La Araucana

Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga

La Araucana consists of 37 cantos that are distributed across the poem's three parts. The first part was published in 1569; the second part appeared in 1578, and it was published along with the first part; the third part was published with the first and second parts in 1589. The poem shows Ercilla to be a master of the octava real (that is Italian ottava rima), the complicated stanza in which many other Renaissance epics in Castilian were written. A difficult eight-line unit of 11-syllable verses that are linked by a tight rhyme scheme abababcc, the octava real was a challenge few poets met. It had been adapted from Italian only in the 16th century, and it produces resonant, serious-sounding verse that is appropriate to epic themes. The work describes the initial phase of the Arauco War which evolved from the Spanish conquest attempt of southern Chile. The war would come to shape the...