Ye fresh and soft breezes,
That now for the spring
Unfold your bright garlands,
Sweet violets bring,[874]—
is, again, full of gentle tenderness. And so are some of his religious popular poems, which occasionally approach the character of the old villancicos.
His odes of the same period are more stately. That on the Armada, which must have been written as early as 1588, since it contains the most confident predictions of a victory over England, is one of the best; and that on Saint Hermenegild—a prince, who, in the sixth century, partly for his resistance to Arianism and partly for political rebellion, was put to death by his own father, and afterwards canonized by the Church of Rome—is full of fervor and of the spirit of Catholic devotion. Both are among the good specimens of the more formal Spanish ode.
But this poetry, all of which seems to have been written before he went to court, and while he lived neglected at Córdova, failed to give him the honors to which he aspired. It failed even to give him the means of living. Moved, perhaps, by these circumstances, and perhaps by the success of Ledesma and his conceited school, Góngora adopted another style, and one that he thought more likely to command attention. The most obvious feature in this style is, that it consists almost entirely of metaphors, so heaped one upon another, that it is sometimes as difficult to find out the meaning hidden under their grotesque mass as if it were absolutely a series of confused riddles. Thus, when his friend Luis de Bavia, in 1613, published a volume containing the history of three Popes, Góngora sent him the following words, thrown into the shape of a commendatory sonnet, to be prefixed to the book:—
“This poem, which Bavia has now offered to the world, if not tied up in numbers, yet is filed down into a good arrangement, and licked into shape by learning, is a cultivated history, whose gray-headed style, though not metrical, is well combed, and robs three pilots of the sacred bark from time and rescues them from oblivion. But the pen that thus immortalizes the heavenly turnkeys on the bronze of its history is not a pen, but the key of ages. It opens to their names, not the gates of failing memory, which stamps shadows on masses of foam, but the gates of immortality.”
The meaning of this, as it is set forth in ten pages of commentary by one of his admirers, is as follows:—
“The history which Bavia now offers to the world is not, indeed, in verse, but it is written and finished in the spirit of wise learning and of poetry. Immortalizing three Popes, it becomes the key of ages, opening to them, not the gates of memory, which often give passage to a transient and false fame, but the gates of sure and perpetual renown.”[875]