfilment of meaning depends
not on our casual half-remembering but rather upon a keen attentiveness to the
older voices that mingle with the new voice of Garcilaso; in our response to their
interplay, to the departures and reinforcements, we collaborate in giving the poem
its particular significance. This procedure of listening for the refracted echoes
from past poetry is given added warranty if we recall the setting in which Garcilaso
momentously redirected his own lyric, the Naples he frequented from perhaps as
early as 1529. The Academy of Naples had a distinguishing feature; the hallmark
of its humanism, stamped on it by Giovanni Pontano, lay in its intercourse with the

1 Vida, op. cit., A4v-7r, where an essay in literary history is drawn up as part of a discussion of
literary apprenticeship. The idea of an unbroken succession of poetry-making that grants authority
to the modern poet is central to Juan Boscan's discussion of the new 'gdnero de trobas' that prefaces
Book 2 of his works; Obras poeticas de Juan Boscdn, edited by M. Riquer et al. (Barcelona, I957),
pp. 90-I.
2 Angeli Politiani Sylua, cui titulus est Rusticus, cum docta elegantissimaq .Jicolai Beraldi interpr
(Basle, 15I8), D4r. My translations, where there is no available English version, are intended
cribs; for reasons of space, the original texts have been omitted. Elsewhere, I desist from tra
when it would obscure stylistic features in the Neolatin text.
3 Ibid., D3r.
4 Ibid., D4r.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON 75

past through poetry. It is the poetic achievement of Neapolitan humanism that seals
Sannazaro's praise of the city in L'Arcadia: 'E soppra tutto me piacque udirla
comendare de' studii de la eloquenza e de la divina altezza de la poesia' (Prosa xi).
It was Pontano himself who cultivated the affinity between the city of Naples and
Virgil, bringing about what has been called the 'meridionalizzazione' of the Latin
poet and casting himself in his pastoral Lepidana as none other than Virgil's direct
successor.l There is little need to enlarge upon Garcilaso's public association with
this Neapolitan blend of humanism. It was, for example, an edition of Donatus's
commentaries on the Aeneid that Garcilaso urged the Neapolitan Scipione Capece
to publish and it was to Garcilaso that Capece in turn dedicated it.2 Appropriately,
it is towards Virgil that the first digression in Garcilaso's third eclogue points.
Orpheus and Eurydice. In ecphrasis, the movement of words records the movement
of an eye as it scans, for the artefact itself is immobile, complete. Through the
organization of words, this imaginary eye may be thought of as halting over a
detail, and so that detail assumes importance, as if through a selective process
of perception. Thus, in Philodoce's tapestry, the attention is drawn first by the
river Strymon, its one bank pleasantly pastoral and its other precipitous and
unhospitable; it was there, on the uninviting bank, that Orpheus sang:
Phillodoce, que assi d'aquellas era
llamada la mayor, con diestra mano
tenia figurada la ribera
de Estrim6n, de una parte el verde llano
y d'otra el monte d'aspereza fiera,
pisado tarde o nunca de pie humano,
donde el amor movi6 con tanta gracia
la dolorosa lengua del de Tracia.3

Now Orpheus by Strymon is the end of a story, not its beginning; the imaginary eye
has rested first on the figure of desolation and ignored all that went before, turning
only in the second stanza to when the tale began, to Eurydice's premature death
(like the rose plucked before its time). In the third stanza, the eye records Orpheus's
descent into the Underworld, hastening over the details of his fruitless quest to fix
again on the point from which it set out, the singer on the crag by Strymon. The
effect is of the three stanzas being incorporated into a larger, closed system, namely
a narrative unit that bends round upon itself, its end joining up with its beginning.
The three stanzas are an interesting example of ring-composition. It is through this
sense of a linear movement of poetry being converted into a circular one that the
verbal artefact gives, like the woven one it describes, an idea of arrested movement,
or stasis. The tactic serves to centre the grieving Orpheus in our attention, to gather
the stanzas around a pose of grief, a hero transfixed in sorrow. His sorrow is the
beginning and ending of his existence in the stanzas, a sorrow from which there is
no escape, no more than it would be possible for the woven Orpheus to slip away
from the threads of Philodoce's tapestry.

1 loannis loviani Pontani Eclogae, edited by Liliana Monti Sabia (Liguori Editore, I973), p. 77, lines
745-54 and notes; and p. 79, lines 757-67.
2 H. Keniston, Garcilaso de la Vega (New York, 1922) reprints Capece's letter of dedication at p. 438.
For an account of Garcilaso's literary activities and relationships in Naples, see particularly Bene-
detto Croce, Intorno al soggiorno di Garcilasso de la Vega in Italia (Naples, 1894).
3 All quotations are from the Obras completas, edited by E. L. Rivers (Madrid, 1964).

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 76 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

There is no question that the major model for the first ecphrasis is to be found in
the so-called 'Aristaeus epyllion' that concludes the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics.
El Brocense and Herrera rightly fixed upon Virgil's account of Orpheus's loss and
of the singer's retreat to Strymon as Garcilaso's model, ignoring Ovid's memorable
but inappropriate version, with its malicious reference to Orpheus's paederasty and
its robust, farm-yard violence.1 Among its other features, Virgil's account raises a
literary puzzle which is reflected back to us from Garcilaso's poem; it concerns the
tale's appropriateness to its context. For Virgil introduces the tale of Orpheus
rather oddly, in a passage concerning the supposed spontaneous regeneration of
bees. To illustrate or explain this phenomenon, he tells how a great bee-keeper,
Aristaeus, having lost all his swarms, went to complain to his mother Cyrene who
lived in the river Peneus. She and her water-nymphs, diligent spinners and embroi-
derers, listen sympathetically and send him off to consult Proteus. Under duress,
Proteus tells him the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the opening detail that
Aristaeus, once in lusty pursuit of Eurydice, had caused her to step on a snake.
Early Virgilian commentators were puzzled by the poet's procedure. Servius, for
example, claimed that the episode was a substitute for an original praise of Gallus:
'You must know that the last part of this book has been changed; for an eulogy of
Gallus once occupied the place which is now taken by the fable of Orpheus; this
fable was inserted after Gallus took his own life on account of having angered
Augustus'2 - exactly how such an eulogy would have fitted the context is left
unsaid. The Renaissance commentator Badius Ascensius is prompted to give an
erroneous reading of the Aristaeus narrative and within it an evasive explanation
of the Orpheus excursus on the grounds of rhetorical ornament: 'Aristaeus, at his
mother's suggestion, approached the sea-god Proteus and was taught the art
(presumably of regenerating bees; if so, Badius errs); but Virgil dresses the tale up
with many details, such as the description of the nymphs and the fable of Orpheus'.3
The present-day classicist's answer to the unease of the early commentators is
simply to acknowledge that the Orpheus story in the Georgics is a calculated digres-
sion, or part of an epyllion, 'one feature of which was to have at least one story
inserted within the primary one'. L. P. Wilkinson, from whom this quotation
comes, relates the device to formal prototypes such as Moschus's Europa and
Catullus's Peleus and Thetis, which have already been cited in this article as notable
examples of ecphrasis.4 We now have gained a vantage-point in the classics from
which we can appreciate how Garcilaso seems to have grasped and exploited the
formal relationship between the Aristaeus epyllion and pre-Virgilian examples of
ecphrastic digression. In terms of structure, the Egloga tercera is a series of digres-
sions; each section sheers away from the previous one on the slenderest of narrative
pretexts. By modelling his first ecphrasis on Virgil's 'inset', Garcilaso is not only

