O begins the Cancion en alabanca de la Divina Majestad, por la victoria del Senor Don Juan (1572), a poem which more than any other of his compositions has earned for Fernando de a reputation as the singer of Spanish imperialism during the Golden Age. The poem's unmistakable Biblical overtones identify Spain and the Holy League as a new Chosen People, who at Lepanto are delivered from the wrath of a latter-day Pharaoh. These Chosen People, furthermore, are heirs to Rome as well as Israel. A minor epic register subtends the predominantly Biblical tone. The Battle of Lepanto also becomes a contest between las dos Esperias (28), over the soberuio tirano of an Asia adultera, en vicios sumergida (11, 184). This Orientalist political and moral geography recalls Vergil's Actium in ways that encode the victor as an emergent imperator mundi, just as it celebrates the role of Providence in the victory.2 Certainly, as Oreste Macri writes, En Espana, el sentimiento heroico del poderio patrio llega a la cuspide precisamente con Herrera (508). But the poet of imperialism is also the poet of solitude. For George Mariscal, Antonio Vilanova, and others, the Herreran speaking subject is a quintessential wanderer through the desolate landscapes of the lyric tradition. His Petrarchan verse, we are reminded, encodes a sensibility quite different from that of the Lepanto piece. While the prophetic speaking subject of that poem celebrates the deliverance of a new Israel from a new Egypt, the speaking subjects of the Petrarchan poetry figure themselves as errant souls lost in the desert. At one point, this desert imagery specifically recalls the Exodus narrative central to the Lepanto cancion. In Elegy IV of Algunas obras de Fernando de (1582), the speaking subject, disenchanted with love, resolves to renounce it. After figuring unrequited love through a variety of conventions-as a sea journey, a prison, etc.-the poem turns to the metaphor of the desert: Viendom'en el error, i que s'encubre la luz que me guiava en el desierto, un frio miedo el coracon me cubre. (94-96) The beloved becomes, as she often does in Herrera, a light in the darkness, luz, but here she is specifically figured as the pillar of fire that guided Israel through the desert (Exodus 13: 21). The Biblical story of Israel's flight from Egypt thus provides material for an entirely different poetic effect. In the Lepanto cancion, figures the victory of Spain as the deliverance of Israel by God, while in Elegy IV, he figures the speaking subject's despair as the extinction of one of the principal means by which God sustained Israel in its exodus from Egypt. In this passage from Elegy IV, the desert, that favorite haunt of Herrera's speaking subjects, is transformed from the purgative route to a Promised Land, into the site of radical exile and loss. Some problems stand in the way of making much of this juxtaposition. Among other things, the two poems first appear in two very different sorts of texts, published at either end of an entire decade. The Lepanto poem forms a coda to one of Herrera's historical works, the Relaci6n de la guerra de Chipre (Seville, 1572), while the elegy cited appears in a collection of Petrarchan poems, Algunas obras de Fernando de (1582). Any attempt to treat these two references as an interesting point of contact between Herrera's poetics of empire and his poetics of solitude might find itself frustrated by the distances that separate their moments of production and their discursive locations. Antonio Vilanova is right, it would seem, in explaining the coexistence of different poetic sensibilities in Herrera's poetry by assigning the heroic and the amorous verse to different episodes in Herrera's biography as a lover and patriot. But we must remember that Lepanto has not been forgotten by the who publishes Algunas obras in 1582. In Elegy III, a fleeting moment of requited love is made to coincide with the return of the galleys to Seville after their victory at Lepanto (7-12). …