SOURCE: Modern Women Poets of Spanish America, New York: Hispanic Institute, 1945, pp. 205–27.

[In the following excerpt, Rosenbaum discusses themes concerning the individual woman in the modern city in Storni's poetry. Rosenbaum concludes that Storni's poetic voice “is not feminist but feminine in the extreme.”]

Ni cupo en otro cuerpo así pequeño
Un alma humana de mayor terneza …

With the publication, in 1916, of her book La inquietud del rosal, Alfonsina Storni was to initiate in her country the fruitful period of modern feminine poetry. …

Storni's lyre, far from being monochord—as are those of so many other poetesses of lesser, or even equal, worth—has multiple and varied tones and themes. For not only does she sing of love without “the instinctive false blushes” which have curbed so many women through the ages; not only are her verses the cry of a sensitive, intelligent woman tortured by a gnawing, unsatisfied mental anguish, beset by an elusive, yet persistent ideal, parched by a spiritual thirst which this “impoverished century” cannot allay, but she reveals an aspect until then but little known in feminine poetry: a forceful and poignant interpretation of modern city life, with its piercing loneliness, its chilling indifference, its soulless uniformity and maddening monotony, its spiritual vacuity, its unending vulgarity … which rots and perplexes the soul.

And this loneliness, this drabness, this crushing uniformity are reflected in the spirit of those who, like herself, form part of that “human forest” that moves along its “sad, straight, gray, identical streets.” The same mathematical impersonality of the houses in rows, in angles, in squares, is reflected in their souls, in their ideas, in their very physical outlines and even—she laments—in her own tears:

Casas enfiladas, casas enfiladas,
Casas enfiladas.
Cuadrados, cuadrados, cuadrados.
Casas enfiladas.
Las gentes ya tienen el alma cuadrada,
Ideas en fila
Y ángulo en la espalda.
Yo misma he vertido ayer una lágrima,
Dios mío, cuadrada(1)

(El dulce daño; [hereafter referred to as DD],² 136).

It has been suggested that it was probably that loneliness of spirit, that poignant, bitter desolation—so forcibly evoked and keenly analyzed by countless essayists, novelists and poets of the Argentine—that prompted three outstanding literary figures of the River Plate: Horacio Quiroga, Leopoldo Lugones and Alfonsina Storni, to take their own lives within the short period of two years. Alfonsina expresses this haunting “soledad” in several of her poems—especially in those written toward the end:

En la ciudad, erizada de dos millones de hombres,
No tengo un ser amado …

(Mundo de siete pozos; [hereafter referred to as MSP], 113).

Podría tirar mi corazón
Desde aquí, sobre un tejado:
Mi corazón rodaría
Sin ser visto.
Podría gritar
Mi dolor
Hasta partir en dos mi cuerpo;
Sería disuelto
Por las aguas del río.
Podría danzar
Sobre la azotea
La danza negra de la muerte:
El viento se llevaría
Mi danza.
Podría,
Soltando la llama de mi pecho,
Echarla a rodar
Como los fuegos fatuos:
Las lámparas eléctricas
La apagarían …

(“Soledad”, MSP, 133–134).

At the deaths of Quiroga and of Lugones many of the outstanding writers of Spanish America dedicated pages in prose and verse to their memory. Alfonsina paid touching tribute to both. In her poem, “A Horacio Quiroga”,³ she tends to condone and sanction his act rather than censure it—for she knew that fear rots more efficaciously than death:

          Morir como tú, Horacio, en tus cabales,
Y así como en tus cuentos, no está mal;
Un rayo a tiempo y se acabó la feria …
Allá dirán …
          No se vive en la selva impunemente,
Ni cara al Paraná.
Bien por tu mano firme, gran Horacio …
Allá dirán.
          “Nos hiere cada hora—queda escrito—
Nos mata la final”.
Unos minutos menos … ¿quién te acusa?
Allá dirán.
          Más pudre el miedo, Horacio, que la muerte
Que a las espaldas va.
Bebiste bien, que luego sonreías …
Allá dirán.
          Sé que la mano obrera te estrecharon,
Mas no, sí, Alguno, o simplemente Pan,
Que no es de fuertes renegar de su obra …
(Más que tú mismo es fuerte quien dirá)

(Antología poética; [hereafter referred to as AP], 169)

And in the lines which she inscribed to the memory of Leopoldo Lugones⁴ she seems to understand, too well, the drama that prompted him to take his life: “a drama which touches us all”—she says—“for it is that of a writer wrapped in a net which can smother us, which is probably smothering us” …

She herself had often meditated death, and, strangely enough, especially in her later poems, the idea of it is constantly associated with the sea—for the sea meant liberation, space, infinity … “Life is a cave,” she once wrote, and “death is space.” And because the city, like life, like the universe, was a cavern, a cage to her spirit, she loved the boundless span of the sea. For it must have been to her a momentary relief from the crushing sameness of those “houses in rows, houses in rows, houses in rows.” It must have been, as she said, like a refreshing “pampa of water” after that impenetrable “forest of houses” …

But the attraction is magnetic, and one day “the green flesh of the sea”⁵ makes her its own. Plagued by an incurable illness, and sick and lonely in spirit, she refused to go on suffering.⁶ And so, early on a cloudless October morning, she finally resolved to wander down into that “crystal house” at the bottom of the sea where she would be lulled by “the green music of the waters” … A day before her death she had sent a poem to La Nación which serenely told of her intent to seek repose in that green, lethal haven:

          Dientes de flores, cofia de rocío,
Manos de hierbas, tú, nodriza fina,
Tenme prestas las sábanas terrosas
Y el edredón de musgos escardados.
          Voy a dormir, nodriza mía, acuéstame,
Ponme una lámpara a la cabecera;
Una constelación; la que te guste;
Todas son buenas; bájala un poquito.
          Déjame sola: oyes romper los brotes …
Te acuna un pie celeste desde arriba
Y un pájaro te traza unos compases
Para que olvides … Gracias … Ah, un encargo:
Si él llama nuevamente por teléfono
Le dices que no insista, que he salido …

(“Voy a dormir”)

“I have the presentiment that I am to live but a short time,” she had said in an early book; and it was not long after that she wrote her lyric epitaph:

Aquí descanso yo: dice “Alfonsina”
El epitafio claro al que se inclina.
Aquí descanso yo, y en este pozo,
Porque no siento, me solazo y gozo.