1 Metamorphoses, Book xi.

2 G. Thilo and H. Hagen, Servii Grammatici Commentarii (Leipzig, i887), II, fasc. I, 320.
3 P. Virgilii Maronis Poetarum Principis Opera (Venice, I537), f. I35va.
4 L. P. Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 116. Juan Boscan's translation cum adaptation of the Aristaeus
epyllion, wedged into his Leandro, seems tantamount to a poet's taking wilful advantage of a known
critical perplexity. His request for permission to digress 'un poco' (line I I8) is a drastic understate-
ment for well-nigh two thousand lines unrelated to Hero and Leander. Arguably, Boscan broke the
structure of his Leandro knowing full well that he has Virgil's authorization, good or bad, from the
Georgics. Boscan's use of the Aristaeus epyllion is an interesting sidelight on the attraction it held for
Garcilaso.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON 77

paying homage to his classical vates; he is also defending by precedent the digres-
sionary tactic which he is to practise throughout the eclogue.
Apart from the authority of Virgil's account, its relevance as Garcilaso's model is
highlighted by other means. Three of the Tagus nymphs, Philodoce, Climene, and
Nise, have been transferred from the river Peneus, scene of Aristaeus's complaint;
Garcilaso's sonorous roll-call of their names is a poet's way of dropping a heavy hint
without actually turning the pages of Virgil for us. The technique of ring-
composition is original to Virgil's organization of the tale.1 Yet the dominant
presence of Virgil in association with Garcilaso should not mask a range of second-
ary sources. Take the setting by the river Strymon: its inhospitable bank derives
from Virgil's cold, remote landscape of suffering into which the defeated Orpheus
retreated:
septem ilium totos perhibent ex ordine mensis
rupe sub aeria deserti ad Strymonis undam
flevisse, et gelidis haec evolvisse sub antris ...
(Georgics, iv, 507-9)

Servius's gloss on those lines, 'DESERTI; asperi, inculti' and 'AERIA, quae sunt
vicina astris',2 has prompted Garcilaso's intensification of inaccessibility and the
absence of human company: 'El monte d'aspereza fiera/pisado tarde o nunca de
pie humano'. What of the grassy plain that stands in contrast to the exile's retreat?
Garcilaso fleetingly transfers his allegiance, for this detail has been drawn from
Ovid:
Collis erat collemque super planissima campi
area, quam viridem faciebat graminis herbae.
(Metamorphoses, x, 86-7)

These two examples illustrate how tiny fragments from a late-antique and classical
source have been delicately inserted as if into a fine inlay of poetry.3 But I a
delaying a fourth, important source which represents a dramatic move along
time-scale of poetry: it is simply that the entire Orpheus passage, in ecphras
form, had been sketched out by Sannazaro in L'Arcadia. When the shepherd
Sincero descends into the grotto in Prosa XII he meets a group of water-nymp
who are working on 'una tela di meraviglioso artificio'; it shows 'i miserabili casi de
la deplorata Euridice; si come nel bianco piede punta dal velenoso aspide
constretta di esalare la bella anima, e come poi per ricoprarla discese all'inferno
ricoprata la perde la seconda volta lo smemorato marito'. The affinity between
Sannazaro and Garcilaso is so close that there would be a point in toning dow
Virgil's dominance over the first tapestry. But by doing so we would upset, I think
the deep-laid planning behind the sequences of the eclogue. As the other tapestries
make clear, Garcilaso turns the historical dimension contained in the doctrine
imitation to particular advantage: he sets up a calculatedly diachronic mode
composition. His own version of Orpheus and Eurydice frames within itself other
versions which extend back through an impressive time-scale of poetry; at it
furthest terminus, there is the avatar of Garcilaso's poetry, Virgil himself (who is

1L. P. Wilkinson, Appendix V, p. 327.

2 G. Thilo and H. Hagen, II, fasc. I, p. 357.
3 The phrase 'taracea finisima' is from M. R. Lida's helpful inventory, 'Transmisi6n y recreaci
de temas grecolatinos en la poesia lirica espafiola', RFH, I (1938), 25.

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78 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

controlling, through the same Aristaeus epyllion, Sincero's experience in the

grotto), and nearer at hand there is the pastoral writer par excellence of Garcilaso's
own time and ambience, Sannazaro. But if we move still closer in time to the poet,
we can see that the first tapestry frames a myth which has been persistent through-
out Garcilaso's own poetry.
For English readers, Orpheus's presence in pastoral elegy is familiar from
Milton's Lycidas. By then, the association was a firmly established one; its roots may
be traced back to Virgil and beyond. What is significant is that as the Renaissance
pastoral acquired its distinctive elegiac mood, generated in the poignant contrast
between the promise of a landscape and the limitations set to human happiness
within it, then Orpheus becomes no mere transient interloper but a central presence
in the Arcadian pleasance. The reason for this may be twofold. On the one hand,
Orpheus is a figure of deprivation. On the other, it is loss that moves him to sing his
finest, so that dumb beasts, crags and trees are drawn to commiserate with the
singer; in the mournful and musical landscape of Arcadia his presence is a natural
one. Within the scope of this article the cultivation of Orpheus in the Renaissance
pastoral can only be sketched. In what must be a basic exemplar of the Renaissance
threnodic pastoral, Pontano's Meliseus, the poet grieves over the death of his wife
Ariadna Sassone; the poem is hung with the mourning motifs of pastoral; the
oaten-flute lies forgotten among thorns; the poplar-trunks are carved with an
elegiac refrain; 'Lo, the meadows mourn and their beloved willows go untended;
the fields sound with the name of the dead Ariadna, the woods and valleys moan
and keen over Ariadna; the rocks cry aloud repeating Ariadna's name, and the hills
repeat "Ariadna" and "Ariadna" the rivers'.l The anaphora 'Ariadna' itself
returns a clear 'Orphic' echo, for this is the device used by Virgil as Proteus tells
how the hero's severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, called out the name
of his love:
... Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua
a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat.
Eurydicen toto referebat flumine ripae.
(Georgics, Iv, 525-7)

Yet grief in the pastoral is inevitably eased by the consolation of song. The shepherd
Ciceriscus tells how he spied on the bereaved Meliseus singing a lament for
Orpheus as he worked on a basket of osiers; around the side of the basket, Meliseus
was weaving the figures of Orpheus and Eurydice, frozen thus in eternal pursuit of
each other, just as in Pontano's verse the accusative embraces both figures
indifferently:
Orpheaque Eurydicenque sequentem intexite, iunci.2

Like innumerable pastoral characters before and after him, Meliseus has discovered
the power of song to assuage grief and hence the consolation offered in the figure of
the demi-god. On other occasions, the shepherd singer is simply endowed with the
identity of Orpheus; such is the case in the opening stanza of Marco Girolamo

