Jorge Manrique

• 1. Introduction

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  Jorge Manrique was born around 1440. He died on the 24th of April 1479, killed during an assault on a castle in the heart of Castile. He was not a king or a general. He was a poet, and one line by a later writer says more about his standing than any battle he fought. Lope de Vega praised Manrique's best known work as 'worthy to be printed in letters of gold.' That work, the Coplas por la muerte de su padre, verses written on the death of his father, is still read today. How did a nobleman who spent his final years fighting in a civil war come to write a poem still praised for its craftsmanship? What did his family owe to poetry before he ever picked up a pen? And why does a stanza he wrote about a river reaching the sea still get quoted, translated, and argued over five centuries later?

• 2. A Line Of Poets

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  Iñigo López de Mendoza, the marquis of Santillana, was Manrique's great-uncle, and one of the most important poets of the fifteenth century. Manrique also descended from Pero López de Ayala, who served as chancellor of Castile and left his own mark on medieval Castilian letters. His uncle, Gómez Manrique, held the post of corregidor of Toledo and wrote poetry of his own. All three were counted among the significant poets of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Jorge Manrique was born into that inheritance, a noble family whose name already carried literary weight before he added to it. The theme running through his own work was tempus fugit, time flees, an idea he would return to most fully after tragedy struck his family.

• 3. War For The Crown

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  Isabel I of Castile found a supporter in Manrique when her half-brother, Enrique IV, tried to make his daughter, Juana, crown princess. That attempt triggered a civil war, and Manrique fought on Isabel's side throughout it. Isabel eventually won the crown, but the fighting did not end there. In 1479, after she had already become queen, Manrique took part in an attempt to capture the castle of Garcimuñoz. The Marquis of Villena, described as a staunch enemy of Isabel, held that castle against them. Manrique died in the assault. But the poem that made his name had already been written years before, an elegy that would outlast the war that killed him.

• 4. Songs And Satires

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  Two satires survive among Manrique's shorter poems, alongside love lyrics written in the courtly-love tradition. He called these pieces canciones, or songs, and esparsas, short poems usually just one stanza long. Other forms included preguntas y respuestas, questions and answers exchanged in verse, and glosas de mote, interpretations of refrains connected to the villancico form. Hernando del Castillo printed the first edition of his Cancionero general in 1511, and it holds the most complete surviving selection of Manrique's shorter poems. Other early editions and manuscripts preserve additional lyrics scattered outside that collection.

• 5. An Elegy For Ocaña

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  Rodrigo Manrique, Jorge's father, died on the 11th of November 1476 in the town of Ocaña. The Coplas por la muerte de su padre is Jorge Manrique's funeral eulogy for him, and it is considered his best composition. Jorge believed his father had led a life worth living, and he built the poem around three kinds of life. The first is terrestrial life, which ends in death. The second is the life of fame, a concept the poem links to the Greek idea of kleos, and lasts longer than the body does. The third is eternal life after death, which the poem holds has no end at all. From there, stanzas 1-24 turn outward to examine earthly life among the living, building toward some of the poem's most quoted lines.

• 6. Rivers And Vanished Kings

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  Stanza one opens with an image of the soul asleep, urging it to wake and see how quietly death approaches. Longfellow's English version renders it as an appeal to 'let the soul her slumbers break,' watching how life passes and 'death comes softly stealing on.' Manrique wrote these early stanzas from a general point of view about the pull of earthly attachments. He compares life to a road lined with dangers and opportunities, and to a river that eventually reaches the sea, meaning death. Stanzas 15-24 shift from that reflection into a set of rhetorical questions the tradition calls ubi sunt, meaning 'where are they.' Manrique uses them to summon a string of infamous deaths drawn from contemporary Spanish history. Stanza sixteen asks what became of 'the King, Don Juan' and the princes of Aragon. It mourns the vanished tournaments, jousts, and 'gorgeous panoply' of their courts. Longfellow's version calls that vanished pageantry nothing but 'the garlands, gay and green, that deck the tomb.' Stanzas 25-32 turn from these vanished kings to a single life Manrique believed still mattered: his father's own.

• 7. A Father Meets Death

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  Manrique argued that a life could outlast its body if the person who lived it left something worth remembering. He credited his father with exactly that kind of legacy. The poem then closes with a small dramatic scene: Don Rodrigo faces Death, personified, in a dialogue that makes up stanzas 33-39. Death, in Manrique's telling, is deferential: it does not seize Rodrigo's soul so much as escort it to Heaven. A final, fortieth stanza offers the family consolation, the last words the poem speaks before falling silent.

• 8. A Meter Of His Own

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  Each of the poem's forty stanzas contains twelve lines, mixing lines of eight syllables with shorter lines of four syllables. The rhyme scheme runs ABc ABc DEf DEf, and every third line is what Spanish calls a quebrado, a half line that breaks the pattern. That structure became so associated with Manrique that it now carries his name: the copla manriqueña. The poem was read and glossed so widely that it popularized the meter across Castilian verse. Manrique's language itself is plain. He avoids decoration and difficult metaphors, keeping the focus on what he says rather than how he says it. The alternation of long and short lines, paired with careful punctuation, let the verses shift between a somber tone and a lighter, quicker one.

  The Coplas has been translated into English at least twice. One of those translations came from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and it is his versions of stanzas I, III, and XVI that circulate widely in English. Critics have faulted that translation for straying from the original, calling it considerably more florid than Manrique's plain Castilian. The river stanza makes the gap clear. Manrique's Spanish literally translates as 'Our lives are rivers, that will lead to the sea, which is death.' Longfellow rendered the same lines as 'Our lives are rivers, gliding free, to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave.' Longfellow's version is only one of at least two English translations of the Coplas. Each one still has to decide how much of Manrique's plain six words to dress up for English ears.