(“Epitafio para mi tumba”, Ocre; [hereafter referred to as O], 111)

for she was “the sad woman” to whom Charon had already shown his oar. She knew that from birth one's heart must begin its grim rehearsal—because “the art of dying is an arduous one” …

Written under the fast-declining light of “the last gleams of Rubén Darío”,⁷ and sounding still the familiar and distant echoes of a Romanticism long eschewed by more expert, pliant and alert hands and minds, her first book, La inquietud del rosal (1916),—however many its deficiencies of form, style, and even content—opened heretofore difficult, or forbidding literary doors to women in the Argentine, and revealed a spirit unafraid, undaunted by the many prejudices which the free expression of feminine sufferings, yearnings, feelings still evoked. For when her book was published in Buenos Aires, people looked upon a woman who dared publicly to reveal intimate thoughts, intimate longings, as somewhat of a déclassée. In Alfonsina's case there were no attenuating circumstances. And as she frequented gatherings of the then prominent—and promising—writers, at a time when it was not customary, nor considered proper for a woman to form part of these literary circles,⁸ criticism was rife and acute. But Alfonsina was daring in art, as she had been in life …

And so even when people were being regaled with such works as Gálvez' La maestra normal, Lugones' El payador, Hugo Wast's La casa de los cuervos, Rojas' La argentinidad, Capdevila's La sulamita, Lynch's Los caranchos de la Florida, and Fernández Moreno's Intermedio provinciano—all published in 1916—her book had resonance, mainly because of what was then termed its audacity, and the author's self depiction in verses that sounded a new note—the feminine note—among the Lugones, the Larretas, the Quirogas, the Ugartes, the Gálvez … This book of uneven and relative merit whose poems, according to Giusti,⁹ were “palotes rimados, trazados sobre la falsilla de todas las escuelas poéticas que se han sucedido desde las guzlas románticas hasta los cisnes decadentes” was, subsequently, virtually disowned by its author; it was never reprinted (although the edition was soon exhausted), and, what is more significant, no poem from it was included in Alfonsina's personally supervised and rich Antología poética. It served, at best, merely to reflect, as does its title, that restlessness¹⁰—emotional and intellectual—so characteristic of her throughout her life. But as a work it is an isolated, sterile phase and does not bear any appreciable relation to her future and more personal production.

Other books followed with astonishing rapidity and fecundity: El dulce daño (1918), Irremediablemente (1919), Languidez (1920)—books which profiled and defined in each successive phase her many-faceted poetic personality, her indubitable talent, her keen mind. They were also the only means by which one could peer, at times, into her somewhat veiled life. “I am a naked soul in these verses”, she said in Irremediablemente, and spoke of having imprisoned in her pen vibrant moments of her life. Written when el dulce daño—that “sweet torture” that was love—sounded the dominant note in her spirit; when she found sorrow and life irrevocably, irremediably, linked in her being; when she resigned herself, at times with indifference, at times with spiritual and moral languidness, to the relentless Nemesis which hounded her, these books comprise a definite and distinct phase in her poetic evolution.

El dulce daño, engendered in a far from happy mood:

Hice el libro así:
Gimiendo, llorando, soñando, ay de mí …

(DD, 9)

seems to cull happiness only from the past. Its last part, called “Hielo,” reflects a mood that in time becomes characteristic: an ironic, pseudosupercilious mood, in which she adopts an antagonistic, defiant and superior tone which people driven from the social pale so often assume. Life, with its tumult and its weariness, makes her sometimes long for the eternal silence, for the quieting sleep of death. And she feels weighed down by thought, oppressed by consciousness, overwrought by emotion. “Oh, how lovely, how lovely, not to feel … not to know of one's self,” she says in “Nocturno.” She yearns to be inanimate—without a heart, without a soul.

She knows the frailties of woman, her whims, her caprices; yet she feels very strongly against two distinct moral codes—one for man, and one for woman. “Only when you have cleansed your soul of all carnal impurities”—she says to the man—“demand that I be white, that I be pure, that I be chaste” … Death stalks through some of these lines, but not yet with the intensity that it assumes in later books. And the city appears with its geometric and precise contours in poems like “Cuadrados y ángulos” and “Aspecto.”

Irremediablemente recaptures “humble, amorous, passionate” moments of her life—as the sub-sections indicate—as well as “bitter, sylvan and tempestuous” ones. “This book is a child of a moment of great spiritual stress”—reads the colophon—“and was written in two months: January and February of 1919.”

The two initial poems, “Este libro” and “Alma desnuda”—which serve as preamble—bespeak the sincerity of the verses that follow:

Me vienen estas cosas del fondo de la vida

(Irremediablemente; [hereafter referred to as I], 7)

Momentos de la vida aprisionó mi pluma

(I, 7)

Soy un alma desnuda en estos versos

(I, 9)

The second poem graphically depicts her soul: a brave and dauntless one, a willing soul—sensitive, humble, restless, idealistic …

With a plea to man to understand her suffering, her madness, she recounts the multiple phases of her love:

Seré en tus manos una copa fina
Pronta a sonar cuando vibrarla quieras …

(I, 29)

Yo seré a tu lado silencio, silencio,
Perfume, perfume, no sabré pensar,
No tendré palabras, no tendré deseos,
Sólo sabré amar

(I, 47)

Te ando buscando amor que nunca llegas,
Te ando buscando amor que te mezquinas …

(I, 99)

Fiero amor: soy pequeña como un copo de nieve,
Fiero amor: soy pequeña como un pájaro breve,
Triste como el gemido de un niño moribundo,
Fiero amor, no hallarás mejor presa en el mundo