1 Ed. cit., p. 87.

2 Ed. cit., p. 95.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON 79

Vida's Daphnis.l Among the poets of this period the myth of Orpheus seems to have
answered an imaginative need as deeply and pervasively, though in quite distinct
fashion, as the cult of the priestly Orpheus so solemnly celebrated in Ficino's
Neoplatonic Academy. Orpheus, among Garcilaso's associates and contemporaries,
enjoys the status of poetry's deity. Vida, for example, drawing Book I of his Poetics to
a heroic conclusion, casts the power of poetry in Orphic terms; it moves hard rocks,
brings forests in their wake, stuns the livid shades of Hades, silences the menacing
doorman of Orcus, soothes the savage Furies' rage.2 In his unusual poem Orpheus,
the Neapolitan poet Antonio Tilesio, to whom Garcilaso addressed his Latin Ode II,
handles the myth so that in almost unrecognizable form it speaks of the first clumsy
fumblings of the poet and then of the skills which once acquired set him apart from
the pleasures of the body (the loss of Eurydice) yet allow him to move crags and
woods by his melody, to travel roads forbidden to mortals (Strymon and Hades);
deprived of sleep, he faints, destroys the body (the Ciconian Bacchantes) in pursuit
of the eternal laurel.3 This surprising version of Orpheus as an early poete maudit
presumably provided Tilesio with a mythical persona through which he could
stabilize and explore his own psychology as a poet. These are variations on a deeper
theme of Orpheus as one of the age's great culture heroes, for it is nothing other
than the concept of salvation through culture that found expression through the
Orpheus story. To this end Bembo in Gli Asolani (Book I, xii) elaborates his exegesis
of the tale: Orpheus was one of the first masters of life, a poet who sang in the forest
and softened the hardness of primitive men, drawing them from the trees, caves and
river-sides where they lived like beasts. Beraldo is another who exemplifies the
poet's role in Orpheus as the saviour of primitive man: 'Orpheus, priest and
interpreter of the gods, discouraged primitive man from slaughter and from his foul
way of life. For this reason he is said to soothe tigers and raging lions'.4 The human-
ist scholar Lilio Gregorio Giraldi utilizes the myth to substantiate the view that
poetry enjoys priority over philosophy in the development of man. 'What else do
the stories of Orpheus and Amphion mean?' he asks. 'Among the ancients they
were said to have soothed and drawn beasts and rocks; this means that by their
divine songs they enticed primitive country-dwellers from their wild life to a humane
civilization, giving customs and laws to the states they founded'.5 Let us now
consider where and how Garcilaso engages his later poetry and personality in the
powerful strain of feeling which poets and humanists of his own age registered
through the antique legend.

1 En habes lector bucolicorum auctores XXXVIII... Farrago quiderm Eclogarum CLVI.. ., (Basle, 1546),
p. 477. In the same important anthology, Johannes Secundus's (Jan Everaert of Malines) eclogue
Orpheus opens with an unhappy shepherd singing of 'patrem Orphea vatum' (p. 503); Pomponio
Gaurico's eclogue Orpheus is a lament by Orpheus over losing the love of a boy (p. 704). C. A.
Mayerson, 'The Orpheus Image in Lycidas', PMLA, 64 (I949), I89-207, notes the frequency of
Orpheus throughout the examples of Renaissance pastoral given in The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology,
ed. T. P. Harrison, Jr (Austin, I939).
2 Ed. cit., B7v. Tilesio's friendship with Vida (see Antonii Thylesii Consentini Poemata (Rome, 1524),
A4r) brings Vida within the group of scholars and poets with which Garcilaso was an associate by
adoption. Reference at this point to Poliziano's Favola d'Orfeo would take us beyond the Roman-
Neapolitan poets and humanists and inveigle us into the Florentine cult of the Orphic mysteries.
Since I am not drawn to involve Garcilaso in main-stream Neoplatonism, I have restricted my
examples to those whose literary associations are with Rome and above all Naples.
3 'Orpheus' (Carmen IX), Antonii Thylesii Consentini Opera (Naples, 1762), p. 78.
4 Angeli Politiani Sylua ... (Basle, 1518), D2r.
5 L. G. Giraldus, Historiae poetarum tam Graecorum quam Latinorum Dialogi Decem (Basle, 1545), p. 65.

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8o Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

Garcilaso's Egloga primera is a major achievement in the poet's progress. Indeed,

it may be said to have raised Renaissance pastoral to a new power; the unreflective
lachrymosity of Sannazaro, the eccentricity of Pontano, to cite major exponents,
give way to an authoritative clarity evident in the handling of both psychology and
form. One aspect of control lies in the aptness of those associations created through
imitation. Take Salicio's stanza beginning
Con mi llorar las piedras enternecen
su natural dureza y la quebrantan . . .

Its cumulative sequence of the effects of Salicio's song sets Galatea's indifference
against Arcady's spontaneous compassion. The persona adopted by Salicio is, by
artful connexion, that of Orpheus, the charmer of dumb and inanimate things.1
Feeling, in Nemoroso's song, is more painful, less an ingredient of self-flattery and
persuasion; in the memorable simile of the bereaved nightingale (324-37) the poet
puts Nemoroso into direct relationship with Virgil's poignant analogy, in the now
familiar Aristaeus epyllion, between Orpheus and Philomela:
qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra
amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator
observans nido implumis detraxit; at illa
flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen
integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet.
(Georgics, iv, 511-I5)

Garcilaso thereafter extends the topos of the nightingale and its empty nest by a
personification of death, whose hand stole Elisa from the lover's heart. In the
non-abstract manner of true pastoral, the whole simile sets up a psychology of
bereavement and the consequent impulse to poetry, for as the nightingale is locked
within a long tradition of symbolism in which its loss and its song form a spontaneous
and natural equation, then by the same token Nemoroso's sense of an unanswerable
grievance in life has resolved itself spontaneously and irresistibly into poetry. The
point at issue here is that in this psychology of suffering and art, the ultimate
connexion, made secure through imitation, is between Nemoroso and the mythical
Orpheus, the subject of the Virgilian simile. In his Sonnet XV Garcilaso had already
drawn the voice of the poet into association with Orpheus, although the sonnet's
querulous mood hardly allows for the theme of a professional's identification with a
master-singer. Conversely, in the publicity-conscious Cancion V, 'Ode ad florem
Gnidi', the opening claim to Orpheus's power of expression yields little hint of a
more private relationship between experience and literary poiesis.2 In the brief
canon of Garcilaso's poetry it is the Latin ode to Tilesio which offers insight into
how the Orpheus legend was cultivated by Garcilaso in order to contain and shape
his divided role of poet and imperial servant. In this ode, Garcilaso first pictures
himself in exile by the banks of the Danube, which he will later contrast with another
stream, the southern Sebeto, on whose banks Parthenope (Naples) preserves the
spirit and ashes of Virgil. In the cold north, he suffers estrangement from those he
loves, isolated among barbarian customs which drive him through desolate crags to

1 M. J. Woods's study 'Rhetoric in Garcilaso's First Eclogue', MLN, 84 (I969), 143-56, stresses
how Salicio's lament is a plea for Galatea's affection in which rhetoric is deployed to engage sympathy.
2 P. N. Dunn, 'Garcilaso's Ode A la flor de Gnido', ZRP, 81 (I965), 289, acknowledges the allusion
to Orpheus.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON 8I

launch his plaint at the river's edge. Garcilaso's presentation

spicuously modelled on Orpheus's retreat to Strymon; the portrai
by barbarism derives from the opposition of culture and pr
Renaissance exegetes consistently read into the Strymon epis
the poet's outlook is not by mere analogy that of Orpheus. To th
of the gods has lent his help?' the poet answers directly:
idem sonanti cui vaga flumina
sistunt, silentes margine vortices
ventosque narratur frementes
per nemora ardua conquiesse.1

