4 - ‘Arranca de Dafne sin piedad los brazos’: The Pastoral Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo

Summary

In 1993 Manuel Ángel Candelas Colodrón advanced the possibility that Francisco de Quevedo’s silva Farmaceutria o medicamentos enamorados, also known as the silva sexta, might be considered an eclogue, a form not typically associated with the poet’s amorous verse. Soledad Pérez-Abadín Barro’s 2008 study convincingly made a case for the poem’s inclusion within a subgenre of the eclogue, the pharmaceutria, present in neo-Latin and Spanish Renaissance pastoral poetry, of which Theocritus, Idyll 2, and Virgil, Eclogue VIII are the foundational texts. The bucolic artifice is a fundamental component of the Renaissance legacy which Quevedo contests in his confrontational amorous poetics. And yet the pastoral is a facet of his poetic voice which has been largely absent from critical discussions. The strictures of courtly lyric both impede and permit the forging of the Quevedesque voice which rails against them, colliding with the limitations imposed by literary convention. This chapter will aim to consider the implications of Quevedo’s audacious voice when it reverberates within the boundaries of the bucolic, suggesting that a detailed consideration of the transformative dynamism of the silva as a pastoral poem can enrich and extend existing readings of Quevedo’s amorous lyric. The mordant incantations of its embittered speaker, which seek to revivify the flames of love through witchcraft, encompass a startling negation of Renaissance pastoral norms. However, the poem engages with the possibility of successful poetic catharsis and offers a macabre vision of communication beyond the grave, a topos which has been read as embodying the emotive charge of Quevedo’s amorous verse. Early indications of these poetic tendencies can be detected in the muted criticism of courtly love which intermittently flares in the pastoral poetry of Quevedo’s amorous lyric. With its unexpected prioritisation of the body as the site of a transcendent love, the metaphysical voice of Quevedo’s love poetry engages with intangibility and the contradictory nature of human existence.2 The human body can also be the target of Christian suspicion, but a similar dialectic between disintegration and renewal may also be detected within the scathing and grotesque vision of Quevedo’s pastoral satire, as we shall see in the final section of this chapter. This poetry is evidence of the poet’s awareness of the sociocultural utility of the literary space, and even his presentation of the most unpalatable imagery ends on a note of regeneration and enrichment of the bucolic artifice.