CANCIÓN DEL PIRATA

EL CANTO DEL COSACO

EL MENDIGO

SONETO

A TERESA

NOTES

VOCABULARY

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

THE LIFE OF ESPRONCEDA

Don José de Espronceda y Lara, Spain's foremost lyric poet of the nineteenth century, was born on the 25th of March, 1808, the year of his country's heroic revolt against the tyranny of Napoleon. His parents were Lieutenant-Colonel Don Juan de Espronceda y Pimentel and Doña María del Carmen Delgado y Lara. Both were Andalusians of noble stock, and, as we learn from official documents, were held to be Christians of clean blood "without taint of Jews, heretics, Moors, or persons punished by the Holy Inquisition, and who neither were nor had been engaged in mean or low occupations, but in highly honorable ones." This couple of such highly satisfactory antecedents had been married four years previously. In 1804 Don Juan, a mature widower of fifty-three, was still mourning his first wife when he obtained the hand of Doña María, a young widow whose first husband, a lieutenant in the same regiment, was recently deceased. The marriage was satisfactory in a worldly way, for Doña María brought as a dower four hundred thousand reales to be added to the two hundred thousand which Don Juan already possessed. By his first marriage Don Juan had had a son, Don José de Espronceda y Ramos, who became ensign in his father's regiment, then studied in the Artillery School at 

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