(I, 113)

He amado hasta llorar, hasta morirme,
Amé hasta odiar, amé hasta la locura …

(I, 129)

Así, como jugando, te acerqué el corazón
Hace ya mucho tiempo, en una primavera …
Pero tú, indiferente, pasaste por mi vera …

(I, 141)

But man remains adamant and so, in a biting poem called “Hombre pequeñito”, she asks him to free her—the bird—caught in his guileful and deceiving cage:

Hombre pequeñito, hombre pequeñito,
Suelta a tu canario que quiere volar …

(I, 93)

Her “fight for freedom” rather than individual is collective. She feels that in liberating herself she is freeing all women from the “ancestral weight” of prejudice; for she has dared to unseal her lips and declare her desire openly—although, like Prometheus, she too had been “bound”:

Para decirte, amor, que te deseo,
Sin los rubores falsos del instinto,
Estuve atada como Prometeo,
Pero una tarde me salí del cinto

(I, 109)

Languidez sets its tone in its dedicatory note: “To those who, like myself, have never fulfilled a single one of their dreams.” The discontent and dissatisfaction apparent in so many of her previous poems are even more evident and poignant now when she feels impotent to break from “the prison of the senses” that enslaves her; when she sees herself “consumed” in life within the four symmetrical walls of her house, and her love wasting away in useless and fruitless waiting; when she realizes that she has not yet said “the best” that is within her, and wonders if ever—in prose or verse—she will be able to “extract” it …

Life costs much pain—she has learned—, much weariness. And she is surfeited with suffering; for her breast has been a propitious target for all the arrows of pain—perhaps because it is so “white,” so “docile,” so “inoffensive.” She looks deeper within now and pries curiously at her soul that sleeps that “larga siesta de víbora”. And her spirit is pitilessly immersed in the abysmal depths of her solitude …

“The poetry which I shall write in the future will be of another type”—she announced in Languidez—; “this collection initiates in part my abandonment of the subjective type of poetry which cannot be continued when the soul has said, in respect to itself, all that it had to say.” Ocre (1925) which reveals greater maturity of mind, of concept, and more conscious form and style, heads the literary phase which, according to her own admission, she prefers.

In this book she is more bitter, yet more resigned to the poverty of her spiritual and amorous life. Her taunts at man are more caustic; her attitude more ironic. Her spirit, with the vintage of experience, has assumed the ocher or faded tone of aridity rather than the honeyed and mellow one of fruitfulness. Her laughter is more raucous and rings less true.

She takes whatever love—whatever life—is meted out to her, with spiritual and moral listlessness, for she is weary of hoping and of waiting … She knows man to be faithless, vain, selfish, yet she continues to be cognizant of the power he has over her—for she cannot free herself from the need of that “rey devorante.” But, rather than with resignation, she meets failure with cynicism, with irony, or with feigned indifference. She who had been already born “wise”—without innocence or purity; she who had so early learned “the science of weeping,” knows life well—she says—and does not ask for “the impossible.”

One year later (1926) she published Poemas de amor, which never enjoyed the popularity of her other books and which was sentimentally defined by the poetess as “una de las tantas lágrimas caídas de los ojos humanos” … Almost eight years elapsed before the publication, in 1934, of Mundo de siete pozos—poems in “the new manner” which achieve a form polished and succinct and ingenious imagery, and which mark the beginning of a strange, new and bitter phase.

There seems now to be a depuration of certain familiar themes, and an exclusion of others. Those that persist with more trenchant contours are the city, and death—constantly associated in this prophetic book of hers with the sea. The style follows more closely the patterns of the times. She abandons rhyme and seeks expression in free verse and in a form scintillating with images—not always equally inspired.

This “world of seven wells”—as she explains in the initial poem (pp. 9–11)—is the human head, which holds the wonder of the eyes, “like seas upon the earth”:

Desde el núcleo
En mareas
Absolutas y azules,
Asciende el agua de la mirada
Y abre las suaves puertas
De los ojos
Como mares en la tierra.
                    … tan quietas
Esas mansas aguas de Dios
                    que sobre ellas
Mariposas e insectos de oro
                    se balancean …

the ears—wells of sound; snails of mother-of-pearl wherein resounds the spoken and the unuttered word:

Y las otras dos puertas:
Las antenas acurrucadas
En las catacumbas que inician las orejas;
Pozos de sonidos,
Caracoles de nácar donde resuena
La palabra expresada
Y la no expresa;
Tubos colocados a derecha e izquierda
Para que el mar no calle nunca,
Y el ala mecánica de los mundos
Rumorosa sea …

the nose—that mountain raised above the equatorial line of the head; those two doors that foretaste “the fragrant serpentine of spring”:

Y la montaña alzada
Sobre la línea ecuatorial de la cabeza:
La nariz de batientes de cera
Por donde comienza
A callarse el color de la vida;
Las dos puertas
Por donde adelanta
—Flores, ramas y frutas—
La serpentina olorosa de la primavera …

the mouth—that crater which vomits forth the sulphur of violent words and the dense smoke that issues from the heart and its tempest:

Y el cráter de la boca
De bordes ardidos
Y paredes calcinadas y resecas;
El cráter que arroja
El azufre de las palabras violentas,
El humo denso que viene
Del corazón y su tormenta;
La puerta
En corales labrada suntuosos
Por donde engulle la bestia,
Y el ángel canta y sonríe
Y el volcán humano desconcierta.

Some poems, like “Uno” (p. 81), again evince that admiration and cult—that strong desire—for the masculine physique and strength that recurs throughout her poems:

Los anchos hombros, su brazada heroica
De nadador …
… el pétreo torso …
Desde mi asiento, inexpresiva espío,
Sin mirar casi, su perfil de cobre.
¿Me siente acaso? ¿Sabe que está sobre
Su tenso cuello este deseo mío
De deslizar la mano suavemente
Por el hombro potente?

