Manrique, Jorge

(1440–1479)

   Jorge Manrique, son of a distinguished Castilian family, was a military man by vocation and a lyric poet by avocation. He is best known for his Coplas por la muerte de su padre don Rodrigo (Verses on the death of his father, Don Rodrigo, 1476), an elegy that is considered one of the classics of Spanish poetry.

   He was probably born at Paredes de Nava in about 1400. The father for whom Manrique composed his greatest poem was Rodrigo Manrique, count of Paredes and grand master of the Order of Santiago. Rodrigo was a renowned general, and his fourth son, Jorge, followed his father in that profession. Like his father, Jorge opposed the weak king of Castile and León,Henry IV, and supported the king’s half-brother, the Infante Don Alfonso. When the young Alfonso died in 1468, the Manriques threw their support behind the other claimant to the throne, Henry’s half sister Isabella “the Catholic.” When civil war broke out after Henry’s death in 1474, the Manriques fought for Isabella and her new husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, against supporters of rival claimants to the throne. After his father’s death in 1476, Manrique continued his active support of Isabella, and distinguished himself in several conflicts, finally falling in her service doing battle against one of her chief enemies, the marqués of Villena, before the castle of Garci-Muñoz in 1479.

   Manrique wrote some 50 extant lyrics, most of them undistinguished to modern tastes—they tend to be clever but conventional, though his contemporaries saw Manrique as one of the major Spanish love poets of the time.His poems also deal with religion and with the vicissitudes of Fortune. Many of these are collected in the Cancionero general, a large collection of verses published by Hernando del Castillo in 1511.

   But the one poem on which Manrique’s reputation rests is the elegy on his father, written immediately after the general’s death in 1476. The poem consists of 43 stanzas of 12 lines, rhyming abcabcdefdef. The verse form is called pie quebrado: In it, most lines are eight syllables long, but every third line (that is, each c and f line) is only four syllables. In the poem Manrique laments his father’s passing, celebrating his major victories and comparing him to great figures of the classical world, but puts his death into a universal context by contemplating the brevity and vanity of earthly life and giving examples of the great Spanish kings and soldiers who had passed away before. The poem ends with a climactic allegorical dialogue between Death and Don Rodrigo.

   There is nothing particularly original in the elegy. The form seems to be influenced by the poetry of Jorge’s uncle, Gomez Manrique (also a lesser-known lyric poet), and sentiments from the Bible, BOETHIUS, and other sources. But Manrique gives memorable expression to these commonplace sentiments.Many scholars have seen the complex tone of the elegy—which combines the medieval contemptu mundi (contempt for the world) tradition with the humanistic pride in personal achievement associated with the Renaissance—as evidence that Manrique was a transitional figure between the medieval and early modern periods.Manrique’s influence has been widespread and lasting: His poetry has influenced writers like Lope de Vega and Pedro Salinas, and his elegy was translated into eloquent English by Longfellow in 1833.

   Bibliography

   ■ Dominguez, Frank A. Love and Remembrance: The Poetry of Jorge Manrique. Studies in Romance Languages, no. 33. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988.