Myth and the Construction of Meaning in the Soledades and the Polifemo

Abstract

This essay examines the role of mythological allusions in the Soledades and the Polifemo, and in particular those with which both poems open. While many critics have identified the sources of the myths Góngora uses, less attention has been given to their importance as markers of meaning. I aim to show how these allusions exercise a broader function than is commonly understood, especially in preparing the way for what is to come; how insufficient attention has been paid to the biblical reference to Jonah; and how the apparently discrete allusions belong to larger patterns of mythological discourse the presence of which can be detected at later points in the poems. I shall look at the ways in which they establish the themes of shipwreck and deliverance in the Soledades and consistently associate both Galatea and Acis with death in the Polifemo. I conclude that in each case the poems offer a more complex vision of love than some have thought.

Notes

¹Keats' ‘Endymion’ is peopled with many of the figures encountered in the Soledades and the Polifemo, demonstrating the continuing appeal of classical mythology for the radically different poetic aesthetic of Romanticism.

²‘En general, el interés por la estructura de los dos poemas mayores de Góngora fue siempre bastante inferior al despertado por su intepretación literal’ (Giuseppe Mazzocchi, ‘La estructura narrativa del Polifemo’, in Góngora Hoy VII: el ‘Polifemo’, ed. Joaquín Roses [Córdoba: Diputación de Córdoba, 2005], 125–38 [p. 125]). This is largely the approach taken by Góngora's early commentators Pellicer de Salas and Salcedo Coronel; see José Pellicer de Salas y Tovar, Lecciones solemnes a las obras de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote (Madrid: Imprenta del Reino, 1630) and El ‘Polifemo’ de Don Luis de Góngora comentado por don García de Salcedo Coronel (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1636). It is followed by Dámaso Alonso, in his Góngora y el ‘Polifemo’, 2 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1961); Jammes, in Luis de Góngora, Soledades, ed. Robert Jammes (Madrid: Castalia, 1994); and José María Micó, El ‘Polifemo’ de Luis de Góngora: ensayo de crítica e historia literaria (Barcelona: Península, 2001). The edition I follow here is Luis de Góngora, Soledades, ed. Robert Jammes (Madrid: Castalia, 1994).

³‘The process of mythical formation uses metaphor in a defined, localized context to form parallelisms between the individual image (the term of the metaphor) and the myth of which the metaphor is itself but a part or term’ (Thomas E. Peterson, ‘The Generation of Mythic Language in the Polifemo’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 17 [1993], 191–211 [p. 201]).

⁵‘Les Solitudes comme système de figures. Le cas de la synecdoche’, in Crepúsculos pisando. Once estudios sobre las ‘Soledades’ de Góngora, ed. Jacques Issorel (Perpignan: CRILAUP, Univ. de Perpignan, 1995), 23–78 (p. 36). Robert Jammes, by contrast, maintains that mythology occupies a less prominent place in the Soledades than in other contemporary poems (Góngora, Soledades, ed. Jammes, 137).

⁴Mary Gaylord Randel, ‘Metaphor and Fable in Góngora's Soledad primera’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 40 (1978–79), 97–112 (p. 106). R. O. Jones argued for the unity of the Soledades at a more moral and philosophical level; see ‘The Poetic Unity of the Soledades of Góngora’, BHS, XXXI:4 (1954), 189–204. John Beverley, on the other hand, locates it in the socio-political context of Góngora's age; see Luis de Góngora, Soledades, ed. John Beverley (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991), especially pp. 18–27.

⁶Marsha S. Collins, The ‘Soledades’, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination (Columbia/London: Univ. of Missouri, 2002), 161.

⁷José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ‘La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea de Góngora como poema narrativo’, in Philologica (Homenaje al profesor Ricardo Senabre) (Cáceres: Univ. de Extremadura, 1996), 435–60 (p. 449).

⁸Isabel Torres, The Polyphemus Complex. Rereading the Baroque Mythological Fable, Special Monograph Issue, BHS, LXXXIII:2 (2006), 1, 2.

