Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Voicing Time: The Temporal Textures of Garcilaso de la Vega
- 2 Luis de León and the Moriscos: A Close Reading of Ode XXII (La cana y alta cumbre)
- 3 Conde de Salinas: poesías atribuidas o disputadas
- 4 Horacio en Quevedo: principios retóricos del arte de la imitación
- 5 El nuevo Olimpo de Gabriel Bocángel en Aragón
- 6 Imaging Women: The Portrait Poems of Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán
- 7 La sublimidad del Septentrión: paisajes de la poesía romántica española
- 8 Antonio Machado as Cynic: ‘Fantasía de una noche de abril’ as Pastiche of Espronceda
- 9 Hamlet Without the Prince: Denunciation and Surveillance in Vicent Andrés Estellés's Testimoni d'Horaci
- 10 Poetry and Crisis in Spain after 2008
- 11 Contexto, texto e intertexto en Cuaderno de vacaciones (2014), de Luis Alberto de Cuenca
- 12 La lírica en los tiempos del neoliberalismo: reflexiones sobre Balada en la muerte de la poesía, de Luis García Montero
- Appendix: The Publications of Trevor J. Dadson
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Luis de León and the Moriscos: A Close Reading of Ode XXII (La cana y alta cumbre)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Voicing Time: The Temporal Textures of Garcilaso de la Vega
- 2 Luis de León and the Moriscos: A Close Reading of Ode XXII (La cana y alta cumbre)
- 3 Conde de Salinas: poesías atribuidas o disputadas
- 4 Horacio en Quevedo: principios retóricos del arte de la imitación
- 5 El nuevo Olimpo de Gabriel Bocángel en Aragón
- 6 Imaging Women: The Portrait Poems of Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán
- 7 La sublimidad del Septentrión: paisajes de la poesía romántica española
- 8 Antonio Machado as Cynic: ‘Fantasía de una noche de abril’ as Pastiche of Espronceda
- 9 Hamlet Without the Prince: Denunciation and Surveillance in Vicent Andrés Estellés's Testimoni d'Horaci
- 10 Poetry and Crisis in Spain after 2008
- 11 Contexto, texto e intertexto en Cuaderno de vacaciones (2014), de Luis Alberto de Cuenca
- 12 La lírica en los tiempos del neoliberalismo: reflexiones sobre Balada en la muerte de la poesía, de Luis García Montero
- Appendix: The Publications of Trevor J. Dadson
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The rebellion of the moriscos of Granada in 1568–70 was a turning point in their history. It led initially to their dispersal throughout Castile, and eventually to the decision in 1609 to expel all the moriscos from Spain. These events have been studied by Trevor Dadson in a series of remarkable articles and books that have changed how we understand them. The present chapter, written in his honour, concerns a poem of Fray Luis de León (Ode XXII: La cana y alta cumbre) that takes the Granada uprising as its subject. Fray Luis observed the rebellion at a distance, from his teaching post in the University of Salamanca, but it engaged him closely nonetheless because of its impact on the life of his friend and patron, Don Pedro Portocarrero, who was at the time a canon in the cathedral of Seville. The Portocarrero family had long-standing connections with the region, and Don Pedro's brother, Alfonso, took part with distinction in the military defeat of the rebels, under the leadership of Don Juan of Austria. This chapter considers how the ode of Fray Luis presents the uprising, its suppression, and its implications for Portocarrero and his family. It examines in particular how its themes are mediated not only by direct statement, but by Classical and biblical allusions, symbolic images and the poem's overall structure.
Ode XXII
The studies of La cana y alta cumbre that have appeared in print have raised several questions about its interpretation that remain unresolved. One of them has to do with its tone. The poem has been called a skilled but formal exercise in rhetoric (‘pese a ciertas virtudes, es un hábil y brillante ejercicio retórico’), written dutifully in honour of a friend, but lacking passion, and in this respect it has been likened to another ode of Fray Luis, Virtud, hija del cielo (Ode II), also dedicated to Pedro Portocarrero: ‘para los gustos actuales […] parecen un poco frías y de encargo […] puesto que en su origen y fundamento son […] meros elogios, si bien sinceros, del destinatario’. It is true that the poem is in one sense conventional: praise of an absent friend, already present in the odes of Horace, was cultivated in neo-Latin poetry of the time.
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- Information
- Studies on Spanish Poetry in Honour of Trevor J. DadsonEntre los Siglos de Oro y el siglo XXI, pp. 35 - 46Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019