[In the following excerpt, Parker argues that the rhyme scheme, meter, and musicality of Polifemo y Galatea are hallmarks of the Góngora's unparalleled genius and originality.]

To the conclusion that Polifemo is poetry of the very highest class there still has to be added the evidence of its architectural and musical craftsmanship. No reader can fail to become aware of the parallelistic construction of its verses. The eight-line stanza is in nearly every case divided into halves by a heavy stop, and reveals a symmetrical structure in other ways also. Lines can be conceptually and syntactically paired:

bóveda de las fraguas de Vulcano,
o tumba de los huesos de Tifeo

(27-8)

There is a double pairing in

la serba, a quien le da rugas el heno;
la pera, de quien fue cuna dorada
la rubia paja, y—pálida tutora—
la niega avara, y pródiga la dora.

(77-80)

Here the lines are paired by a repetition of the syntax: the first pair by noun-relative-verb-subject, the second pair by the balance of the words helped by the linking vowel assonance of—a paja / avara and the near assonance of the proparoxytones pálida and pródiga, these linking words being in the same metrical position in their respective lines. Further, the third line has the syntactical symmetry adjective-noun/adjective-noun, and the fourth the chiastic symmetry of object + verb—adjective/conjunction/adjective—object + verb, with the further parallelism of the semantic contrast between the two adjectives (‘miserly’ and ‘prodigal’). The halving of individual lines, as in these last two examples, either by repetition or by chiasmus, is the most frequent single structural feature, especially common as a resounding last line of the stanzas. Many examples were noticed in the course of the above analysis of conceits and theme. Here are others: ‘peinar el viento, fatigar la selva’ (8); ‘en carro de cristal, campos de plata’ (120); ‘rinden las vacas y fomentan el robre’ (200); ‘grillos de nieve fue, plumas de hielo’ (224).

The various ways in which Góngora reveals his predilection for a two-part symmetry has been studied by Dámaso Alonso with his usual mastery.¹ This often meticulous symmetry is rare, to this degree, in other poets; it is so far removed from the practice of modern poets that it must strike the reader who comes to it for the first time as a perhaps tiresome mannerism. We have seen that it has an essential function to play in the conceptual structure of the poem, and therefore in the conception of the theme. Although this is not so in every instance it is impossible to separate this element from the rest of the poem; this constriction of verbal and syntactical patterns is part of the over-all unity of the poem, giving it its statuesque, almost hieratic, quality.

What makes these mannered patterns readily accepted—indeed, what allows them to pass unnoticed by all but the most attentive readers—is the music of Góngora's lines. He is one of the most melodious of all Spanish poets and his music has a subtlety not found later in Romantic and Modernist verse, where novel musical effects are generally the result of unusual metres. Góngora extracts the maximum musicality from the Italian hendecasyllabic line, and very expressive sound effects from forms of alliteration, as in the often-quoted line ‘infame turba de nocturnas aves’ (39). Dámaso Alonso's method of stylistic analysis has revealed the full extent of Góngora's craftsmanship in these respects. But further reasons for the exceptional musicality of Polifemo have been disclosed by Colin Smith, who detected the fact that Góngora arranges vowel sounds in symmetrical patterns (and, one may add, the astonishing fact that these are the same symmetrical patterns in which he arranges parts of speech). What follows is a summary of Smith's paper La musicalidad del ‘Polifemo’.² These patterns are possible in Spanish by the phonetic simplicity of its vowel system (a feature, also, of Italian). In the line just quoted the threefold repetition of the group of letters a-e (infame, turba de, aves) is the repetition of the same two sounds.

The commonest example of ‘vowel music’ in Polifemo is the echo-like repetition at the end of a line of the same two vowels in the two syllables of its beginning:

de más ecos que unió cáñamo y cera

(91)

a la de viento, cuando no sea cama

(215)

pisando la dudosa luz del día

(72)

Such repetition constitutes a frequent vowel pattern in the poem. Though it must have become a habit of composition it is not likely to have been unconscious in every case; in the second example the highly distorted syntax (see the note to this line) seems to have no other function than to produce the phonic balance of the beginning and the end.

