Photo: Church of San Sebastián, Madrid. @Mariola Diaz-Cano Arevalo
It was in Madrid, city that saw the birth and also die on a day like today 1635 to Lope de Vega Carpio, the Spanish poet and playwright, one of the most important of our Golden Age and perhaps of all national poetry and theater. And all of Madrid went to see him off that day. So to remember I choose these 5 sonnets. Although there is always a reason to read Lope: greatness.
Lope de Vega
We have all read or "seen" Lope, the Fénix de los ingenios or Monster of Nature, as his contemporary called him a certain Miguel de Cervantes, with whom he maintained a legendary rivalry. His verse, his theater ... We all learned what a sonnet was with A sonnet tells me to do Violante. And we all know where it is Fuenteovejuna and how a gardener's dog spends them.
He was born in Madrid in the year 1562 and he was the son of a humble peasant couple. He did not finish high school, but even so, he was an author very prolific that cultivated diverse sorts, like the narrative, the theater and also the lyric. From intense love life, had 15 children between legitimate and illegitimate. And he was friends with Francisco de Quevedo or Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. An existential crisis, perhaps due to the loss of several relatives, led him to the priesthood.
His work was influenced by Luis de Gongora, with whom we all know well that he was at enmity. But Lope's tone is closer to colloquial language. However, where its imprint and its renewing character it is in his plays. He wanted to present stories that were realistic and where, as in life, drama and comedy intermingle.
To highlight among some of his works: Fuenteovejuna, Peribáñez and the Commander of Ocaña, The best mayor, the king, The star of Seville, The silly lady, The steel of Madrid, The discreet lover, The punishment without revenge...
However, today I stay with his verses and I choose these 5 sonnets (of the 3 000 that are attributed to him) that show his most romantic and also religious poetry.
5 sonnets
At night
Charm-making night,
crazy, imaginative, chimerist,
that you show him who conquers his good in you,
the flat mountains and dry seas;
dweller of hollow brains,
mechanic, philosopher, alchemist,
vile concealer, sightless lynx,
frightening of your own echoes;
the shadow, the fear, the evil attributed to you,
caring, poet, sick, cold,
hands of the brave and feet of the fugitive.
Let him watch or sleep, half a life is yours;
if I see it, I'll pay you with the day,
and if I sleep, I don't feel what I live.
***
To a skull
This head, when alive, had
on the architecture of these bones
flesh and hair, for whom they were imprisoned
the eyes that looking at her stopped.
Here the rose of the mouth was,
already withers with such icy kisses,
here the imprinted emerald eyes,
color that so many souls entertained.
Here the estimate in which I had
the beginning of all movement,
here of the powers the harmony.
Oh mortal beauty, kite in the wind!
Where so high presumption did he live,
Do the worms despise the chamber?
***
Wishing I was inside your own
Wishing to be inside your own,
Lucinda, to see if I am loved,
I looked at that face that from heaven has been
with stars and natural sun copy;
and knowing its improper baseness,
I saw myself dressed in light and radiance,
in your sun like a lost Phaeton,
when he burned the fields of Ethiopia,
Near death I said: «Have us,
crazy wishes, because you were so much,
the jobs being so unequal. '
But it was the punishment, for more fright,
two opposites, two deaths, two wishes,
Well, I die in fire and I melt into tears.
***
Tear force
In the spirit of speaking to you in confidence
of his piety I entered the temple one day,
where Christ on the cross shone
with the forgiveness of the one who looks at him it reaches.
And although faith, love and hope
they put boldness on their tongue,
I reminded myself that it was my fault
and I would like to take revenge.
I was coming back without saying anything
and how I saw the sore on the side,
the soul stood in tears bathed.
I spoke, I cried and I entered from that side,
because God does not have a closed door
to the contrite and humbled heart.
***
I am dying of love
I am dying of love, that I did not know,
although skilled in loving things on the ground,
that I did not think that love from heaven
with such rigor the souls ignited.
If you call the moral philosophy
desire from beauty to love, suspicion
that with greater anxiety I wake up
how much higher is my beauty.
I loved in the vile land, what a foolish lover!
Oh light of the soul, having to seek you,
what time I wasted as ignorant!
But I promise you now to pay you
with a thousand centuries of love at any moment
that for loving me I stopped loving you.