ll. 31-32. The rhyme is imperfect or shows dialectal influence.
l. 32. cortesa, an analogical feminine form due, doubtless, to the influence of national and other locative adjectives in -es, -esa.
l. 33. Te ... bien, loves thee so very much.
[Page 6].—l. 5. la mía señor. The article often appeared with the attributive possessive adjective in Old Spanish. The noun señor was both masculine and feminine in early Spanish, as its etymon, the adjective senior, was in Latin.
l. 17. un su mesaiero, a messenger of his. Cf. l. 27, es meu amigo, this friend of mine, and l. 31, una mi çinta, a ribbon of mine.
ll. 21-22. The MS. has buenas yentes and punnientes.
[Page 7].—l. 3. This line is an emendation of Morel-Fatio’s.
l. 12. fe que devedes, by the faith that you owe, on your honor.
l. 18. Por ... muerto, I nearly died.
[GONZALO DE BERCEO]. Gonzalo de Berceo is the first Castilian poet known to us by name. He is mentioned in documents ranging in date from the second decade to the middle of the thirteenth century. From his birthplace, the village of Berceo, he early passed to the monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, and there he remained, as a secular priest, throughout his life. Most of his work consists of religious, legendary and narrative verse, in the production of which he was most prolific. He has also left us one long profane poem, the Libro de Alexandre, giving the usual mediæval account of the adventures of Alexander the Great. Berceo seems to have been the first to use the metrical form called cuaderna vía345—quatrains of fourteen-syllabled lines with a single rhyme—which he employed consistently and which had considerable vogue in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Abandoning that narrative verse form, he strikes a true lyric note in the Cántica de la Virgen, a somewhat irregular octosyllabic song inserted in his longer poem, El duelo de la Virgen. As this lyric resembles watch-songs found in Latin and German Easter-plays, it has been supposed that Berceo borrowed it from a lost Easter play in Spanish. Like them it represents Mary as entreating the apostles to guard the body of the buried Christ. The collected poems of Berceo are to be found in volume 57 of the Biblioteca de autores españoles.