MANRIQUE, JORGE. — Spanish poet, b. at Paredes de Nava ca. 1440, d. of wounds received in the assault on the castle of Garci-Muñoz in 1479. Lord of Belmontejo and a man of arms, he served valiantly under the banner of Isabella the Catholic.
Of his brief *Cancionero* (modern ed. by A. Cortina, in *Clásicos castellanos*, XCIV, Madrid 1929), the elegy in 40 stanzas entitled *Coplas a la muerte del maestro de Santiago don Rodrigo Manrique, su padre* is famous. In it, projecting the transience of earthly goods onto the unchangeableness of the eternal, M. teaches the conquest of the latter through the scorn of the former, which are subject to the dominion of death, inexorable not only against kings but also against the brave and the pious, such as Rodrigo was. His acceptance of death, in the son’s moving evocation, assumes a universal and exemplary value of man’s conformity to the divine will. The *coplas*, deemed by Lope de Vega worthy of being written in letters of gold, often translated abroad (among others, by Longfellow in 1833), imitated and commented upon, derive their concepts and manner especially from the Bible, Boethius, and Prosper of Aquitaine (only apparent is the derivation from Villon’s *Ballade des dames du temps jadis*); yet, as an original and moving expression of a thinking heart, they are the song of human sorrow, an incentive to trustful resignation and, in the realm of art, “a perfect and sublime work in universal lyric poetry” (A. Valbuena Prat).