And although she can already discern the “black flocks” of death in the horizon, she still expresses the hope of finding the ideal lover:

          Pero, encontrar un día el espíritu sumo,
La condición divina en el pecho de un fuerte,
El hombre en cuya llama quisieras deshacerte
Como al golpe de viento las columnas de humo!
          La mano que al posarse, grave, sobre tu espalda,
Haga noble tu pecho, generosa tu falda,
Y más hondos los surcos creadores de tus sesos.
          Y la mirada grande, que mientras te ilumine,
Te encienda al rojoblanco, y te arda, y te calcine
Hasta el seco ramaje de los pálidos huesos!

(“Pasión”, p. 141)

Never a poetess of joy and laughter, Alfonsina sinks still deeper into the bitter waters of sadness and hopelessness. The world is sour—she has learned—immature and stunted; sour is the sun above it; sour the moon; sour the wind; sour is man upon the earth. She feels that she is nailed on the cross of Time, while on her eyelids there “grows” a tear far older than her body. Her heart dances on the whirling tip of a whip. And as she drags the “sad and solitary isle” of her body, her miserable and weary flesh, her eyes—beacons of anguish—behold a dreary and defeated landscape of gray skies, deserted seas, lost comets, broken stars, a “faded” moon, dead insects … She herself is but the vestment of a moan; her body drab and dry, her hands already dead for human caresses, her heart “a dead point” nailed on a black rock—incessantly pecked at by the raven of pain, but which no longer bleeds …

If in other books she spoke of the sea, it seemed to be in a somewhat casual manner. Not so here where the sea and the thought of finding peace in its icy, turbulent depths, become almost an obsession:

Escalinatas lentas
Descienden al agua
Y llegan, desvanecidas,
A mis pies.
Por ellas
Ascenderé
Un día
Hasta internarme
Más allá del horizonte.
Paredes de agua
Me harán cortejo
En la tarde
Resplandeciente.

(“Crepúsculo”, p. 38)

Esponja del cielo,
Carne verde del mar,
Por tus carreteras húmedas
Hube de andar.
.....Mi cuerpo quería echar raíces,
Raíces verdes en la carne-del-mar.

(“Círculos sin centro”, p. 85)

… mi cuerpo,
Pardo y seco,
Clavado en la fría
Flor del mar …

(“Luna de Marzo sobre el mar”, p. 88)

Cálida, morada, viva,
La carne fría del mar.
Para mi carne
Que se acaba
Su terciopelo
De coral …

(“Trópico”, p. 101)

And that world of seven wells—of seven doors—which is her head, registers all the emotions of city-life. Seldom has the city inspired more tortured, impassioned, tragic poems than those she calls “Vaticinio,” “Imagen,” “Momento,” “Calle,” “Plaza de invierno,” “Selvas de ciudad,” “La hora 19,” “Una paloma,” “Hombres en la ciudad,” “Llovizna,” “Torre,” “Buques,” “Soledad.”

The book closes with a group of sonnets and ends, appropriately, with the dolorous “Landscape of a dead love” which leaves no doubt that even then her tongue was savoring the black taste of death:

Ya te hundes, sol; mis aguas se coloran
De llamaradas por morir; ya cae
Mi corazón desenhebrado, y trae,
La moche, filos que en el viento lloran.
Ya en opacas orillas se avizoran
Manadas negras; ya mi lengua atrae
Betún de muerte; y ya no se distrae
De mí, la espina; y sombras me devoran.
Pellejo muerto, el sol, se tumba al cabo.
Como un perro girando sobre el rabo,
La tierra se echa a descansar, cansada.
Mano huesosa apaga los luceros:
Chirrían por sus lóbregos senderos
Con la pupila negra y descarnada.

(“Paisaje del amor muerto”, p. 155)

Her books, like her life, became progressively more bitter; and Mascarilla y trébol, her last book, published but shortly before her death (1938),¹¹ marks the hight point in this route of grief which she was fated to traverse. This book is saturated with the brine of the sea which now, rather than an objective reality, becomes almost an integral, an intimate part of her; and with the turbid waters of that other sea—the disconsolate sea of woe, of discontent and tears—that lies, always agitated, within her. It is formed by what she terms antisonetos,¹² and is preceded by a “brief explanation” which she deemed necessary; for from the opinions called forth by some of the poems which had previously appeared in newspapers and magazines, she foresaw that the book would be “branded as obscure.” The key to “this relatively new lyric tendency,” she states, should be looked for in those “fundamental psychic changes that have operated in me,” and not in “external currents of my true personality.” She then calls upon the reader's imaginative and creative collaboration, and tells us that these sonnets have sprung “vitally” from her—in content and form—while she was almost in a state of trance; that she wrote the majority of them in pencil, rapidly, in a public place, in a moving vehicle, in wakeful moments in bed, but spent months in polishing them.

She looks beyond this world—into that “trasmundo” that harbors unspoken thoughts and visions or sugestiones that become potently real; for, as she says, he is now traveling, rolling “loosely” over the beaches and the seas of dreams. And her imagination conjures up weird images: that of a man with a head hugely out of proportion; or of a dead child that goes along, pensive, on feet of clover. “El mirasol”—the sunflower—is a typical poem of this distorted and distressed state of mind:

Le vi en un sueño antes de aquí, golpeando
Su cara roma en el perfil del viento,
En una procesión de unos gigantes,
En carnaval de plantas trasnochadas.
Venía a ritmo de oso, mofletudo,
Un paso atrás, el otro hacia adelante,
Y el delgaducho vientre le reía
De soportar un sol sin sus farolas.
Pasó a mi lado entre pomposas lanzas
Cayendo al golpe del libado vino
E inhábil para alzarse en frase alguna.
Lo encuentro aquí contándole a las berzas
Su aventura burguesa de mi sueño
Y fofo adulador del astro de oro.

And yet, in Alfonsina's words: “todo tiene aquí un sentido, una lógica”.