The strong echo from the De Orpheo attributed to Virgil leaves l

identity of this godly helpmate.2 Thereafter, the ode move
commiseration to the shared pleasures of company; yet still
Garcilaso finds comfort in reading Tilesio's Imber aureus, above a
the languishing Daneae; it is surely no coincidence that in th
Daneae is likened, in an extended simile, to the sorrowing nightin
Georgics, Iv.3 And in a final pleasantry that refers to conversation
Mario Galeota and Placido di Sangro, Garcilaso recalls how they
to silence the over-eloquent Tilesio, as the Ciconian bacch
Orpheus. In the major development of the myth in the ode to Til
than a simple question of poetic strategy whereby the poet di
available repertoire of mythology; considering the seriousness
situation, we must conclude that in the figure of Orpheus G
correlative for his own predicament and personality; the myth o
awareness, recurrent in Garcilaso's later works, of plenitude bein
of the self-same denial providing the incentive for privileged cre
ode, this awareness is placed in direct relationship to Garcilaso
confinement near Ratisbon during Charles V's displeasure.
After this excursus, it may seem excessive to refer to the Canc
example of the Orpheus motif were it not for its evidence that G
of a further dimension to the Orpheus story and its interpretation
a highly personalized poetic symbolism. The Alexandrian poet
who provided Ovid with the detail of Orpheus's homosexuality, d

1 Edited and translated by P. Jos6 Lopez de Toro and E. L. Rivers in the l

Obras completas, p. I92. Orpheus's divine status need cause no surprise; it w
Renaissance mythographers to promote from within the ranks to Olym
underlines in his eclogue Orpheus that Orpheus has divine rank:
Non sunt mortales qui me genuere parentes,
Calliope mater, pater est mihi magnus Apollo.
(En habes lector, p. 705). See also Giraldo's Historiaepoetarum, p. I64, for the pos
divinity to Orpheus. In the above reading of the ode I have avoided wha
chronology; traditionally, the ode is thought to have been written after t
Garcilaso in Naples with the viceroy Pedro de Toledo, between autumn
Internal evidence can suggest, however, that Garcilaso, writing from exile, loo
his friendships in Naples. The publication in I531 of the Neapolitan poet
intimate poems to Garcilaso suggests his contact with the city's poets befor
oda latina in6dita de Garcilaso de la Vega y tres poesias a 61 dedicadas por C
critica de historiay literatura espanolas, portuguesas e hispano-americanas, 3 (I89
2 Regularly printed in major Renaissance editions as part of an 'Elenchus
3 Antonii Thylesii Consentini Opera (Naples, 1762), pp. 18-19.

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 82 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

the mutilation the singer's head and lyre were cast into the river Hebrus, carried
downstream and washed ashore at Lesbos, where they received a decent burial.
Ever after, Phanocles observes, Lesbos has been famous for song and poetry. This
account of the singing head and its posthumous effects was available to the sixteenth
century, transmitted through Stobaeus's Florilegium, lxiv, 14. It emerges with colour-
ful additions. Giraldi states, for example, that the river, now significantly renamed
Helicon, went underground in outrage at the barbaric death and carried the head
off elsewhere; he adds a complementary anecdote that a shepherd of Thracian
Libethra who settled down for a noon-day nap on the tomb containing the relics
began all unawares to sing sweet verses by Orpheus.1 To my knowledge, at least one
major humanist accommodated the Phanocles coda to Orpheus's role as a culture-
hero. Francis Bacon interprets it in terms of a cyclical rise, fall and revival of
civilization: kingdoms and republics flourish, then dissent and sedition arise; laws
weaken, men return to their depraved state, cities are ravaged (the murder of
Orpheus). But fragments of letters and philosophy survive like the mariner's raft
from the wreck (the head and lyre are carried downstream); other nations emerge
and flourish (Lesbos inherits Orpheus's talents).2 This impressive interpretation is
unthinkable without its having had a prior trial and essay in the vast repertoire of
myth exegesis belonging to the sixteenth century. In Garcilaso's Cancion III, the
poet's address to the Danube (53-65) is consistent with a knowledge not only of the
Phanocles ending but also of its exegetical possibilities. The poet casts his poem
into the river for it to be carried through 'fieras naciones'; downstream, it may be
washed ashore 'en la desierta arena', there perhaps to be found by someone. Taken
together with the unobtrusive association between Garcilaso by the Danube and
Orpheus by Strymon in the early stanzas, the apostrophe is a clear variant on the
casting of the singing head to the waves and its later rescue. The river's course
through hinterlands of barbarism is associated by analogy with the place of
Orpheus's mutilation, and the thought that downstream there may be someone to
rescue the poem recalls the singing head's reception in hospitable territory. But at
this point Garcilaso's version inverts the optimistic ending: if the poem is rescued,
he begs for it to be buried so that its 'error' should end on that shore. The Phanocles
ending has been remodelled into a compelling expression of the poet's stance in the
literary movement of his age. The flowing river images poetry's collective advance
and in the casting of the poem to the waves is figured the poet's contribution. Myth
and metaphor refer closely to Garcilaso himself, to the poet in exile who diagnoses
his frustration at being excluded from the proper course of poetic endeavour; unlike
the case of the singing head and its posthumous influence in Lesbos, he foresees no
guaranteed haven that will shelter his gifts and perpetuate his achievement. This
development of the Orpheus story will figure largely in the Egloga tercera. For the
moment, let me resume the bearing that the first ecphrasis has to Garcilaso's own
poetry: it recreates the myth which he has promoted consistently elsewhere in his
work to convey a deeply held and developed psychology of personal failure or
deprivation and literary poiesis.

1 Historiaepoetarum ..., pp. I66 and I67; the alteration of Hebrus into Helicon is symptomatic of
how the Orpheus legend diffused into the mythologies of artistic creation.
2De Sapientia Veterum, xi, in The Works of Francis Bacon, vi (London, I890), 647-8.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON 83

Apollo and Daphne, Venus and Adonis. In both descriptions, the im

the proper narrative order. In both, thanks to an identical device
rest on one particular tableau in the composite design. This
alteration of tense, from past imperfect to present. In Dinamene'
could be seen depicted as the hunter, then as Cupid's victim; Daph
Apollo was pursuing. For a brief recapitulation, the present tense
61 va siguiendo, y ella huye como
quien siente al pecho el odioso plomo.

Then, for the stages of metamorphosis, the imperfect is reins

sensed as an unwilled unfolding by the battery of reflexive verbs
that close each line. Yet there is overlap too, in that the synt
stanza is the couplet; so that while movement is adumbrated
strategically placed verbs, it is movement that is carried forw
pattern of tense and syntax is interrupted:
llora el amante y busca el ser primero,
besando y abracando aquel madero.

