There are also a few examples of oxytone rhymes (agudas) in the canciones and two cases in the sonnets. In Canción I there is an unrhymed line in the envoy, ending in ver; in Canción II, there are rhymes in -ar, -ad, -or, í, and -é; and in Canción III, there are rhymes in -er and -ar. It is probable that the use of rimas agudas was considered justified in a canción because of Petrarch's use of an oxytone rhyme in his Canzone XI. But there are also rimas agudas in two of Garcilaso's sonnets, XXVII and XXXII, in i and -al. There has been much discussion of the desirability of using these rhymes in Castilian verse, the principal justification being naturally the large number of oxytone words in the language. They are not unknown in Italian, for Dante has fourteen examples and Ariosto two in the Orlando furioso. In Spain they are very common in Boscán and Diego de Mendoza in their verses in the Italian measures. It should be observed, however, that the authenticity of both of the son

nets of Garcilaso in which they occur has been questioned, largely because of them, and the general absence of such rhymes in the Spanish sonnets and other Italian forms in the poets of the Golden Age may be attributed to Garcilaso's example.

Aside from obvious printer's errors, there are a number of faulty rhymes in Garcilaso. Three of these are found in Eclogue III (lines 204, 359, and 374) and are doubtless an evidence of the unfinished state in which the poet left this last poem. The others occur in the inner rhymes in Eclogue II: cabo-hago (lines 1006-7), culebras-negras (lines 944-45), puedes-deves (lines 997-98), Phaunos-Silvanos (lines 1156-57) sangre-hambre (lines 1205-6), sangre-estambre (lines 1242-43), sangrehambre (lines 1663-64), campo-blanco (lines 1257-58). Although there is no possibility that these could have formed perfect rhymes to Garcilaso, it should be remembered that in Garcilaso's time there were some, like the good Castilian Juan de Valdés, who always pronounced the nasal

n rather than m before p and b, which would reduce most of the examples to a simple dissonance between b and g, d and v, or p and c. Furthermore, there is assonance in every case and the pairs are either both voiced or both voiceless. In the case of Phaunos, it should possibly be pronounced Fanos, as some of the editions have it. Perhaps it is unnecessary to say more than that they are evidences of haste or carelessness, some of them involving difficult rhymes.

Equivocal rhymes are not infrequent in Garcilaso's verse but their use never degenerates into abuse.1 Occasionally the same word seems to be employed without distinction of meaning, as in

are of different significance. In Sonnet XIX there is an instance of a rhyme word used three times,

Julio, despues que me parti llorando de quien jamas mi pensamiento parte, y dexe de mi alma aquella parte que al cuerpo vida y fuerça estava dando,

de mi bien a mi me voy tomando estrecha cuenta, y siento de tal arte faltarme el bien, que temo en parte que ha de faltarme el ayre sospirando.

(lines 1-8)

CHAPTER V

ORTHOGRAPHY, VOCABULARY

AND GRAMMAR

a.

ORTHOGRAPHY

The conditions under which the poems of Garcilaso were published, to which we have so often referred, make it impossible to draw any conclusions as to his personal orthography. But the text adopted, following the readings of the edition of Antwerp of 1544 in respect to spelling, stands at least as an example of the current orthography in the decade after his death. In general, it presents no striking peculiarities; the spellings are those which we find in other contemporary editions.

A few of these spellings are merely conventional and point to no divergence from the modern pronunciation. Y for i enjoys a rather frequent usage, being regularly employed in the diphthongs ay, ey, oy and