Décimas are poetic compositions written in a stanza of 10 lines, usually octosyllabic. Décimas can be found in works such as, for example, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, or El Vértigo (Vertigo) by Gaspar Núñez de Arce .
Also known as “espinelas,” these compositions rhyme ABBAACCDDC. This means that the first line rhymes with the fourth and fifth; the second with the third, eighth, and ninth; and the sixth with the seventh and tenth.
- See also: Poetry
Examples of tenth
- Thought
I think that if I have deserved
the good fortune God has given me,
it will be because I loved
what God most loved.
That God, always dressed
in a hundred women’s names,
who lives in me, unwillingly,
because one day I was the seed
of the simplest form
of God, ready to be born.
(Ramón García González)
- Poet
There will always be a thirsty man
by the side of a fountain
, and a river of running water
born from a thought.
And there will be a breeze and a wind
that turns the weather vane,
and a dreamer with a restless soul,
and a soul that is asleep.
That is how life passes,
that is what the poet sings about.
(Ramón García González)
- Ashes and bread
I know I can be the ashes
of a land that ignores me
and that silence devours
beneath the limestone.
But
death also heals the body,
and a heart of crystal
can one day be the source,
whose bosom nourishes
the seeds of a wheat field.
(Ramón García González)
- Women
To say, “Woman,” is to say:
Fountain of Beauty.
Natural Nature
that can never die.
To say, “Woman,” is to open
one’s lips to the first love
and feel imprisoned
in a word of passion,
where the heart learns
for the first time: “I love you!”
(Ramón García González)
- Excerpt from “Life is a Dream”
They tell of a wise man who one day
was so poor and miserable
that he only lived
on some herbs he picked.
“Is there anyone,” he said to himself,
“poorer and sadder than I?”
And when he turned around,
he found the answer, seeing
another wise man picking
the leaves he had thrown away.
(Pedro Calderón de la Barca)
- Excerpt from “Lunatic Gathering”
In a vague golden tomb,
a cataleptic fakir
gave himself over to sleep
the anointing of a vague Nirvana…
A fateful
torment of thought takes shape,
and like remorse
, the dull murmur
of some pulverizer
of music of torment swarms.
(Julio Herrera y Reissig)
- Excerpt from “The Seven Joys of Love”
Before the doors of the temple where love
receives sacrifice, in whose service I contemplate nights and days, I demand your charity obeyed, sir, this blind lover whom I will tell you, singing, if pain moves you from him, the seven joys of love.
(Juan Rodríguez del Padrón)
- Excerpt from “Nostalgia for Death”
What proof of existence 8a
could there be greater than the luck 8b
of living without seeing you 8b
and dying in your presence! 8a
This lucid awareness 8a
of loving what is least seen 8c
and of waiting for the unexpected; 8c
this falling without arriving 7d
is the anguish of thinking 7d
that since I die, I exist. 8c