⁹See especially his introduction to Luis de Góngora. ‘Polyphemus and Galatea’. A Study in the Interpretation of a Baroque Poem, verse translation by Gilbert F. Cunningham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1977), 7–106 (pp. 20, 52, 57).

¹⁰Góngora, Soledades, ed. Jammes, 137. Góngora's principal sources for classical myth are Ovid's Metamorphoses, Boccaccio's De genealogia deorum (1^st ed. Venice, 1477) and Natale Conti's Mythologiae (1^st ed. Venice, 1567). But he is also likely to have known and used as a primary source Juan Pérez de Moya's Philosophía secreta of 1585 (ed. Carlos Clavería [Madrid: Cátedra, 1995]), which is dependent on these earlier works.

¹¹On liminality, see John Beverley, Aspects of Góngora's ‘Soledades’ (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980), 26–27. As Beverley notes, Agenor, the father of Europa, bids her brother Cadmus go off in search of her (Metamorphoses, iii.3–137) and he roams the world, becoming an exile, like Góngora's ‘peregrino’, though with very different consequences (28). Cadmus’ ploughing of the land to sow dragons’ teeth at the command of Pallas Athene (iii.104–05), fused with an allusion to the ‘gusano’ from which the new phoenix emerges, may help to unravel the difficult lines in Soledad1.740–42.

¹²On hypallage in the Polifemo, see Luis de Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Jesús Ponce Cárdenas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2010), 120–27; also his Cinco ensayos polifémicos (Málaga: Univ. de Málaga, 2009), especially pp. 403–24.

¹³In line 7 ‘podia’ must be pronounced as two syllables to fit the hendecasyllable (see Góngora, Soledades, ed. Jammes, 198). The abduction of Ganymede is only briefly mentioned by Ovid (Metamorphoses x.155–61, xi.756); Pérez de Moya devotes greater attention to it (Philosophía secreta, ed. Clavería, 480–81). Góngora's emphasis on male beauty is unusual in the period; its possible implications for both poems studied here have been explored by Paul Julian Smith, The Body Hispanic. Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 31–68, and for the first Soledad by Frederick de Armas, ‘Embracing Hercules/Enjoying Ganymede: The Homoerotics of Humanism in Góngora's Soledad Primera’, Calíope, 8 (2002), 125–40.

¹⁴As Edgar Wind pointed out long ago, one of the problems of interpreting classical mythology in the early modern period is the multiplicity of meanings, some of them contradictory, which attaches to many of the gods; see Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1980 [1^st ed. 1958], where he refers to ‘particular deities who, like Venus, are inherently composite and contrarious’ and who ‘contain multiplicity within their own natures’ (138). In Soledad 1.840–43 further reference is made to ‘los hurtos de amor’ and ‘las cautelas de Júpiter’, and specifically to the rape of Danaë and Leda.

¹⁵Beverley, following Chacón, punctuates differently: ‘náufrago, y desdeñado sobre ausente’; see Góngora, Soledades, ed. Beverley, 9–11, 75.

¹⁶See St Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), I.xiv, 23–24.

¹⁷Jammes is harsh in his judgment of Góngora as a religious poet; see Études sur l'oeuvre poétique de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote (Bordeaux: Féret et Fils, 1967), 227–46. For a line-by-line study of the sources of the Polifemo, see Antonio Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas del ‘Polifemo’ de Góngora, 2 vols (Madrid: CSIC, 1957); for a recent, broader survey of classical, neo-Latin and Italian influences, see Ponce Cárdenas, Cinco ensayos polifémicos.

¹⁸Pellicer de Salas y Tovar, Lecciones solemnes, 367; Juan de Jáuregui, Antídoto contra la pestilente poesía de las ‘Soledades’, ed. José Manuel Rico García (Sevilla: Univ. de Sevilla, 2002), 25, 53; El ‘Polifemo’ de Don Luis de Góngora comentado por don García de Salcedo Coronel, 20^v.

¹⁹Jonah is fleeing to Tarshish (generally believed to be biblical Spain) to escape from the Lord's call for him to preach the need for repentance to the people of Nineveh.

