Home > The Black Heralds Summary & Study Guide

The Black Heralds | Introduction

In the early 2000s, César Vallejo was considered Peru’s greatest poet, and the first line of “The Black Heralds” was said to be known by every Peruvian. Written after his move to Lima from a country village in 1916, the poem was included in a collection to be published in 1918, but Vallejo waited to issue the book until Abraham Valdelomar, an avant-garde writer, could add an introduction. However, Valdelomar died suddenly, so Vallejo released the book in 1919. There has been a confusion about the date of publication ever since. The collection was praised by Vallejo’s own artistic community; however, there were few sales and few reviews. The public was accustomed to modernismo and symbolism in verse, not Vallejo’s emotional and social outcry.

As time would show, The Black Heralds was actually the most traditional of Vallejo’s works, a blend of modernistic influences and the unique style of structure and language that he developed even more in later works. Nonetheless, the basic themes addressed in The Black Heralds remained important elements in all of his poetry: suffering, compassion, and the various components of existential anguish. All of these elements find expression in the title poem. “The Black Heralds” opens the collection and sets a tone for the rest of the book of bitter sentiments and blasphemous rebellion, as well as a compassionate understanding of suffering. Although his first book of poetry, The Black Heralds was the last of Vallejo’s works to be translated into English. Two later publications of the title poem can be found: in the 1990 English edition of Los Heraldos Negros, the translation by Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaaf; and in the 2006 collection The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo, the translation by Clayton Eshleman.

The Black Heralds Summary

Stanza 1

The first line of “The Black Heralds” is one of the most memorable in Spanish poetry: “There are blows in life so powerful . . . I just don’t know!” The intensity of the poem is immediately established with the subject of the painful blows and the questioning they engender, although a question is not asked but is left to the reader’s imagination by the ellipsis before the answer, “I just don’t know!” The line is the cry of the oppressed as they struggle to understand why life is so hard.

In the second through fourth lines, Vallejo says that these blows are as terrible as if they were from “God’s hatred.” These blows are so strong that they are capable of causing all the memories of one’s suffering to well up, capable of causing the pain to rise up from the depths of the soul to the surface. However, the author repeats the use of the ellipsis to create a pause that makes the “I just don’t know” phrase that follows into an outcry of exasperation and frustration, as if to question his own analogy or to emphasize the impossibility of knowing why terrible things happen.

Stanza 2

Here the narrator says that even when there are only a few hard blows in one’s life, any of them can cause deep wounds, “dark furrows,” in even the “fiercest face and in the strongest back.” The word “dark” may simply be a reference to the usually darker, redder skin color of scars, but it may also mean “dark” as in the black depths of the soul that the furrows represent or as in the dark recesses of the mind that are repressed after trauma.

In the third line, Vallejo... » Complete The Black Heralds Summary