In Mundo de siete pozos there were poems where one saw a premeditated disjunction of elements for a better and more minute analysis. This is clearly illustrated in “Mundo de siete pozos”, “Retrato de García Lorca”, “Retrato de un muchacho que se llama Sigfrido” and “Ecuación”, where man in general—or a specific man—rather than as an entity, is seen as a component of his various physical features: head, hair, face, forehead, eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, cheeks, mouth, lips, tongue, neck, throat, shoulders, arms, hands, waist, legs—and even heart, soul and voice.

This process becomes far more refined and labored in her last book where she attempts to view “the detail as if it were an independent organism” personified. Thus, she elaborates on a tear (“Una lágrima”), an ear (“Una oreja”), a tooth (“Un diente”), a pencil (“Un lápiz”)—a micro-world, as she calls it, pregnant with compressed thought—not always within facile comprehension—that in the opinion of the poetess, could be equivalent to “those novels … which unfold themselves, in a few hours, in the reader's imagination.”

Alfonsina Storni's feelings concerning death—and life—vary with her moods, as they do in everyone. At times sorrow, grief, pain, make her long to be wrapped in the soothing cloak of oblivion which death alone can furnish. But at others, less frequent, when hope and joy dispel these dismal shadows, she urges the lover to stay death's avid hand; to tell him not to keep her from gathering the fragrant flowers of love and life.

She calls death “just” and “fair” and “kind,” and speaks of its ineffable sweetness with which our impure life can never vie—and of its “freedom.” In contrast she laments the bitterness of life and its restrictions. “I want to forget I am alive,” she says in a moment of despair. Yet in spite of its being “bad,” life is also “divine” and “sweet”:

                                                  … Oh vida mala
Y divina, y terrible y dulce …

(O, 85)

And so like “the young man called Siegfried”—in one of her poems—she has but one desire: to die; and but one hope: not to die.

Yet she well knows that the “Destructive Form” which devours all will someday efface her figure from the earth, and cast her into the well of oblivion. This feeling of the transitory nature of all things often takes possession of her; and so she longs, in the lover's arms, to forget that she is, after all, but a bit of mire:

Háblame, amor, arrúlame, dame el mejor apodo,
Besa mis pobres manos, acaricia la fina
Mata de mis cabellos, y olvidaré, mezquina,
Que soy, oh cielo eterno, sólo un poco de lodo

(I, 24)

But she versifies and rationalizes her grief, her longings, and her fears as she does her passion, and thanks nature for the “supreme gift” of poetry with which she graced her. “What would my life be”—she asks—“without the sweet word?”:

Naturaleza: gracias por este don supremo
                    Del verso que me diste;
.....¿Qué fuera de mi vida sin la dulce palabra?

(O, 105)

She feels herself crushed and soiled in the midst of the vulgarity which surrounds her.¹³ And even as her eyes had longed to satiate their thirst for space in the boundless horizon of the sea, so her spirit cries out for freshness, for purity, for renascence—or for a love capable of “renovating” and “redeeming” her:

Tener el alma fresca, limpia, ser como el lino
Que es blanco y huele a hierbas

(DD, 65)

Yo quiero, Dios de dioses, que me hagan nueva toda.
Que me tejan con lirios; me sometan a poda
Las manos del Misterio; que me resten maleza

(DD, 67)

Pero yo espero algún amor-natura
Capaz de renovarme y redimirme

(I, 129)

She who had been but a fragile puppet rudely flung on the inclement and wild sea of restlessness, longs for “the swallows of eternal quietude” and for a life with “a rhythm of silk”; for sweetness, and more sweetness, and for the soothing serenity of an afternoon “delicious with sunshine”; for a piece of sky that “tangles itself in the tendrils of the soul”:

… ¡Clamo por vida nueva!
Una vida que sea como un ritmo de seda!
¡Dulzura y más dulzura! La quietud de una tarde
Deliciosa de sol, la casita con hiedras
Y un pedazo de cielo que en el alma se enreda.
Tener las golondrinas de una quietud eterna …

(“Resurgir”, La inquietud del rosal; [hereafter referred to as IR, 20)

She aspires to cross life with soaring wings¹⁴—wings in soul, in body, and in thought. And so she seeks free skies, unhampered paths, and “lo que no se rige / por orden expreso”. For she abhors regimentation—preconceived ruling—of any kind: celestial or human. There is in her, therefore, a constant longing—a need—for liberation: moral, social, spiritual; an open rebellion against the restricting, and ofttimes strangling bonds of convention, her sex, life.

In La inquietud del rosal and other early books she flaunts her daring in breaking away from “the herd”; her indifference, her independence, in the face of those who “laugh and point.” And one can sense a challenge—born of hurt pride and bravado—in her cry:

Yo tengo un hijo fruto del amor, amor sin ley
Mirad cómo se ríen y cómo me señalan.
Y soy como la loba. Ando sola y me río
Del rebaño. El sustento me lo gano y es mío
Dondequiera que sea, que yo tengo una mano
Que sabe trabajar y un cerebro que es sano.
El hijo y después yo, y después … ¡lo que sea!

(IR)

Oveja descarriada, dijeron por ahí.
Oveja descarriada. Los hombros encogí

(DD, 134)

But this bitter, caustic attitude may have been dictated, rather than by her rebelliousness of spirit, by the circumstance that her moral transgression—“yo tengo un hijo fruto del amor, amor sin ley”—was not condoned. Society did not forget—nor forgive—the straying of this (was it wilful?) “oveja descarriada”.