The present that takes over so emphatically in the third stanza su

the eye has stayed and located its point of reference whereby the
stages fall back into the descriptive imperfect. This is the device, t
the sense of arrested movement in both those tableaux which rec
power of the present; after active pursuit, Apollo is forever froz
embrace of the metamorphosed Daphne; after the fall of Adonis,
not so much in her sensuous movement over her lover's body (fo
the past) as in the kiss with which the goddess seals his lips to he
Orpheus tapestry, the two narratives are dominated by an a
centres attention upon a climactic grief at unreciprocated or lost
In the case of the second tapestry, the presence of two voices s
The voice of Ovid asserts itself with such effortless authority (Me
that the matter need not be pressed any further, except to note th
think of poetry shifting along a literary time-scale, the Garcilas
gathering into the compressed ecphrastic device what he has said
the third stanza of the Apollo-Daphne motifis a close variant on h
In the sonnet, Garcilaso develops the story towards self-recrimin
tears are thought of as nourishing the plant that receives the
trope that is adapted to the Virgilian topos of disfigured nature
eclogue (308-9):
Yo hago con mis ojos
crecer, lloviendo, el fruto miserable.

This firm contact between the sonnet and Nemoroso's song

Daphne close to the ranks of mythical personae who populate the
of Garcilaso's pastoral; they are illustrative figures of an elegiac t
memory renews the cause for anguish. The paradoxical nature
manifest throughout the first eclogue, one whereby the ster
impossible love sponsor the opportunity for an emotional intensi
uncalled for or denied before, is epitomized in the tableau of
second tapestry; Apollo and Daphne have taken up their plac
bower prepared for them in Sonnet XIII and in the psycholog

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 84 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'
Egloga primera.l The ease with which the second ecphrasis operates in a di
fashion, thanks to the effortless identification of metamorphosis with Ov
direct self-plagiarism, is a helpful indicator to the planning behind
tapestry motifs. However, the reconstruction of this planning turns out
difficult in the case of Venus and Adonis.
To identify the major model for the third tapestry it may reduce uncertainty to
proceed by elimination. One version of the tale was given by Angelo Poliziano in a
collection of scholarly notes, famous in their time, the Liber miscellaneorum. Poliziano
tells the story to explain why roses are associated with Venus: the jealous Mars slew
his rival Adonis, and Venus, in her haste to help her lover, cut her foot among rose
briars; the flowing blood dyed the flowers red.2 Poliziano recommends Lorenzo de'
Medici's sonnet on the theme 'Non de' verdi giardini ornati e c61ti...'3 Both
versions deviate from Garcilaso's; in his, Mars is not identified by name and it is
Adonis's blood that turns the roses red. In his Elegia I, 223-40, Garcilaso certainly
made use of Bernardo Tasso's version in the Elegia terza, 'Pon freno homai Rutilio
al lungo pianto. ..',4 where Tasso finds consolation in the end of the story when the
goddess recovers from mourning and, in a movement majestically caught in
Garcilaso's elegy, steps out to make all things rejoice once more in her presence.
Tasso's elegy leaves no imprint, however, on the third tapestry. Nor is Ovid's
account (Metamorphoses, x) a major source, although its faint traces may be seen in
the youth's challenge and in the wound he inflicts on the animal. No doubt minor
renderings could be accumulated, but this would merely postpone the identification
signalled in the pose that concludes the third ecphrasis, the lingering kiss by which
the goddess draws the last breath from her lover's body to her own:
que viendo la herida abierta y fiera,
sobre'l estava casi amortecida;
boca con boca coge la postrera
parte del ayre que solia dar vida
al cuerpo por quien ella en este suelo
aborrecido tuvo al alto cielo.

In those lines, we catch the most ancient voice of all those whose echoes are to be
heard in the third eclogue; it belongs to the author of the Lamentfor Adonis, distant
prototype for the mighty tradition of threnodic pastoral: 'As she saw, as she beheld
the unchecked wound of Adonis, as she saw the crimson blood about his drooping
thigh, stretching forth her arms, she moaned, "O stay, Adonis, ill-fated Adonis,
stay, that I may possess thee for the very last time, that I may embrace thee and
mingle lips with lips. Awake but a little, Adonis, and give me this last kiss; kiss me
as long as a kiss may live, until from thy soul into my mouth, even into my very
heart, thy breath may flow, and I may drain thy sweet love charm and drink up all

1 The theme that felicity is a retrospective state defined through a screen of present sadness is a
strong one in Garcilaso's poetry, to be found outside his pastoral. In Sonnet X the theme is attached,
again through imitation, to Dido's lament as she places on her pyre the belongings left in Carthage
by Aeneas.
2 Omnia Opera Angeli Politiani. . . (Venice, 1498), C3r.
3 The Oxford Book of Italian Verse, no. 127.
4 Rime di Messer Bernardo Tasso divise in cinque libri ... (Venice, 1560), p. I93. Tasso returns again
to the story as an injunction against mourning in his ode Al S. Ferrante Caraffa per la morte delfratello,
'Perche Ferrante homai. . .', Ode di Messer Bernardo Tasso (Venice, 560), pp. 66-7. Again, there is no
sign of influence on the third eclogue.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON 85

thy love . .".'1 If we go against modern custom and accredit

critus rather than to Bion, we would nevertheless be mov
Renaissance custom, for among their scholars there was un
was who' in the trio of Greek bucolic poets (Theocritus, Bio
Garcilaso used, for example, the Latin translation of Elius E
would have read the Epitaphion Adonidis as Idyll 23 of Theocrit
the Lament over further details of Garcilaso's version can easily
reader. Thus, in an act of imitation that moves his reader back
years of poetry, Garcilaso brings his poem into contact with th
strange mixing of fact and myth that characterizes Renaissance
considered to have been the first to inherit the pastoral pipes f
In order to isolate a model, I noted the lack of direct ref
Garcilaso's version. Now, for the purposes of interpretatio
association ought to be acknowledged. Mars is implied in th
'cielo' at lines I9I-2; the sinister, military euphemism in 'e
aguzando/contra un moo. . .' and the tableau of armed con
two adversaries (one of whom falls stricken in the chest as befit
the thigh as Theocritus has it) colour the narrative so that the
name, is hailed in spirit. The handsome hunter is destroyed
carnates brutal strife. Once again, we are made aware of a c
itself conspicuously in Garcilaso's later poetry: in the life of th
peaceful cultivation of art was at odds with the profession o
Martin was right to stress the vehemence of Garcilaso's indigna
throughout the Latin Ode to Gines de Sepulveda and Elegia
poems refer to Garcilaso's period of active service in Charle
African expedition, yet they dwell on a poet's awareness of
brutality. In Latin Ode III he entrusts to Sepulveda, the sc
converting the Emperor's conquests into a heroic strain, wh
taut bow of religion and soldiery; his own poem comes down to
caesars, in unconcealed accusation. Charles is the Numidian
timid and innocent; it is his Caesarian destiny to take joy in
dens caede nova'). This ambivalent attitude of recognizing th
sympathetically identifying with the human misery caused by
Elegia I as a personal fatalism: suffering is an inheritance of th
exacerbated by the present working-out of a historical design:

