[JORGE MANRIQUE]. The most eminently successful of the Spanish lyric poets of the fifteenth century, Jorge Manrique fell in battle when but thirty-eight years old. The greater part of his verse is to be found in the Cancionero General of 1511. The love-poems and humorous pieces given there and in other Cancioneros are of no decided merit, except perhaps an occasional poem, such as that printed here on [p. 42]. His real title to enduring fame is based upon the exquisite coplas, in which he commemorates the death of his father, the Maestre de Santiago, and proclaims the vanity and fleetingness of all earthly things. In sweetness and mournfulness of tone, as in finish of form, they are surpassed by nothing prior to them. The calm beauty and dignity of the original, and to some degree its metre, have been excellently rendered into English verse 354 by Longfellow in his translation, beginning: “O let the soul her slumbers break.” Cf. Ticknor, I, 366 ff., 391 ff.
[Page 44].—l. 3. se acabar: an Old Spanish order of infinitive and object pronoun.
l. 15. yerva secreta: so in Menéndez y Pelayo, Antología, III, 102. The rhyme seems to require yervas secretas.
l. 20. Cf. St. John i. 10.
[Page 45].—l. 1. fué: in modern Spanish fuera or sería would be more natural.
ll. 5-6. Es ... atendemos, i.e., It serves for the gaining of that world (Paradise) which we await, i.e., hope for.
l. 19. D’ellas: partitive, some of them.
[Page 46].—l. 1. arraval: limit, bounds.
ll. 12-14. Otros que por, etc.: an ellipsis. Otros is in the same construction as unos of l. 9. Translate: How low and abject do people deem others who, since they have nothing, maintain themselves by means of undeserved offices!
[Page 48].—l. 19. al Rey Don Juan: Juan II. of Castile (1406-54), a weak sovereign, but a munificent patron of letters in his splendid court.