There can be repetition of three or four vowel sounds in the same position:

ser de la negra noche nos lo enseña

(38)

la caverna profunda que a la peña

(36)

There is a five-vowel pattern in the following astonishing line, where perfect symmetry is achieved by the vowel repetition between the two long groups:

en pie, sombra capaz es mi persona

(411)

e i-e o-a / a-a / e i e-o-a

This is not meaningless virtuosity. Each of these lines, especially the last, is given a special melodiousness by the phonic repetition. This repetition can be in inverse order (i.e. chiastic):

con el pincel que le clavó su pecho

(272)

Galatea lo diga, salteada

(304)

All this is what Smith calls Góngora's ‘normal’ sound patterns. They become more complex when there is a threefold repetition (not necessarily symmetrically placed):

Con lágrimas la ninfa solicita

(493)

— / i-a / - / i-a / — / i-a

Or two pairs of chiastic assonances:

Su horrenda voz, no su dolor interno

(465)

- / o-é / - / ó-o / - o-ó / - / é-o

where it will be noticed that the four groups are symmetrically placed syllabically.

The name Galatea, itself so euphonious, invariably enriches musically the lines that accompany it. In the following example the rhyme ea, extended to latea, produces a marvellous assonance of a and e:

                                        Galatea.
Pisa la arena, que en la arena adoro
cuantas el blanco pie conchas platea

(372-4)

                                        a-a-e-a
- / a-a-a-e-a / e-e / a-a-e-a-a / —
a-a-e-a / [co] - ié - [co] / a-a-e-a.

The phonic symmetry of this last line is unbelievably skilful; as a result its melody is exquisite. The most elaborate musical effects are produced when three or four assonance groups, of from two to five vowels, are interwoven within one stanza. An example is the second (lines 9-16), at which the reader may wish to try his hand on his own.

The last lines quoted show an example of ‘rich rhyme’—the two obligatory rhyming syllables, -ea, extended to three, -latea. It should be noted, however, that the rhyme is in fact even richer since these three rhyming syllables are in each case preceded by the vowel a: -alatea, -as platea. This enrichment of rhyme by assonance as well as by additional consonants in Polifemo has been studied in a second paper by Colin Smith.³ The enrichment is frequent in the end rhymes:

tal, antes que la opaca nube rompa,
previene rayo fulminante trompa.

(487-8)

But it is also found in the other rhymes:

Colin Smith sums up this aspect of his Polifemo studies as follows:

The Polifemo must be unique, … in world literature, for its purely musical qualities, to which the supplementary echoes of rich rhyme contribute greatly. As one studies the various types of word-music in the poem, one begins to see even greater reason for the liberties the poet took with word-order. The logical exposition of ‘sense’ of the intellectual kind was of very little interest to Góngora. His sense is of the sensory and sensual kind, and much of it is conveyed by word-music.

To explore and analyse Góngora's artistry in one particular aspect [rich rhyme]—even in what seems at first sight to be a very unexciting aspect—is to realize anew what an astonishing creation the Polifemo is. Here are no casual conjunctions of sounds, but a construction of such artifice that the process of its building seems to the ordinary mortal the more mysterious the more it is investigated, the more divinely inspired.⁴

This fine statement would be unexceptionable but for the last two sentences of the penultimate paragraph. It is true that Góngora in this poem was not specially interested in ‘the logical exposition of “sense” of the intellectual kind’, but the witty formulation and exposition of intellectual sense was a prime concern with him. This kind of sense combines with the sensory and the sensual to produce what it is surely justifiable to call a total work of poetic art, one in which none of these three elements is weakened by its communication through either of the other two. Most readers may continue in the future, as has been the case in the past, to attach little importance (some even none at all) to the poem's agudeza and to the ideas it packs so tightly into the poetic form, but to ignore the fact that Góngora consciously strove to create an art of the mind—arte de ingenio—is to simplify his artistry. This, in effect, is to lessen his achievement, even if we were to hold (as I do not) that this simplification is an aesthetic improvement.

Notes

1. Not only passim in the works already referred to on many occasions but especially in the following: ‘La simetría bilateral’, in Estudios y ensayos gongorinos (Madrid 1953) 117-73.

2. In Revista de Filología Española, XLIV (1961) 139-66.

3. ‘Rich Rhyme in Góngora's Polifemo’, in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, XLII (1965) 106-12.

4. op. cit., 112.