1 The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology, edited by T. P. Harrison, English tr

(Austin, 1939), p. 35.
2 Theocriti Syracusani Eidyllia trigintasex, Latino carmine reddita, Helio Eobano
1531); the Lament is headed 'Theocriti Epitaphion Adonidis' (K5r); th
the earliest printed translation. On the tendency to confuse Bion and Mos
L. G. Giraldo, Historiae poetarum, p. 332. A later sixteenth-century translatio
the following note: 'Quanquam hoc idyllium inter Theocriti bucolica vul
tamen tribuit Bioni', Moschi Siculi et Bionis Smyrnaei Idyllia ... (Bruges, 565
that among Neapolitan poets, Sannazaro was familiar with Theocritus (se
Literature and the Pastoral (Chapel Hill, I965), p. 66) and Garcilaso's friend
tion into Latin (see Antonii Thylesii Consentini Opera (Naples, 1762), p. xx).
3 An account of the evolution of pastoral through a series of major po
Virgil) appears in Sannazaro's L'Arcadia, Prosa X.
4 Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, 'Oda latina de Garcilaso de la Vega', Rev
literatura espanolas, portuguesas e hispano-americanas, 4, Afio 4 (1899), 362-71 pa

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86 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

cA quien ya de nosotros el ecesso

de guerras, de peligro y destierro
no toca y no a cansado el gran processo ?
(82-4)

In composing this mental drama, Garcilaso turns to figures from mythology. In

self-directed rage, he sees himself in the Elegia II (94-II o) as the lover placed under
the ruthless sway of Mars, who is powerfully evoked as an impassive figure of
destruction clad in a diamond-studded harness, hardened at every point. This
unresolved burst of feeling sets Garcilaso apart from those who sought that sense of
discordia concors, of balance between the martial spirit and amiability, analysed by
Edgar Wind.1 The lethal art of war and the gentle arts of peace are not to be found
in harmony in Garcilaso's poetry; we need think only of his self-portrait in the
Egloga tercera of the poet who snatches time from the fury of war, 'tomando ora la
espada, ora la pluma'. True, there is in the Elegia I an attempted reconciliation
with violence; on the death of Adonis (cited like Hector before him as an exemplary
victim of martial ferocity), Venus turns away from sadness to the task of restoring
happiness. But this is an injunction to cease from mourning and a requirement of
the kind; by contrast, the Venus of the Egloga tercera is vividly arrested in her grief.
Climene's tapestry of the boar, the dead youth and the goddess cast over his body
recapitulates figures from mythology previously elaborated by the poet; it holds,
too, the tense psychodrama of the poet whose profession of arms magnified the
vulnerability of his love and art.
Nise's tapestry. On several counts the fourth tapestry is atypical. Descriptive
topographia is enlarged; the figures in this intensely localized landscape by the
Tagus no longer relate to antique mythology; there is no narrative. At the same time,
it is an epitome of the previous three. The dead nymph by the river's edge has, like
Eurydice, been killed in violence ('degollada') before she could achieve mature
perfection '(casi en flor cortada'); like Adonis, she lies on the ground; the pastoral
motif of the epitaph carved on the tree-trunk echoes Apollo's laurel that stood as a
reminder of erstwhile beauty. The scene of collective mourning and homage to the
dead carries forward the threnodic element. Unlike the other tapestries there is
little attempt to simulate arrested movement, but the impression is that Nise has
assimilated the previous themes to her own so that in the evocation of no more than
a landscape and its figures the essence of the classical precedents has been recreated.
The scene has been set. Yet the drama to which it belongs is omitted. It is omitted
because the story of Elisa and Nemoroso is well enough known. As E. L. Rivers
rightly observes, by this device the reader is remitted to Garcilaso's first eclogue, in
particular to Nemoroso's lament.2 Here we have justification enough for the pro-
cedure of diachronic reading which I have carried out so far, an obvious key to a
mechanism which Garcilaso has devised from the doctrine of imitation: by omitting
the 'historia' Garcilaso is authorizing our journey to its major model, to the material
it would have quarried. Practically, for a poem to be read under the auspices of the
doctrine of imitation means that from this poem in front of him the reader is sent to
other poems, stored in his memory or shelved in his library; the one poem beckons
for others to be read alongside it. Just so. Perhaps for the reader not so steeped in

1 Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, I967), Chapter v.

2 'La paradoja pastoril del arte natural' in La poesia de Garcilaso, edited by E. L. Rivers (Barcelona,
1974), p. 300.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON
87

the poetry of the past as one imagines they were in Garcilaso

given a unique opportunity to experience imitation without d
impact of the fourth tapestry we need do no more than recall
incorporate it into our reading at this point.
From the material gathered above, I see two directions to ta
to consider the poem as literary history. T. G. Rosenmeyer in
toral emphasizes the 'artlessness' affected by the pastoral wri
intention we find in other forms of poetry, or the single cu
drama or narrative 'mythos' are alien to a literary kind that
and dispersion'. Discussing Virgil's pastoral, he speaks of
combines disparate segments into charged aggregates, and in
deeper levels of sympathy'.1 The point should be taken in
tercera. The poet offers his thought without recourse to dida
comprehensive argument or to the closed sequence of a single
sympathies' are harmonized through a highly refined process
part of that process; it can be seen as engaging each separ
within a larger continuity, which is the history of poetry it
dealt with briefly, because it is simple yet majestic in con
major models the four ecphrases set up a line of four poets:
Virgil (Georgics) - Ovid (Metamorphoses) - Theocritus (th
(Egloga primera)
Unobtrusively, the poet has written his own name into an im
makers. Here is the poet's superbly confident answer to his e
Cancidn III, over his exclusion from the proper course of poet
place within a span of literary history that stretches bac
pastoral. It was not unprecedented for the Renaissance poet to
an inheritor of the past: Pontano did so, as we have seen
Rusticus pictures himself on the bank of the river at Mantua
from Tityrus (Virgil) and an invitation to join him in song.2
claim is at once more discreet and yet more grandiose, for if w
logy in greater detail his field of vision opens wider tha
Poliziano's. To do so, we return to the theme of Orpheus.
In the introductory stanzas of the eclogue the poet promise
poetry to Maria. The tribute is turned in such a way that, at
of the poet is engaged with that of Orpheus; the image of th
lengua muerta y fria en la boca' -picks up the Virgilia
lingua' and in the development of the stanzas towards the con
death there is mirrored the passage of the singing head down
libre mi alma de su estrecha roca
por el Estygio lago conduzida,
celebrando t'ira, y aquel sonido
hara parar las aguas del olvido.

There is detectable pressure from the Phanocles ending in the confident hope that
the poet's mission of conferring immortality will succeed (as Orpheus's head, once

1 T. G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1969), Chapter 3, in particular pp. 46-8.
2 Omnia opera Angeli Politiani (Venice, 1498), Dd2r.

