[Footnote 1: This poem is composed of hendecasyllabic verses, mostly of the first class, and of heptasyllabic verses. Notice the esdrÚjulo ending the 1st verse. The even verses have the same assonance throughout.]

[Footnote 2: "Read in the light of what we know of his long struggle, his frail physical health, his sensitive temper, his crushing double defeat at the hands of death, these somber verses have an individual, personal note, hardly present, perhaps, in the love-poems, with all their passionate beauty." Mrs. Ward, A Spanish Romanticist, Macmillan Magazine, February, 1883, p, 319.]

[Footnote 3: "He used to dream, he tells us, in his boyish visions, of a marble tomb by the Guadalquivir, of which his fellow-townsmen should probably say as they pointed it out to strangers, 'Here sleeps the poet!' In his later days, oppressed with drudgery and ill-health, as he looked towards the future he bitterly saw himself forgotten, and oblivion settling down on all his half-finished activities of heart and brain." (Mrs. Ward, ib, p. 320.) It was in such a mood that he wrote this the most painful of all his poems.]