[In the excerpt below, Post explores the allegorical aspects of the Razón de amor, comparing it with other conventional allegories of the period.]

The "Poéme d'Amour," usually called now from the opening lines the Razón de Amor, is an idyll describing a scholar's more or less imaginary encounter with his lady, and thus belongs to a class which … may be regarded as allegorical; the "Debate of Water and Wine" is seen by its name to be a member of a large and well known category of mediaeval verse. It is a question whether they are to be considered as separate poems or parts of the same poem. The protagonists of disunion are Petraglione and Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, who ascribe the awkward juncture to some lumbering copyist; the latter differs from the former only in suppressing certain lines that she regards as added to the original compositions for a makeshift at a transition. Monaci, Gorra, Baist, and lastly Menéndez Pidal maintain that the two fragments were meant by the author to constitute a single poem. Gorra surmises that he has translated and united two foreign pieces without heed to the artistic discord. Baist, on what ground I do not know, would trace the juncture to the French original. Monaci and Menéndez Pidal suggest that the author had the specific intent of exhibiting the dexterity of his trade by joining two incongruous scenes. Though the links between the love poem and the debate, adduced by Menéndez Pidal as impossible for a mere copyist, are by no means conclusive evidence, they tend to inspire a belief in the unity of the whole composition. The difficulties, however, are of little importance to us: whether the two parts are to be conceived as originally distinct, or one as a digression within the other, for our present purpose we need only note the two diverse themes. It is, in any case, an error, as Petraglione was the first to point out, to print the whole first part separately and to call it with Morel-Fatio Poème d'Amour or with Menéndez y Pelayo Aventura Amorosa; for this also is subdivided into two separate parts, the one forming an introduction and setting to the Debate, the other consisting of the detached amorous episode and having no apparent logical connection with the theme of the Debate.

After a preface in which he discusses the excellence of his poem and his own cosmopolitan education in courtliness, the writer imagines himself, in the month of April, a popular time for such experiences, as lying down after his meal under an olive tree and as seeing in the branches of an apple orchard a silver vessel full of red wine, placed there by the mistress of the garden and possessing the magical property of curing whosoever drinks of it daily. He discerns also, in some vague spot above the wine, a vessel of cold water, which rises from the apple orchard and which he hesitates to drink for fear of enchantment. Here commences the long digression of the meeting with his mistress, which for the moment I pass over. When she has departed, he continues without transition the allegorical setting to the Debate by describing the appearance of a dove, which, frightened from bathing in the spring of the olive orchard by the sight of the author, seeks the vessel of water in the apple orchard. Having refreshed itself, the bird in its rapid flight overturns the water into the wine below, thus precipitating the encounter and consequent quarrel of the two liquids. The introduction and the Debate itself are further riveted together by a double reference in the latter to the commixture as the motive for the argument.

The mingling of the two liquids is a common setting for the mediaeval subject of a debate between Wine and Water. Thus in the French Débat du Vin et de l'Eaue, Pierre Jamec, also after a meal, provokes the dispute by mixing the two in his glass. In our anonymous composition the device of the dove and the basins of wine and water hidden away amidst the foliage of an orchard is more ingenious and poetical, and possesses a certain charm of mystery. Although, strictly, Wine and Water are personifications rather than allegorical figures, the treatment does not differ from that of the ordinary allegorical debate. The introductory fiction, though somewhat more extended, serves the purpose, as in the debates of Ruy Páez de Ribera, of a framework for a didactic argument. It is an instructive comment on the attempt of those who would trace Ribera's inclination for allegory to Dantesque influence that there exists in Spain two centuries before his day, not a general, but an exact prototype to his poems, and that the imaginative setting in the identical sort of composition plays a more important rôle prior to the entrance of Dante into Spain.

The erotic episode itself is more or less on the plane of allegory. Lying in a meadow bedight with varied flowers, and watered by a spring the coolness of which spreads a hundred feet around, the writer, as he is about to sing of fin amor, beholds a fair lady approaching and likewise singing of love. After the mediaeval fashion, he describes her loveliness in most scrupulous detail. Her song is of the scholar who is unfaithful to her. She does not perceive the writer until, grasping her by the hand, he draws her to his side beneath the olive tree and questions her of her lover. Learning that she does not know him except by reputation, and by the gloves, hat, coral, and ring that he has sent her, he recognizes her forthwith by his own gifts, and she him by the belt that she has embroidered with her own hands. Like Basiliola in D'Annunzio's La Nave, she slips the mantle from her shoulders, they have their pleasure, and she leaves him.

The background of the episode is one of the conventional gardens that are to form so frequent a feature of literary landscape in the fifteenth century. The first lines, assigning the events to the springtime and laying the scene in an orchard, belong both to the erotic episode and to the Debate, but in the former they are later much augmented by a lengthy description of the fountain and a detailed list of the flowers. The whole passage is closely parallel to the beginning of the Decir de las Siete Virtudes. Just as the earlier poet is surprised by the lady of his heart, so, in the midst of a garden surrounded by a sweetly murmuring stream, carpeted by flowers, and redolent with soft odours, Imperial perceives Leah singing and gathering blossoms. The similarity to the dream of the twenty-seventh canto of the Purgatorio and to the fulfilment of the dream in the twenty-eighth might seem exact enough to suggest a relationship, were that possible, and once more proves how hazardous it is to dogmatize about specific imitations, unless they be extended or verbal.

The lapse of two centuries brings with it no appreciable difference in the verses that tell of Imperial's amorous wound and captivity. The same emphasis is given to the flowers and their perfume, and the many and varied constituents of the lady's beauty are enumerated with the same meticulous care. The surprisingly unmasculine familiarity with feminine costume finds an analogue in the description of the French lady whom Imperial in another poem discovers hunting along the bank of the Guadalquivir.

The presence of all this material in the thirteenth century renders it absurd to speak in very decided terms about any new allegorical school at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Since the Marquis of Santillana, the chief exponent of allegory during the later period, does not employ this form in at least half of his productions, if we are to speak at all of a Spanish allegorical school, Berceo should not improperly have a place in it. If he is responsible for the Alexandre, his title is all the stronger; if not, allegory of these early days occupies a still broader field, for another poet not only imports allegorical elements from his sources but adds touches of his own.