ABSTRACT
Building from Ovidian and Petrarchan models of the love lyric that center vision as the privileged vehicle for love, or a frustrating impediment to it, erotic and pornographic poems of the Spanish early modern period frequently dramatize ocularcentric poet-lovers’ attempts to control visual stimuli—a scopophilic struggle frequently aligned with efforts to control the beloved’s “body.” Garcilaso’s “Con ansia estrema de mirar,” and the anonymous “Mudo despertador del apetito” offer dramatic descriptions of the barriers and thresholds distinguishing the malleable forms the lovers desire from the impervious materials they cannot govern. Both sonnets recall classical stories of agalmatophilia, wherein the enargeic experience proves particularly tantalizing: the coveted body captures the eyes of poet and reader, yet access to this body is purposely circumscribed and denied.
