ABSTRACT
The images of the phoenix, Icarus, and Phaethon in Gongora’s Soledades are telling examples of the poet’s imaginatively polyvalent weaving of mythological figures, poetic images, and thematic threads. In the Soledades, the phoenix is reincarnated in the humble, fertile marriage of the peasant newlyweds and in the arrogant, aborted relationship of the wanderer and his beloved. The image of the phoenix appears in one of the poem’s few insights into the shipwrecked wanderer’s mind. The offspring of this fruitless relationship is a monster, the worm or maggot engendered by the conflagration within the nest of his heart. This monstrous phoenix imagery presented by Gongora contradicts the use of the phoenix by French baroque authors as a figure for the creative poet. The most direct reference to the myth of Icarus occurs in the lament of the peregrino to the sea at the beginning of the second Soledad.
