Cantiga, upon departing
Maria S. Mendes
The theme is again love and the pain of separation, but the magnitude of the hurt is conveyed by the linguistic resources of the poem, to which we have called “impressionist” because of the importance attached to physical referents, mainly tears and eyes, who fall “sick”, and to repetition which allows for the parallel created at the beginning and at the end of the poem. Without this craftsman’s work on language, the poem would be nothing more than a banal complaint about the pains of love.
Read More