ABSTRACT
In a letter to fellow poet Ciria y Escalante, in August 1923, Federico Garcia Lorca recounted a dream of a visit by ‘the old shepherdess Amarilis’, who emerges, ‘old and trembling, crowned by rag flowers. I treated her very well; I gave her a cup of coffee with milk and I promised to resurrect her in a poem in which she would go singing, covered by cicadas and fireflies through a field of narcissus and crystals. If she visits you and (Gerardo) Diego, do right by her; you should know that she is very old and can die on us at any moment’. In Lorca’s fanciful analogy, the young poets are custodians of a precarious legacy, embodied in the neglected shepherdess. In Lope de Vega’s late eclogues, he poignantly documents the eroded beauty of his own Amarilis, a poetic tribute to Marta de Nevares. The shifting fortunes of pastoral literature can be traced through a focus on luminaries such as Lope. In this chapter, the figure of Amarilis allows us to trace the mode’s possibilities for the realization of artistic ambition in the poetry of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain.