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88 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

welcomed ashore, continued to sing and inspire song). As the eclogue proceeds, the
image of the river is reinstated, above all in the evocation of the Tagus where it runs
past Garcilaso's ancestral town and washes 'la mas felice tierra de la Espafia'. In
the carved epitaph of Nise's tapestry, the river receives a decidedly mythopoeic
treatment, for here the Orpheus-Hebrus-Lesbos association is revived in the tell-
tale anaphora and in the guarantee that the Tagus will carry Nemoroso's call of
'Elissa' downstream to the Atlantic, where it will not go unheard. It is difficult to
recreate the directive force of such imagery by logical paraphrase, but, as in the
Cancidn III, we can recognize how the poet is unfolding a continued metaphor that,
under an ostensible concrete meaning, deals with the transmission of poetry; a
metaphor, indeed, that lies behind the whole idea of the nymphs and their tap-
estries. For the four nymphs have not chosen their subjects at random; denizens of
the Tagus, they have worked with a purpose, namely one of recreating the major
themes of the Toledan poet Garcilaso; in other words, the poet's work has come
home. Garcilaso had previously essayed the metaphor of the river as the flow of
poetry, as we have seen, in the Cancidn III. Briefly, too, he had elaborated this trope
with reference to the Tagus in Sonnet XXIV in order to express a process ofaccultura-
tion, his effort as a Spanish poet to equal the achievements of an Italian Parnassus
(Tansillo, Minturno, Bernardo Tasso); with the encouragement of his patroness he
can stay the waters of Tagus ('poesia tradicional') and divert them into a new
course (Italianate poetry). We now have at our command the material of poetic
symbolism that allows us to follow the completion of this developing metaphor from
lines 257 to 264. To read this stanza for its full implications, we can hold to the idea
that firmly embedded in the metaphor of the river as poetry's evolution there is the
guiding reference to the tale of the singing head and its reception in Lesbos, where
poetry and song then flourished. Nise, we are told, had fashioned her tapestry on the
theme of Nemoroso and Elisa so that the tale should be known elsewhere by being
carried down the Tagus to the Atlantic:
y ansi se publicasse de uno en uno
por el huimido reyno de Neptuno.

If the Tagus is seen as an image of Spanish poetry, in which Garcilaso has found place
and recognition, the scale of his self-proclaimed achievement is dramatically magni-
fied. For the measure of his achievement is not only a mighty stream that waters the
heartlands of Castile; it is the river that flows to a seaboard that opens upon an
Empire. What I wish to suggest is that the poet has measured his achievement
against the metamorphosis of Spain, in the poet's own life, into the centre of an
empire which lay not only towards the Mediterranean and Italy, but north, west
and south across the Atlantic. In the image of the western-flowing river that carries
his poetry abroad Garcilaso has set up the poet's equivalent of the imperial 'Plus
Ultra'.l The implications in this development of meaning are revolutionary; by

1 'The proudest device of the sixteenth century' is how E. Rosenthal describes the imperial device
of a pair of columns rising from the sea and a banderole with the motto 'Plus Ultra' ('Plus Ultra,
Non Plus Ultra, and the Columnar Device of Emperor Charles V', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes, 34 (I97I), 204). How the device developed in the early I530s from a heroic, Herculean
meaning to a geopolitical one, namely the western expansion of Spanish power, is one aspect of
Rosenthal's superb study; his summing-up that the device 'embodied the excitement and the sense of
man's enhanced power experienced by the informed courtiers and humanists of Europe who eagerly
awaited news of the latest discoveries in the previously unknown hemisphere' (p. 228) would not be
out of place in a study of the imperial spirit abroad in those last years of Garcilaso's life.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON 89

drawing the genealogy traced across the tapestries towards

national poet, Garcilaso is claiming to have introduced his coun
an avenue of culture which proceeds directly from the Gre
leads towards a new cultural imperialism of Spain. This st
humanistic and nationalist.
The essay in literary history does not end with the tapestries. It can be followed
into the amoebaean dialogue. True to the poet's practice in the eclogue, th
amoebaean is yet another digression, almost teasingly spun away from the body of
the eclogue by virtue of stanza 35. This stanza moves the preceding poem towards a
conventional pastoral ending. At sunset, according to the rules of the pastoral game
the singing ceases; yet here, contrariwise, it starts up. We could see the fina
digression in formal terms; it completes the 'frame within a frame' structure found
in classical models of ecphrasis by returning to the subject promised in the poem's
title and to Maria ('el bajo son de la zampona mia'); it is the pastoral resumed after
digression. But structure does not explain function. The narrative pretext for the
amoebaean is that the nymphs, on the point of retiring for the night, are held up in
the shallows by the sound of 'dos zamponias', the traditional pastoral instruments;
they listen attentively to the songs of two esteemed swains of the region. The
impression is of a staged performance or public audition. But to what end? On
purpose emerges clearly if we place the amoebaean in association with the foregoing
literary-historical argument and if, once more, we allow our reading to be com
manded by the Orpheus-Lesbos motif that draws out the concealed perspective i
the ecphrastic series. The amoebaean demonstrates to the satisfaction of its audience
that the poet has earned his right to the place which he has claimed; in public act,
inhabitants on the banks of the Tagus show themselves to have been graced by the
spirit of pastoral, that is Garcilaso's, poetry, in a manner similar to the achievemen
of the singing head after its welcome by the inhabitants of Lesbos. Now, 'ondas' and
'selvas' alike offer their testimony of the effects wrought on them by the Toledan
poet; the amoebaean completes a mythopoeic process whereby the countryside o
Toledo, with its city on the hill and the river beneath, is transformed through the
imagination of the poet into no less than a Spanish Helicon, a landscape consecrated
to his poetry.
The opportunity to read the third eclogue as an exposition of the poet's outlook
on literary history is only one that is offered through its complex of imitation, myt
and metaphor. To approach this meaning has meant turning aside from others.
we lay aside the mechanism of imitation and concentrate instead on the possibilities
offered by ecphrasis, the poem reshapes itself into an allied but distinctive theme:
deals with the writing of poetry.
Ecphrasis may serve a rhetorical purpose. Rosenmeyer sees Homer's 'Shield o
Achilles' (Iliad, xvIII, 478-607) as a means 'to contrast with the stylized manners of
heroic combat'.1 Similarly, in the case of Garcilaso's Egloga segunda, the motifs on
the sculptured urn of Tormes, with their sense of a life's comprehensiveness, have
been thought to stand in contrast to the wayward introspection of Albanio.2 Other
possibilities in ecphrasis have been seen. Early commentators on the Shield saw 'the
grandiose allegory of creation', we are told by G. Kurman, who also sees the ep

1 Op. cit., p. 192.

2 R. O. Jones, 'Garcilaso, poeta del humanismo', Clavileho, 28 (1954), 4.

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90 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