She feels alone against the world because she knows it to be hostile. It is formed, for the most part, by that “gente recortada y vacía” in whose vulgar midst she feels an aloof outcast. And, sensing the spiritual chasm that separates her life from theirs, she scoffs at this lack of understanding on the part of those apathetic little people (“apáticas gentullas”) who know nothing of that “fever of idealism” that fills her. She finds a certain satisfaction in knowing that they find her and her actions strange:

¿Qué diría la gente, recortada y vacía,
Si en un día fortuito, por extra fantasía,
Me tiñera el cabello de plateado y violeta,
Usara peplo griego, cambiara la peineta
Por cintillo de flores: misotis o jazmines,
Cantara por las calles al compás de violines,
O dijera mis versos recorriendo las plazas
Libertado mi gusto de vulgares mordazas?
¿Irían a mirarme cubriendo las aceras?
¿Me quemarían como quemaron hechiceras?
¿Campanas tocarían para llamar a misa?
En verdad que pensarlo me da un poco de risa

(DD, 122)

Subí, subí, subí. Ya estaba bien arriba
Cuando sentí un murmullo. ¿Era reto, diatriba?
Escuché: carcajadas, ironías, insultos.
¿Qué os parezco una simia? Oh mis buenos estultos:
¿Sabéis de cosas bellas?
Yo hace siglos que vivo trenza que trenza estrellas

(DD, 142)

But more poignant than the poems that speak of feeling misunderstood by the people in general are those which, like “Hombre pequeñito”, bemoan a lack of understanding on the part of that “little man”—“little” in spirit, in moral worth—that fills her verses. It is, therefore, an unsatisfied love of which she sings: all suffering and yearning; never the joy of fulfillment one finds in Juana de Ibarbourou, for instance. For Alfonsina, like Delmira Agustini, like countless others, wanted a love such as no one could ever dream of; a love that would be all of life, all poetry:

Soñé un amor como jamás pudiera
Soñarlo nadie, algún amor que fuera
La vida toda, toda la poesía

(Languidez; [hereafter referred to as L], 89)

But winter passed, and spring; and summer came again, and autumn. And she, alas! still waited:

Y pasaba el invierno y no venía,
Y pasaba también la primavera,
Y el verano de nuevo persistía,
Y el otoño me hallaba con mi espera

(L, 89)

And when, with anguish, she becomes aware of the bitter reality that “the hour”—that ripeness of youth of which Juana de Ibarbourou sings—is passing, and that the afternoon of life is already upon her, she laments having wasted and spent that passion of hers, so ardent, so unbridled, in the fervent but fruitless pages of her verse:

Que está la tarde ya sobre mi vida,
Y esta pasión ardiente y desmedida
La he perdido, Señor, haciendo versos!

(L, 90)

Long ago she had hopefully awaited “the one.” Yet even when the joy and fire of spring were with her, she sensed and feared its brevity (“si me sé lo breve de la primavera”). For she knew spring to be “a fugitive and furtive gazelle”; and therefore she urged the lover to fly to her when she saw its prelude in the first butterflies flitting over the roses in her garden. But “the lover” does not heed the call—nor the invitation: “El lecho mío es blanco / y es Primavera” … It is a pity, she bewails, so much spring that there is no cup from which to drink it; so much spring that there is no flame in which to burn it!

But she had been “born for love” and, in her untiring search, she must have more than once surrendered to its tempestuousness. And although she loved—she says—until she wept, and unto death; although she loved until it turned to hate, and unto madness … she found “all love was meager.” For she who gave her heart as does a flowing fount its water—without reserve; she who had offered it pure—ere other hands had plucked its tempting fruit—found herself frozen in the icy breath of man's egotism …

In Mascarilla y trébol, her last book, she takes vengeance on the mocking Eros; she seizes him by the neck, and tearing him apart she finds the deceiving trap which had so long ensnared her—Sex:

He aquí que te cacé por el pescuezo
A la orilla del mar, mientras movías
Las flechas de tu aljaba para herirme
Y vi en el suelo tu floreal corona.
Como a muñeco destripé tu vientre
Y examiné sus ruedas engañosas
Y muy envuelta en sus poleas de oro
Hallé una trampa que decía: sexo.
Sobre la playa, ya un guiñapo triste,
Te mostré al sol, buscón de tus hazañas,
Ante un corro asustado de sirenas.
Iba subiendo por la cuesta albina
Tu madrina de engaños, Doña Luna,
Y te arrojé a la boca de las olas.

(“A Eros”)

And because in all—save in death—she met frustration, one senses a constant dissatisfaction in her; a feeling of “incompleteness” in life, in love, and in all things:

Yo soy la que incompleta
Vive siempre su vida …

(O, 34)

… que todo a medias se te dió en la vida …

for her desires always transcended their realization:

Preparé un himno y se murió en gorgeo,
Me eché a ser río y terminé canal

(AP, 15)

El amor nuestro pudo ser una aurora
Y sólo fué un poniente triste y sombrío

(I, 132)

Man is the ever-recurring theme of her poems, for he constitutes the constant “problem” in her femininity. And when she finds that neither “fervent breath” nor “yielding kiss” can penetrate the iron cast of his egotism, she masks her pain in irony and scorn. Still, in her verses, he is most often the object of her desire; and it is only when this desire of hers is thwarted because of his indifference, or when her pride is hurt because of his egotism, that she descends upon him with all the strength of her irony. Her scorn of man, therefore, is not that of a woman who is above temptation, and will not succumb to the pleasures which he seeks, but that of one who has yielded, yet does not feel spiritually satisfied.

She alludes, repeatedly, to their different approach to love. Man looks for “a bit of a feast in woman” and is not repelled by coldness or indifference. Woman, on the other hand—if Alfonsina is typical—has need of the warmth which only soul-inspired love can give. And although she herself is not wholly exempt from carnal desires—being, like all, “una pobre mezcla de lo divino, al fin, y lo bestial”—her idea of love was far from festive.

