MANRIQUE, JORGE. - Spanish poet, b. at Paredes de Nava about 1440, d. of wounds sustained in the assault on the castle of Garci-Muñoz in 1479. Lord of Belmontojo and a man-at-arms, he fought valiantly under the banner of Isabella the Catholic.
Of his brief Cancionero (modern ed. by A. Cortina, in Clásicos castellanos, XCIV, Madrid 1929), the famous work is the elegy in 40 stanzas entitled Stanzas on the Death of the Master of Santiago, Don Rodrigo Manrique, His Father. In it, setting the transience of earthly goods against the immutability of the eternal, M. teaches that the latter is attained through contempt for the former, which are subject to the dominion of death, inexorable not only toward kings but also toward the valiant and the pious, such as Rodrigo. His acceptance of death assumes, in the son’s moving evocation, a universal and exemplary significance of man’s conformity to the divine will. The stanzas, 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 chiefly from the Bible, Boethius, and Prosper of Aquitaine (the derivation from Villon’s elegy of the dames du temps jadis is only apparent); yet, as the original and moving expression of a suffering heart, they are the song of human sorrow, an incentive to trusting resignation and, in artistic terms, an “excellent and perfect work in universal lyric poetry” (A. Valbuena Prat).