²⁰I am grateful to Daniel Waissbein for drawing my attention to another reference to Jonah, in Góngora's décima ‘De la muerte de Bonamí, enano flamenco’, which ends with a joke at the expense of the deceased: ‘que al enano/le sobra más del gusano/que a Jonás la ballena’ (see Luis de Góngora y Argote, Obras completas, ed. Juan and Isabel Millé [Madrid: Aguilar, 1961], poem 161 [p. 360]).

²¹Jones, ‘The Poetic Unity of the Soledades’, 191. The English translation follows the King James Version.

²²‘Piélago’ is defined by Covarrubias as ‘lo profundo del mar’, that is, ‘the depths’.

²³Pellicer de Salas cites the Bibliotheca of the ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius (c.810–c.895) as the sole ‘testigo’ for such an image and claims that he is the first to do so (Lecciones solemnes, 376). Photius reads: ‘Cum aurea illa lux ad Occasum tendit, propter inaequales umbras in marinis locis montes videntur undis similes, undae videntur quasi montes’. The verbal (and thematic) link with Jonah 2 seems to me closer, and it is less likely that Góngora was familiar with the Photius text, though two editions of the Latin translation by Andreas Schottus were available at the time (Augsburg: C. Mangus, 1606; Geneva: Oliva Pauli Stephani, 1611).

²⁴Jáuregui's comments on ‘montes de agua y piélagos de montes’ are limited to questions of metre and ambiguity of meaning (Antídoto, 32, 71–72).

²⁵Ganymede is usually associated with air, rather than water, though Pérez de Moya interprets his role as cup-bearer in connection with the sign of Aquarius (see Philosophía secreta, ed. Clavería, 481).

²⁶See, for example, Góngora, Soledades, ed. Jammes, 15–17 and Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Ponce Cárdenas, 136–41.

²⁷According to Covarrubias, the word derives from the Latin arripio, which has a variety of meanings, including ‘to seize with the teeth or claws’ (as with the eagle which snatched away Ganymede), ‘to take possession of, seize, grab’, ‘to attack suddenly, fall upon, assail’. It is derived from rapio (ad+rapio), ‘to seize and carry off, snatch away’ (the past participles are arreptum and raptus respectively); see Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, 2^nd ed., 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2012), I, 190–91; II, 1733–34. Its etymology may, however, be more complex: ‘arrebatar’ is also said to come from the Arabic verb râbat, meaning ‘dedicarse con celo a un asunto’ or ‘amenazar las fronteras enemigas’ (see Joan Corominas and José A. Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellana e hispánico, 6 vols [Madrid: Gredos, 1980–91], IV, 809–10).

²⁸Góngora is, of course, also familiar with shipwreck as a Horatian metaphor for a disordered life (Odes i.14; ii.10) and with the theme of exile for the sake of love (Garcilaso, ‘Canción tercera’).

²⁹Jones sees the phoenix as ‘a nodal image that unites all the themes introduced throughout the first Soledad’ (‘The Poetic Unity of the Soledades’, 200).

³⁰Walter Pabst, La creación gongorina en los poemas ‘Polifemo’ y ‘Soledades’, trad. Nicolás Marín (Madrid: Revista de Filología Española, 1966) counts the number of mythological references but offers no analysis of them (46–49).

³¹On the location of Vulcan's forge in the vaults of Etna and the Cyclopes who work there, see Aeneid viii.416–53. Lilybaeum is at the opposite, western end of the island; for Góngora's likely source in Giambattista Marino for locating the cave of Polifemo here, see Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 313. Virgil's account of Aeneas, Polyphemus and the Cyclopes (Aeneid iii.613–81) has the hero skirt Lilybaeum in his flight from the monsters (iii.706); Góngora may also have had this association in mind. In Ovid, the reference to the peninsula precedes the introduction of Galatea's story and belongs to the story of Scylla (Metamorphoses xiii.726). In Pérez de Moya many of the myths present in the Polifemo are treated consecutively: Typhon (143–51) is followed by Juno (151–62), Neptune (162–72), Tethys (172–73), Nereus (174–76), Triton (176–78), and more general ‘peligros del mar’ (178–83).