ecphrasis in the Hesiodic Shield of Herakles as the 'poet's commentary on the power
of art to illustrate history, create life and frustrate time',l for it records the ability of
homo artifex to create worlds on his own in imitation of Deus artifex and natura artifex.
This line of speculation, which goes back in modern criticism to E. R. Curtius, has
been suggestively applied to the Egloga tercera by E. L. Rivers.2 Murray Krieger sees
an aesthetic motive underlying ecphrasis; it is introduced 'in order to use a plastic
object as a symbol of the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must be
superimposed upon literature's turning world to "still" it'.3 This comes close to a
marked feature in Garcilaso's use of ecphrasis: the verbal artefact imitates the still
nature of the embroidered one, by settling attention on a series of poses which are
a poetic equivalent to arrested movement. But what has been captured in the fixed
forms of the four tapestries ? Placed with reference to the poet's works, these beings
set in the threads have in turn been drawn from multiple sources (only later, and
posthumously, united under the term 'Obras') whose fixed point is the mind of the
poet who created or recreated them; Orpheus, Apollo and Daphne, Venus (Mars)
and Adonis, Nemoroso and Elisa have all been previous embodiments of the poet's
experience, once dispersed throughout his poems, now fixed (fictitiously) by the
nymphs on their tapestries and recorded again in a poetry that partakes of the still
form (the stasis) of the embroidered artefact. We can enlarge this argument to
include the multiple sources of imitation, major and minor; they, too, have been
drawn as if by a centripetal act of the imagination into the stilled movement of the
ecphrastic principle. Seen thus, the ecphrastic sections are a commentary on their
own composition; they assert the poet's will to transcend the time throughout which
his own works and their models are dispersed. This implicit assertion of will is of
great significance for Garcilaso's relationship to his work. On the one hand, by
turning to pastoral, he was adopting a genre which was sensitive to temporality; its
melancholy derives from the swains' awareness that against the perfect back-drop
of nature their own mortality is all the more poignantly evident. Salicio and
Nemoroso live out their present in musical evocation of a past that now eludes them.
In more drastic fashion Garcilaso's poetry is steeped in an awareness of time, for by
stepping away from the confines of his own country's lyric into an Italianate manner
of composition he placed himself on a new chronological frontier, behind which
stretched out centuries of poetic diction from which he had to find and retain his
bearings; imitation, that variant on the humanist's need always to compare himself
with the antique past, implies an assertion of the poet's will over time. The use of
the ecphrastic device is an expression of that will at work on several fronts: the
dispersion of the poet's thought throughout his works (only later consolidated into
'Obras'), the fretting anxiety over time in the pastoral, the challenge of time in
imitation have been 'stilled' in the formal device.
At first sight, the amoebaean seems to break the effect of stilled movement. It
restores activity, emphasized in the way that the poet moves forward the hands on a
special pastoral clock. For noon-day, when the nymphs appear, is a privileged hour
in pastoral; it is the time when the shepherds' duties are halted by the burning sun,

1 'Ecphrasis in Epic Poetry', CL, 26 (I974), 3.

2 'La paradoja pastoril del arte natural' in La poesia de Garcilaso, 287-3o8.
3 'Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or, Laokoon Revisited', in The Poet as Critic, edited
by F. P. W. McDowell (Evanston, I967), p. 5.

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 ALAN K. G. PATERSON 91

when the Arcadian world stands still and song takes over.1 Since the tapestries do
not constitute a continuous narrative, they appear to coexist at the noon-day hour,
when birds cease their flight, earth dries and in the silence
s6lo se 'scuchava
un susurro de abejas que sonava.

Only later are we told that time has passed; the amoebaean takes place after
sun has set beyond the mountains, when pastoral activity is resumed and song is
accompaniment to work. The song itself is a competitive to-and-fro. Yet cont
may be a way of emphasizing similarity; by moving apart the two sections of the
eclogue Garcilaso offers them up for a comparison in which a sameness ma
become evident. Consider the amoebaean form. The technique of stanza answe
stanza is one of limited manoeuvre; traditionally, each singer responds to
previous one, so that the whole is a pattern of internal repetitions. In other word
the amoebaean is a form that tends towards a closed poetic system. An example o
severe retorsion can be seen in a pastoral by the Neapolitan poet Pomponio Gauric
(I47I-1530), evidence enough that in Garcilaso's 'school' the amoebaean was ta
as an exercise in self-imposed limitation. Indeed, Gaurico's verse is like a cat after
its own tail; each couple of stanzas, though antithetical in meaning, are alm
identical in word and syntax:
Orpheus. Quisquis amat, duro firmet sua pectora ferro.
Quisquis amat, pulchra componat imagine vultus.
Quisquis amat, dulci praevincat carmine cycnos.
Quisquis amat, doctas studeat placuisse per artes.
Thamyras. Nil opus ut duro firmet sua pectora ferro.
Nil opus ut pulchra componat imagine vultus.
Nihil opus ut dulci praevincat carmine cycnos.
Quisquis amat, fulvum studeat placuisse per aurum.2

Translation would obscure the weird virtuosity; fourteen pairs of stanzas turn ba
on themselves, line by line, even to the extent that pleasure can be taken in the po
as a visual arrangement. Although I would hestitate to stress too much tha
Garcilaso's amoebaean has a visual component, there is no doubt that in
typographical presentation there is a braking effect; the run of the previous oct
is broken by the names so that the reading eye is delayed by a distinctive patter
dismemberment. More pertinently, Alzino's stanzas stand in strict dialecti
relationship to Thyrreno's: Thyrreno's joy at Flerida's approach is countered
Alzino's trepidation at Phyllis's; Flerida as Spring, accompanied by sweet bree
is countered by Phyllis as a raging storm; Thyrreno's cornucopia is countered
Alzino's blight, and so on. This effect of poetry undergoing a self-imposed restra
is set out before the song begins as an aesthetic proposition; Thyrreno and Alzino
twinned in identity and purpose, embark upon an agreed strategy:
mancebos de una edad, d'una manera
a cantar juntamente aparejados
y a responder, aquesto van diziendo,
cantando el uno, el otro respondiendo:

1 See Rosenmeyer, Chapter 4, 'Otium'.

2 En habes lector, p. 700.

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 92 Garcilaso's 'Egloga Tercera'

They obey a specific amoebaean formula, Virgil's 'et cantare pares et respondere
parati' (Eclogue 7, 5). It is not only a formula that is respected, for, in striking
contrast to the ecphrastic section, the entire dialogue turns upon one source alone,
Virgil's seventh eclogue, indeed upon a restricted area of that eclogue.1 Formal
organization and content collaborate to suggest severely restricted manoeuvre; the
poet has desisted from any detail which would disturb the sense of pattern, of
aesthetic fitness. The amoebaean and ecphrastic sections can now be seen as
complementary statements on poetic composition. Both, in the process of being
poetry, are commentaries on the poet's will to stabilize discourse within a poetic
order that resists dispersion. In the major section of the poem the analogue for
poetry's seeking to arrest discourse is the fixed form of the tapestry; in the final
section, it is a poetic form, the amoebaean, pursued with rigour.
To read this poem as a commentary on poetry may seem to forsake the attractions
of the poem as a record of experience. The latter approach has had its exponents.2
Yet the above reading is not altogether divorced from the desire to see experience
recorded in poetry; for what the eclogue's literary-historical outlook and aesthetic
preoccupation suggest is a poet's testament. It is a record of achievement and a
rendering into poetry itself of a fundamental concern which Eliot expresses in
'Burnt Norton',
Only by the form, the pattern
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.

The thought of the poet-warrior composing his testament in anticipation of death is

not too fanciful. Tansillo remarked on how Garcilaso, after his return from North
Africa, was no longer the out-going companion he once had been, 'fastidito del
mondo, non gia lasso'.3 And in a moving qualification to seeing himself as a
mercenary shifted at whim by the forces of fortune (Elegia II, 157-9), Garcilaso, the
professional soldier, adds that dying at least is voluntary. Of course, life outdid art.
Garcilaso may have foreseen his dying in battle as a soldier's choice, but for the
Spanish Orpheus to fall with his head broken by rocks, that was a distinctly
Ovidian touch.4
n LAN K. G. PATERSON
QUEEN MARY COLLEGE, LONDON

1 Lines 53-68.
2 See, for example, R. O. Jones's article mentioned above.
3 On the contact between Garcilaso and Tansillo, see F. Fiorentino, Poesie liriche edite ed inedite di
Luigi Tansillo (Naples, I882); for the above quotation, p. 276.
4 I am grateful to T. E. May and G. G. Brown for reading early drafts and suggesting alterations,
and to H. McL. Currie for illuminating answers to my frequent questions.

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