ABSTRACT
Songs II, III, and IV reiterate the elements of Song I: hope and despair, acceptance and indifference, salvation and death; but the depiction of the lady's plight darkens with each successive text. Song I suggests the first recognition by the lady of the beloved's indifference, shortly after she has declared her own passion to him. In Song II ("Ja de chantar non degr'aver talan"), the poetic voice admits to knowing that the knight loves another and recounts an episode in which she purloined a glove belonging to the knight only to return it for fear of causing him harm through the suspicions of his mistress. In Song III ("Mout avetz faich long estatge,"), speaking as though her liaison is at an end and with it all hope of reciprocation and joy in love (III: 8-12), she alludes repeatedly and graphically to her own death (III: 6, 15-16, 39-40). However, she concludes with the promise of forgiveness and welcome should her beloved chose to return after hearing her song. In Song IV ("Per joi que d'amor m'avenga,"), which begins "henceforth" (IV: 2), the note of resignation has deepened, for the lady laments that another reigns in her place (IV: 9-10). Conspicuously lacking in the songs of Castelloza is the presence in the abstraction joi, so frequently invoked by the poetic voice, of a transcendental power that would permit the elevation of that joy to the status of an ideal. The object, the knight, fails utterly to embody a system of values having the power automatically to ennoble the striving of the subject towards an absolute. The pretense of the poetic voice to find whole-
ness, identity, and fulfillment-joi, in a word-in her posture of noble fidelity rings hollow; for in this poetic universe joi exists only as its obverse, a shadowy reflection of itself.