³²Pérez de Moya's account of Vulcan is in Philosophía secreta, ed. Clavería, ii.15 (220–31). Vulcan is the son of Jupiter and Juno (221), which gives added point to the later identification of Galatea with the goddess; some commentators have him brought up by Tethys and the sea-nymphs (225–26), so that he would have known Galatea from childhood.

³⁷Cited in Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Ponce Cárdenas, 34.

³³See Ovid, Metamorphoses v.318–31, 346–58; also iii.303. Other references are found in Virgil, Georgics i.279–80; Aeneid viii.298; ix.716. Pérez de Moya has much to say about ‘Thiphoeo’ (see Philosophía secreta, ed. Clavería, 2.6–7 [143–51]).

³⁴The fullest treatment of Orpheus and Eurydice is in Virgil, Georgics iv.387–558; for the tale of Hippomenes and Atalanta, which is inset into the story of Venus and Adonis, and who are changed into lions for their ingratitude, see Ovid, Metamorphoses x.560–707.

³⁵Mazzocchi examines in some detail ‘una ley drámaticamente omnipresente en todo el Polifemo, o sea la repetición’ (‘La estructura narrativa del Polifemo’, 130).

³⁶Further connections between the mythical characters in the poem are found in the Elder Philostratus; see Imagines, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, trans. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library 256 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 1931), where Glaucus is linked with the myths of Orpheus and Alcion (ii.15; 187–91), and Palaemon with Poseidon, the Nereids and dolphins (i.19, ii.16; 81, 191–95). In Ovid, Glaucus is mentioned in Metamorphoses vii.233; Scylla flees from him, following Galatea's story of the death of Acis, in xiii.904–xiv.69. Palaemon is found in iv.539–42 and xiii.919 (referred to by Glaucus).

³⁸Torres, The Polyphemus Complex, 42, 47–48, 49. Given the allusion to the golden apples, one cannot help but think of Galatea's tantalizing ‘pomos de nieve’ (l. 328) at this point, with its additional but ironic allusion to the myth of Tantalus, since Acis will, at least briefly, taste their beauty. The image is more complex than it appears because it relates to both allusions.

³⁹I do not agree with Jammes that the poem represents the triumph of love or that Góngora ‘suprime toda indicación de premeditación del acto, que se convierte entonces en una ola impulsiva de celos que hace humano al gigante’ (cited in Rubén Soto Rivera, ‘Acerca de Polifemo y Galatea, o la Natura: un acercamiento parmenídeo a la Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, de Ovidio y Góngora [II]’, in Góngora Hoy VII, ed. Roses, 187–209 [p. 187]); see Jammes, Études, 546–47.

⁴⁰The term is Parker's (Luis de Góngora. ‘Polyphemus and Galatea’, 64). For an analysis of this passage, see also 24–25, 64–66.

⁴¹Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, rev. ed., ed. G. P. Goold, trans. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 63 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 1999), 262–63.

⁴²Here Góngora is inspired by Virgil, not Ovid: ‘non lupus insidias explorat ovilia circum / nec gregibus nocturnus obambulat’ (Georgics iii.537–38); the bleating of the lambs which whets the wolf's hunger (‘auditisque lupos acuunt balatibus agni’ [iv.435]) and ‘balatu pecorum’ (iii.554) (my emphases). Vilanova provides various classical sources for the nocturnal wolf (Las fuentes y los temas, II, 19–20), but appears to miss the bleating.

⁴³Colin Smith, ‘An Approach to Góngora's Polifemo’, BHS, XLII:4 (1965), 217–38, arguing against the neo-Platonic interpretations of R. O. Jones, takes the view that the portrayal of nature in the poem is Lucretian and Darwinian. This may be so, but here its violence is due to the fact that art (in the form of a pastoral economy) has failed to control it.

