Rosalía de Castro's "En las orillas del Sar": Intimacy and Metric Innovation

Features of "Sar By the Shores"

The main feature of this collection by Rosalía de Castro is its strictly intimate nature. In it, the author's gaze turns almost exclusively inward toward her own mind; the outside world almost disappears or is reduced merely to serve as a term of reference or comparison to the self. Thus, nature, the environment, and the world in general will serve to confirm her irremediable loneliness, decadence, populated only by memories, nostalgia, and pain—all that is characteristically romantic melancholy. This subjectivism and melancholy are completed by a gloomy vision of the world, seen from the perspective of a troubled and hopeless spirit. In vain, she attempts to reestablish contact with her youth by writing, retreating into herself so as not to increase her bitterness.

Metric Combinations in "Sar On the Shores"

Despite a general lack of interest in rhyme (usually assonance), Rosalía had the willingness to innovate metrically and rhythmically, to the extent that some of her original combinations were developed extensively in later Symbolist and Modernist poetry. Be taken into account:

Innovative Meters and Strophic Combinations

• The student will remember some of the most innovative meters and strophic combinations: the verse of eighteen syllables (octodecasílabo), the verse of sixteen syllables (hexadecasílabo).
• She also uses the Alexandrine verse (fourteen syllables), as well as combinations of verses of eight and ten syllables, twelve and ten, or eleven and eight.

Structural Flexibility

She was not interested in structurally fixed or conventional verses; usually, she reworked classic verses or created new ones. Often, in traditional forms, she broke the foot or combined lesser art songs. She also used Ametria, or a combination of different verses, advertised as free verse, without measure, without accents, and with assonant rhyme.

Precedent for Free Verse

It should also be assessed that, in this regard (among others), Rosalía's poetry has been considered a precedent for free verse of the 20th and 21st centuries.