Like many intellectual women, she feels superior to the average run of men who surround her¹⁵ and is humiliated when man seeks in her merely what he can find in any other woman. She realizes, bitterly, that “the women of intellect are the losers in matters of love.” All this, however, does not make her shun “el dulce daño”. Her idealism yields to the lure of the “somber man”—he of the strong hands with the hardness of steel—even though she laments:

Yo te pedía el cielo, me diste tierra,
Yo te pedía estrellas, me diste besos …

(I, 132)

She who had wanted a “ferocious love of claw and tooth”—a love that would be like a tempest; she who had wanted to be held in a tireless grip by hands of steel; she who told “Fierce love” that there was no better prey (than she) in the world, often only found an emotional outlet and “escape” in those burning poems of hers—daring poems which caused critics to remark that here was a woman who would doubtless envy the fate of Europa,¹⁶ or that hers was a muse that did not know how to tighten her stays.¹⁷

And yet her poems which appear, at times, so much to stress the carnal ways of love, seem to clamor still louder for the soul. “Give me your soul to kiss!”—she writes in one; “give me all your soul,” in another. And in a touching one called “Alms” (“Limosna”) she begs for a soul in exchange for her life!

Alfonsina Storni is the only one of these major poetesses who has in any way carried the feminist banner. She is the only one who has essayed the woman-theme in poems which sing of the bitterness that has been woman's lot since time immemorial (“Peso ancestral”); of the injustice of the “double standard” (“Tú me quieres blanca”); and, finally, of her own rebellion against the chains of convention and those “false blushes” which had so long kept women from openly revealing that surging “hidden sea” they have within.

Yet she who ofttimes speaks of love with cynicism and with irony as when, in a mood that recalls one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's, she says: “little man, I loved you half an hour, do not ask for more”; she who is forever intent on proclaiming the final “liberation” of woman, is also the one who says to the lover: “I shall lay myself at your feet, humble and meek”; “sweetly, I shall fall at your feet, 'neath the full moon”; “take my life; make it, if you will, your slave,” in a tone which is not feminist surely, but feminine to the extreme. For many of her poems disclose a meekness and submission in the face of the “sweet torture” of love for which she ever clamors; and what she admires most in man is his virility, his physical strength. She speaks of iron muscles, of hands of steel, of a voice that makes a woman cringe, and dominates—a man's voice: warm and feared. And before this tower of strength she likes to feel small and humble.

This quasi-servile attitude of hers contrasts with the other she likes to assume in moments when she feels it incumbent upon her to express the muffled and stifled cry of other women who, like herself, wish to proclaim their equality with men, yet want nothing better, perhaps, than to be frail femininity in the steel grip of powerful and commanding masculine hands.

She never gives herself wholly to her passions, as do most women, for she is forever conscious of the mind—the first nucleus, as she calls it in Mundo de siete pozos—whose weight she cannot elude, and which she feels nailed fast within her by a cruel destiny. For she is aware that were it not for this propensity of hers to think, to philosophize, to rationalize, she might have found more happiness in life, more freedom. And so more than once she bemoans this cerebral chain that has the power to bind her to the stolid, cold and restricting fetters of thought, and to keep her from roaming freely in the uninhibited plains of instinct.¹⁸

Perhaps because of this, many of her poems seem somewhat prosaic and intellectual; to reflect preconceived mental attitudes, rather than spiritual or emotional needs. Such are the ones that pretend to depict her merely as a modern, cynical, urbane, “free” woman—bereft of plebeian emotions or femininity. But there are others that are born of a true duality of spirit, with her two selves—intellectual and emotional—constantly struggling to gain the upper hand. Such are those which show antithetical reactions to one reality or thought.

Thus, she yearns to break away from “the prison of the senses,” yet longs, eternally, to be stirred by passion and the honeyed pain of love. She feels at times repelled, at times attracted, by man—that “rey devorante” whose strong hands and stony build bind her relentlessly with the chains of desire. She aspires to liberate woman from the bondage and prejudices which “the sex” imposes, yet she herself, in her almost slavish attitude towards man and love, and in the typically womanly way in which she “rebels,” is the best example of true femininity. She longs to abandon the restricting “cave” of life, yet hopes to live and fulfil the destiny which her heart had so zealously patterned out for her.

One can say, therefore, that Alfonsina never achieved true happiness—nor spiritual repose—not only because Fortune was adverse, but because of the insurmountable contradictions within her; for there was a bitter war, as in so many other “idealists,” between her aspirations and reality, between her art and her life, between her emotions and her intellect.

Her poetry frequently transcends the personal bounds and becomes, at times, almost social in character. In this she differs from most women poets whose work tends to be monotonously centripetal; for whereas others look only within to find the meaning of love, of life, of death … she attempts to probe problems which affect others besides herself. Her poems, too, may be called “cerebral”—as she once suggested—in that she captures in them not only emotional but mental states as well. Thus, we may well consider her the most intellectual, the most objective and the most social-minded of these modernist Spanish American poetesses.

More illuminating, perhaps, than any objective critical opinion of her verse, are the statements she herself makes concerning her compositions, her books, her work in general. In interviews, in letters, in prefaces to her own books, she has given ample evidence of this propensity for auto exegesis which characterized her. Her manner at all times reveals a sincere and earnest attempt to evaluate her work in the light of possible emendation. Enrique Díez-Canedo¹⁹ had already noted this constant desire for improvement, this “faculty for renovation” which are evident in her work. Commenting upon the title of her first book, La inquietud del rosal, he says:

… “al titularlo encontró instintivamente la mejor definición de sí misma. El rosal no se cansa nunca de dar rosas: en el suyo, más que la floración constante, nos sorprende el ansia de producir la rosa perfecta … Si Alfonsina no llevara en sí la facultad de renovación, veríamos en ella una poetisa más” …

Perhaps because Alfonsina had to bleed “time and serenity” from her harried life in order to write her poems, one senses that restlessness—that “inquietud”—which was mirrored in her work. More than once does she speak of this urgent need of hers for tranquillity, for hours in which meditation and repose can dictate a more serene, satisfying work:

“Esta vida mía puede dar explicación de brusquedades, contradicciones, saltos repentinos que se advierten en mis libros. Los dos (primeros libros) han sido escritos a ratos perdidos entre tareas abrumadoras, que me han impedido todavía serenarme, completar mi cultura, hacer una sosegada obra de arte”.²⁰

