Por una mirada un mundo; por una sonrisa, un cielo; por un beso. . . yo no se´ que´ te diera por un beso!
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Romantic poetry
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(For a glance, a world; / for a smile, a heaven; / for a kiss. . . I don’t know / what I’d give you for a kiss!)
Be´cquer’s incorporation of the dialogic structure implicit in the cantar, an enunciation addressed by an “I” to a “thou,” gives the Rimas the additionally evocative quality of intimacy. Instead of shouting and declaiming, they whisper and insinuate, giving new emotional tone to the Romantic themes of lost illusions and alienation. Ideologically, Be´cquer was aligned with the conservative, nostalgic strand of Romanticism, an alignment which is explicit in his prose writing, yet in his perception of the radical alienation of the individual subject in a modernizing world, he points forward to the Modernists of the following century.
The other significant figure in the revitalization of the Romantic lyrical tradition after mid century is Rosal´ıa de Castro (1837–1885). Born out of wedlock in Galicia and separated from her mother until midway through childhood, Castro moved with her family in the mid 1850s to Madrid, where she met Be´cquer and other members of his circle. Castro’s early poetry followed the Esproncedan vein of emotional self-expression as adapted by Carolina Coronado and other women writers, but in the small volume published after her mother’s death, A mi madre (“To my Mother,” 1864) she expanded the possibilities of this modality by creating symbolic landscapes that reflected a restless, anguished agitation new to the representation of feminine subjectivity. For example, in “Ya paso´ la estacio´n de los calores” (“The warm season now is over”) her inner state is represented by clouds that fly before the moon,“llenas de amar-gura y desconsuelo” (“disconsolate and full of bitterness”) and “suelto el ropaje y la melena al viento” (“their clothes loosened and their hair in the wind”). By this time, Castro, who had married the Galician nationalist intellectual Manuel Murgu´ıa in 1858, was, like Be´cquer, turning to popular poetry for inspiration – in her case the rich, deeply rooted oral lyrical tradition in the Galician language. Cantares gallegos (“Galician Songs,” 1863), a collection of glosses and imitations of traditional songs, was received with enthusiasm in her native region as a first step in the recuperation of Galician as a literary language.
In the Cantares Castro’s expression, in popular language and imagery, of longing for the familiar landscape and culture of her native land had captured not only her own emotion, but also the experience of Galicians forced by poverty to emigrate to Castile or America. Her next collection of poetry in Galician, Follas novas (“New Leaves,” 1880), was even more direct in expressing the pain of separation and absence resulting from conditions that made orphans of Galicia’s children and widows of its women. In the prologue to Follas novas, Castro declared her conviction that poetry must express the feelings shared by the poet’s contemporaries: “neste meu novo libro prefer´ın, a´s composicio´ns que puderan decirse
380 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century
Personales, aquelas outras que. . . espresan al tribulacio´s dos que. . . vin durante largo tempo sofrir o´ meu arredore” (“in this new book I preferred to the compositions that might be called personal, those that. . . express the tribulations of those whom. . . I saw for a long time suffering around me”).5 Her implicit protest against poverty and exploitation makes Castro an heir to the socially oriented strand of Romanticism present in Espron-ceda and Coronado.
At the same time, in Follas novas Castro gives voice to her own deepening melancholy and existential angst, the feelings of abandonment and solitude that resonate with the suffering she sees around her. Her last book of poems, A las orillas del Sar (“Beside the River Sar,” 1884), written in Castilian, shows her developing this pessimistic vision of human life in poems expressing her intimate responses to Nature, isolation, marital conflict, the birth and death of children, and her own terminal illness (she died of cancer at the age of forty-nine). Resigned suffering as the fundamental reality of woman’s lot was the major theme of the feminine poetic tradition based on Romanticism, but Castro transforms it into a searching exploration of the human condition that extends even to metaphysical doubt. She confronts her condition head-on, for example, in the poem that begins “ Ea! aprisa subamos de la vida / la cada vez ma´s empinada cuesta!” (“Come on! Let’s hurry up the ever steeper slope of life!”), accepting unflinchingly the solitude of her confrontation with death: “No, ni amante ni amigo / all´ı podra´ seguirme; / avancemos! . . . Yo ans´ıo de la muerte / la soledad terrible!” (“No, neither lover nor friend can follow me there; let’s go on! I long for the terrible solitude of death!”). Doubts similar to those of Be´cquer about the expressive capacity of language are entertained in this collection, which registers in its experimentation with innovative meters and rhythms – lines of sixteen or even eighteen syllables – Castro’s struggle to find formal means of representing the unconventional subjectivity she explored so profoundly.
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