⁴⁴Covarrubias defines the ‘segur’ as ‘un género de destral que corta por ambas partes. O por la una sola’, and the ‘destral’ as an axe for felling trees or splitting timber. The two occurrences of the noun are noted by Peterson: ‘such lexical doublings provide a mnemonic scansion to the poem’ (‘The Generation of Mythic Language in the Polifemo’, 210). The reading ‘segur’ in line 220 is, however, contested; for a range of opinions, see Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Ponce Cárdenas, 267–69. Galatea, who has previously been described in terms of roses and lilies (ll. 105–06), now desires to shrink away, to become ‘breve flor, hierba humilde, tierra poca’ (l. 350). Once again, the rhythm underscores the sense, as Góngora moves from the normal single caesura to the smaller units of a line with two.

⁴⁵The image suggests another Ovidian myth, that of Pygmalion, who, disgusted by the immorality of the women around him, carves a female figure out of ‘niveum […] ebur’ (Metamorphoses x.247–48), which comes to life to become his wife. Galatea too will be transformed from cold and heartless to a passionate woman, but there will be no chaste courtship, let alone marriage blessed by the gods.

⁴⁶As Waissbein has observed, Góngora, surprisingly, never refers to Polifemo as a ‘monstro’, while Galatea will be associated not with brute force but with cowardice when her flight with Acis is likened to that of mating hares being disturbed; see Daniel Waissbein, ‘El “vario sexo” de Polifemo’, forthcoming in El universo de Góngora: orígenes, textos y representaciones, ed. Joaquín Roses (Córdoba: Diputación de Córdoba, 2012).

⁴⁷II, 220–27; see, for example, Aeneid xi.721–24 (falcon and dove), xi.751–56 (eagle and serpent), xii.247–50 (eagle and swan); Ariosto, Orlando furioso ii.39 (kite and chick, but successfully, unlike Sol. 2.959–65), ii.50 (falcon and sheldrake or dove), x.103 (eagle and serpent), xxiv.96 (hawk and duck, quail, dove or partridge), xxv.12 (falcon and birds in general), xxvii.89 (eagle and hen); Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana, xx.13 (a ‘cobarde milano’ robbing a falcon of an egret). For a study of the epic similes in the Polifemo, see Ponce Cárdenas, Cinco ensayos polifémicos, 241–369.

⁴⁸See Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, II, 224; a reputation due, no doubt, to the fact that it is principally a scavenger and carrion-eater and may rob other birds of their prey. As Salcedo Coronel observes: ‘Milano es ave de rapiña […] es cobarde, aunque a vezes se defiende con uñas y pico de las aves de altanería, que son sus contrarios’ (El ‘Polifemo’ de Don Luis de Góngora comentado por don García de Salcedo Coronel, 372^r). It could be argued that the stratagem of Acis in pretending to be asleep is similarly cowardly. Pliny (Naturalis Historiae, x.12; 311) is not the source of this information, though he does report that kites suffer from gout from midsummer onward. In Soledad 2.959–65 a pair of kites fail to grab chicks protected by the mother-hens, in sharp contrast to the hunting prowess of the other birds of prey mentioned. I am grateful to Dr Dominic Moran of Christ Church, Oxford, for pointing out that ‘amilanarse’ is still used in modern Spanish (especially in Latin America) for ‘acobardarse’.

⁴⁹The two principal sources of the myth are Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica iv.57 and Pausanias, Description of Greece, v.1. Enrica Cancelliere, ‘La imaginación científica y el Polifemo de Góngora’, in Góngora Hoy VII, ed. Roses, 19–51, refers to the pose of Galatea as one which ‘se abre a visiones fantásticas’ (27), but I believe it is more intentionally sinister than that. It is, however, reminiscent of that of Angélica in Góngora's ballad ‘En un pastoral albergue’, where the outcome is altogether happier; for a comparison (though without reference to the myth), see Melinda Eve Lehrer, Classical Myth and the ‘Polifemo’ of Góngora (Potomac: Scripta Humanistica, 1989), 5–9.

⁵⁰Peterson notes the link; see ‘The Generation of Mythic Language in the Polifemo’, 202–03.