“Tiempo y tranquilidad me han faltado, hasta hoy, para desprenderme de mis angustias y ver así lo que está a mi alrededor. Pero si continúo escribiendo he de procurarme el tiempo y la tranquilidad que para ello me harán falta”.²¹

In her auto-demolition²² she gives a rapid review of the defects of her earlier books:

“No niego, no, que publiqué un volúmen de versos allá por el año 1916—La inquietud del rosal—libro tan malo como inocente, escrito entre cartas comerciales, en tiempos en que urgencias poco poéticas me obligaban a estar nueve horas en una oficina … De los otros cinco libros míos, un poco mejoraditos, os haré la reseña de sus defectos: en El dulce daño, despreocupación de la forma, extravagancia y exceso de literatura; en Irremediablemente, sobre-saturación de azúcar; en Languidez, sobriedad excesiva; en Ocre, exceso de razonamiento y una antipática ironía; y en Poemas de amor, nada más que su brevedad. ¿Pero en cuanto a los defectos capitales, diréis, a los defectos con mayúscula? Allá van: poca severidad en la selección, complejidad, precipitación, desorden, despreocupación de detalles” …

Still, in spite of the many defects ascribed to her work, which she is the first to recognize and admit—“llena de horribles lunares: defectuosa, desencontrada”—she cannot deny, she says, the current opinion that she is a great poetess: “no puedo negar la opinión corriente … soy una gran poetisa”.²³

Notes

1. Fernández Moreno has a poem in similar vein:

   Tengo el cerebro cuadriculado
   Como tus calles ¿Oh Buenos Aires!
   En mi cerebro no hay callejuelas
   El sol alumbra, circula el aire.

   Si me preguntas por qué mis versos
   Son tan precisos, tan regulares,
   Yo diré a todos que aprendí a hacerlos
   Sobre la geometría de tus calles.

   (“Compenetración”)

2. The following abbreviations will be used in quoting from Alfonsina Storni's books, all published in Buenos Aires: IR: La inquietud del rosal, 1916; DD: El dulce daño, 2nd edition, 1920; I: Irremediablemente, 1919; L: Languidez, 1920; O: Ocre, 1925; MSP: Mundo de siete pozos, 1934; MT: Mascarilla y trébol, 1938; AP: Antología poética, 1938.

3. Nosotros, Buenos Aires, 1937, III, p. 322.

4. Nosotros, Buenos Aires, 1938, VII, 218–221.

5. … carne verde del mar,
   Por tus carreteras húmedas
   Hube de andar.
   .....Mi cuerpo quería echar raíces,
   Raíces verdes en la carne del mar

   (MSP, 85–86)

6. Enferma de algún mal que no se cura
   La muerte debe ser la salvación …

   (IR, 78)

7. “Cuando empecé a escribir se advertían los últimos resplandores de Rubén Darío.” (Alfonsina Storni, in Nosotros, Buenos Aires, 1932, LXXVI, p. 158).

8. “Las mujeres todavía no concurrían a los banquetes” (Ibid.).

9. Literatura y vida, Buenos Aires, 1939, p. 101.

10. She alludes repeatedly to her “neurastenia”, “inquietud”, “nervios”, “histeria”:

    Como la neurastenia jugaba en mi ilusión.
    .....Después mi mano inquieta todo lo revolvió

    (p. 60)

    … nervios de inquietud exquisita …

    (p. 68)

    Se me tornan los nervios hilos electrizados …
    .....Y bajo la presión de finísima histeria

    (p. 72)

    Mis nervios están locos

    (p. 13)

    Yo estaba herida de inquietud que mata,
    Una inquietud nerviosa y agorera …

    (p. 28).

    … donde yo he botado neurasténicamente
    .....Librándole mezquina de mis manos nerviosas

    (p. 57).

    Había llorado mucho y sin saber por qué …
    Estaba neurasténica, cansada, no sé …

    (p. 59).

11. The same year—although already posthumously—there appeared her very complete and revealing Antología poética which seemed to be an appropriate and epitomic end to her prolific poetic cycle.

12. … “los que ella llamaba sus ‘antisonetos’, y yo diría ‘casi-sonetos’, pues no son sino los catorce clásicos versos, pero sin rima”.

    (Giusti, op. cit., p. 119).

13. Vulgaridad, vulgaridad me acosa …

    (I, 154)

14. Ir cruzando la vida con alas en el alma,
    Con alas en el cuerpo, con alas en la idea …

    (IR, 20)

15. “Soy superior al término medio de los hombres que me rodean, y físicamente, como mujer, soy su esclava, su molde, su arcilla. No puedo amarlo libremente: hay demasiado orgullo en mí para someterme. Me faltan medios físicos para someterlo”. (Part of a letter written by the poetess to R. Brenes Mesén, and published in Revista Iberoamericana, Mexico, 1939, I, no. 1, p. 14).

16. “Es una mujer que envidiaría quizás la suerte de Europa raptada por Jupiter”. (E. Solar Correa, Poetas de Hispano-América, Santiago de Chile, 1926, p. 281).

17. “Su musa no sabe apretarse el corsé”. (L. M. Jordán, “Alfonsina Storni”, in Nosotros, Buenos Aires, 1919, XXXII, 37–41).

18. “El pensamiento se enreda a mi instinto y lo ahoga, lo debilita, lo tritura” … (From the letter previously referred to, and published in Revista Iberoamericana, loc. cit.)

    Naturaleza mía …
    .....¿Que hice de ti? Para enfrentar tus males
    Sobre tus formas apreté sayales,
    Y en flagelarte puse empeño tanto
    Que hoy filosofas ante los rosales …

    (O, 139)

19. “Alfonsina Storni, poetisa argentina”, in Repertorio Americano, San José, Costa Rica, June 7, 1930.

20. Letter written by Alfonsina to Julio Cejador, and published in his Historia de la lengua y literatura castellana, Madrid, 1920, vol. XIII, p. 241.

21. Introduction to her fourth book: Languidez, published in 1920.

22. Loc. cit.

23. “Autodemolición”, loc. cit.