The Pervasive Image

It is tempting to speculate that had Ausiàs March (1397–1459) written in Spanish instead Catalan, or rather the Valencian form of it which was his native tongue, he would by now undoubtedly be more widely recognised as the finest lyric poet in the Iberian Peninsula before the sixteenth century, and as one of the greatest in fifteenth century Europe as a whole. This study concerns one aspect of March's poetry: his use of analogy. March's poetry provides a large and varied working context in which to approach the simile as a poetic instrument in its own right, and it is almost as much to this broad aim as to the more specific matter of the use and function of the similes and allied forms of analogy in March's work that this study is addressed. Partly with the non-specialist reader in mind—someone with an interest in simile but not necessarily a direct concern with March—the quotations in Provençal and Catalan have been translated.