And who shall curb this troubled deep,
When Thou no more amidst the gloom
Shalt chide the wrathful winds to sleep,
And guide the labouring vessel home?
For Thou art gone! that cloud so bright
That bears Thee from our gaze away,
Springs upward into dazzling light,
And leaves us here to weep and pray.
Four additional stanzas, accepted as authentic by perhaps the most painstaking of Luis de Leon's editors, are thus Englished by Churton:
Our life has lost its richest store,
The balm for sorrow's inward thorn,
The hope, that, gladd'ning more and more,
Out-brighten'd all the springs of morn.
Ah me! my soul, what hateful chain
Holds back thy freeborn spirit's flight?
Oh break it, disenthrall'd from pain,
And mount those azure depths of light.
Why should'st thou fear? What earth-born spell
Is on thee, with thy choice at strife
The soul no dying pang can quell,
But loss of Christ is death in life.
Dear Lord, and Friend, more dear to me
Than all the names Earth's love hath found,
Through darkest gloom I'll follow Thee,
Or cheer'd with beaming glory round.
Now there is no question of mere executive skill and simple craftsmanship in Luis de Leon's poems. He is, indeed, always sound and competent in these respects; but artistry is not his supreme virtue as a poet. He is ever prone to be a little rugged in his manner, and this ruggedness has proved something of a trap to the unwary. Luis de Leon has no real mannerisms, and is no more to be parodied than is Shakespeare. Yet it is sometimes difficult to distinguish him at his worst from his imitators at their best. Though withheld so long from the public, Luis de Leon's poems, while still in manuscript, were repeatedly imitated—especially by Augustinians. To my way of thinking, he is most nearly approached by his friend Arias Montano. But it should be said that this is not the general verdict. That goes decisively in favour of Miguel Sanchez, el Divino. Miguel Sanchez is the author of a beautiful Cancion de Cristo Crucificado, a poem which, though not published till 1605 with the real writer's name attached to it, has constantly been ascribed to Luis de Leon.[274] The Cancion is no doubt a composition of great charm and mystic unction; but it lacks the concentrated force of Luis de Leon. Luis de Leon has a lofty dignity of his own; he outstrips all rivalry by virtue of his nobility, by virtue of his intellectual vigour, by virtue of sheer excellence rather than by curious refinements of technique. These positive qualities defy reproduction by even the most accomplished of imitators. It has been said that Luis de Leon's verse, as well as his prose, has noticeable roughnesses; but let us not derive a wrong impression from this assertion. Luis de Leon is not 'finicking'. Withal he is a master of his art. Retrograde as we may perhaps think him in some matters, he was on the side of the reformers in the matter of metrics. He was a partisan of Boscan's innovating methods: so much might be expected from a man of his period. It is to be noted that, in his best poems, he shows a decided preference for liras, a form apparently invented by Bernardo Tasso before it was transplanted to Spain by Garcilasso de la Vega. Luis de Leon was of opinion that those who violate poetry, using it for purposes of a meretricious kind, deserved punishment as public corrupters of two most sacred things: poetry and morals. It is one of the curious ironies of art that the measure which the seductive Garcilasso used for amatory purposes should have appealed to Luis de Leon as the vehicle most suited to enraptured chants and hymns of philosophic meditation.
It is obvious that Luis de Leon took a keen interest in all the real essentials of his art. It is no less obvious that he saw matters in their actual perspective, that he attached no undue importance to technique, as such, and that he gave no less weight to the choice of matter than to the choice of form. Luis de Leon was not incapable of metrical audacities: as when he divides into two separate words adverbs in -mente occurring at the end of a line. This practice was audacious, but it was not an innovation. Juan de Almeida defended it by citing a host of precedents from other literatures and, had Almeida been a prophet, he might have foretold that this device was destined to be repeated hundreds of years later by that innovating genius Rubén Darío. But Almeida was not a prophet. His titles to remembrance are that he was learned, and that he may rank with Miguel Sanchez, with Alonso de Espinosa, and with Benito Arias Montano as among the least unsuccessful of Luis de Leon's followers. They often follow his lead with undeniable adroitness. Yet they never attain his incomparable concentration, his majestic vision of nature and his characteristic note of ecstatic aloofness. Nowhere is he more himself than in the immortal stanzas dedicated to Oloarte under the title of Noche serena of which Churton has bequeathed us an English version which I will quote, though it gives but a far-off echo of the original's magic melody: