Rhymes and Legends by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Published 1871 · 60,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Poetry, Short Stories, Gothic Fiction
How hard is Rhymes and Legends to read?
Rhymes and Legends scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 44 out of 100
- Deliberately plain, unadorned Spanish in the poems, with a richer archaic and gothic vocabulary in the legends.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Short lines and simple constructions in the Rimas, more elaborate but still fluent narrative prose in the Leyendas.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- The poems work with abstractions — poetry, memory, the soul — made physical through a single image apiece.
- Information density: 44 out of 100
- Short lyrics with a great deal of white space, and tales that unfold at an unhurried gothic pace.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- The Rimas withhold names and circumstances entirely, and the Leyendas are framed as things the narrator heard from someone else.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The swallows, the silent harp, the moonbeam and the golden bracelet function as compressed emblems that carry each piece.
- Ironic distance: 44 out of 100
- The late Rimas turn a sardonic edge on the earlier ones, and the sequence's arrangement quietly mocks its own opening romanticism.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- Most of the poems break off at the point of loss and the legends end in death or madness without explanation of the supernatural.
- Structural complexity: 46 out of 100
- A posthumously arranged sequence of lyrics forming a loose narrative, bound with a separate collection of independent tales.
How Rhymes and Legends is regarded
Rhymes and Legends holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.