⁵¹The noun ‘paladïón’ almost certainly here refers to the Trojan Horse, though the original meaning of ‘palladium’ was, as Howard Mancing notes, ‘a small wooden image of an armed Athena that was the guardian statue of the city of Troy’, stolen by Odysseus and Diomedes but recovered by Aeneas (Aeneid ii.163–68, 183–84; ix.150–53). Mancing adds that this was ‘a common confusion during this time’, as in Don Quijote ii.41, when the knight prepares to mount the wooden horse Clavileño (The Cervantes Encyclopedia, 2 vols [Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004], II, 540). Pérez de Moya gives a full account: ‘El paladio de Minerva fingen los poetas haber caído del cielo en Pesinunte, ciudad de Frigia, de donde tomó nombre, porque Paladios se llaman todas las imágines que creían no ser hechas de manos humanas y todas las que hubiesen sido echadas del cielo a la tierra. Apolodoro dice que cuando Ilo edificó el Ilión, siguiendo a un buey de dos colores, rogó a los dioses que le apareciese una señal, y entonces cayó el paladio de tres codos, que parecía andar de suyo, y tenía en la mano derecha una lanza y en la izquierda la rueca y el huso. A este Ilo respondió después el oráculo que tanto estaría en pie la ciudad de Troya cuanto se guardase en ella inviolado aquel paladio, y así le tenían a la entrada de una puerta, en grande veneración y guarda’ (Philosophía secreta, ed. Clavería, 411–12). The sense here is that ‘Amor’ destroys the defences of lovers by insinuating his equivalents to the soldiers concealed in the wooden horse into their emotions: ‘Por esto, pues, dize nuestro Poeta que el ciego Amor en sus Paladiones sin romper muros, esto es, sin ruyna exterior, introduce a las almas invisible fuego que las destruye’ (El ‘Polifemo’ de Don Luis de Góngora comentado por don García de Salcedo Coronel, 377^r). Góngora also uses the image of the Trojan horse in Soledad 1.374–78, during the attack by the ‘político serrano’ on the voyages of discovery and trade which have brought him such tragedy. We should remember, though, that Góngora is perfectly capable of using words in their original Latinate sense; for examples, see Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Ponce Cárdenas, 106–11. If his ‘paladïones’ were images inspired or created by the god of Love, they form a continuation of the metaphors drawn from artistic terminology in lines 251–52, where Cupid causes Galatea to sketch out the features of the as yet unknown Acis in her imagination.

⁵²Parker, Luis de Góngora. ‘Polyphemus and Galatea’, 72.

⁵³‘The fact that the Cyclops compares Galatea to beautiful things which are dying—the broken-off carnations, the singing swan, though she is not—foreshadows her tragic loss of Acis’ (Lehrer, Classical Myth, 72). Many critics prefer the reading ‘troncar’ and interpret the line as ‘carnations plucked at dawn’; see Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Ponce Cárdenas, 317–20. Covarrubias does not give such a meaning (s.v. ‘tronco’); he derives ‘troncho’ from the French ‘trancher’, ‘cortar’. But brittle stalks broken by a heavy dew seem to me to fit the ironical way in which Góngora treats his characters: it is Acis, not Galatea, who will be cut down, and at sunset, not dawn. In any case, whether broken or picked, the flower is severed.

⁵⁴See Pozuelo Yvancos, ‘La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea de Góngora’, 451.

⁵⁵‘The play on morir and morar […] also looks forward to Acis’ fate, for he dies and dwells in the water as a river god’ (Lehrer, Classical Myth, 62). Acis first appears in the poem at the hottest point of the day, when, in Góngora's fiery image, the dog-star is ‘barking’ in the heavens: ‘Salamandria del Sol, vestido estrellas, / latiendo el Can del cielo estaba’ (ll. 185–86). Though the image of the salamander relates to the midday heat, there is further irony in associating it with the arrival of Acis, since it was the only animal reputed to survive in fire, whereas Acis will die and become water. The image of the dog-star blazing in the heavens is inspired by Virgil: ‘iam rapidus torrens sitientis Sirius Indos/ardebat coelo, et medium sol igneus orbem/hauserat’ (Georgics iv.425–27). Polifemo's likening of the tears he sheds at Galatea's hardness to ‘ríos’ (ll. 389–91), the very element into which Acis will be changed, only adds to the irony.

⁵⁶Smith, ‘An Approach to Góngora's Polifemo’, 225.