that man has no control over his destiny. He is thrust out into space and cannot arrest his movement or alter its direction.

The Big-Bang metaphor also adds a new twist to the old topic of life as a journey. Traditionally man has travelled from a point of departure, A, to a point of arrival, B. The nature of B, of course, has varied according to the dominant world-view. Until the Enlightenment the kind of afterlife envisioned in Christian eschatology was almost invariably accepted. In the Christian concept of the homo viator, the natural culmination of life's journey is union with God…. If one adopts the model of the exploding universe as representative of human life, B vanishes. Man's itinerary loses its terminus. (pp. 155-56)

["Sueño de las dos ciervas"] picks up and ties together the different threads in Alonso's adaptation of the Big-Bang concept. (p. 161)

Although the poem does not contain any overt allusions to the motif of the exploding universe, we can readily situate several of its images within the Big-Bang complex…. The central image of the poem is the familiar one of deer fleeing toward a fountain. Because they are presented as symbols of light and darkness, it is easy to interpret their movement again as imaging the recession of the stars…. After having ascertained that the fountain is also fleeing …, the speaker asks, "¿Por qué nos huyes, Dios, por qué nos huyes?" His abrupt intromission (the preceding stanzas had been narrated in the third person) as a spokesman for mankind makes evident that just as the fountain represents God, the deer represent man. (p. 162)

In the first part of "Sueño" the dream of the sleeper revolves around three images: the deer running toward the fountain, arrows heading toward a target, and a tree. Considered in isolation, the choice and ordering of images is not without method. By analogy of motion, the arrows are explicitly linked with the deer; since the arrows are probably wooden, we can supply the missing link by associating them synecdochically with the tree. If one then accepts the opinion that the deer symbolize time (light and darkness = day and night) and that the tree symbolizes space, we can conclude that the arrows function as a textual hinge that joins the two in order to form our four-dimensional timespace continuum. (p. 164)

We have in the poem all of the components of a literary topic, but disjointed. It is as if the pieces of a well-known puzzle had been forced together into a novel and strange configuration. Something has upset the traditional coherence and predictability of the scene. I believe that the disorder originates in the fact that the diachronic signification of the images conflicts with their synchronic signification. In other words, the ciervas, as symbols, stride in different directions. On the one hand, they are associated with modern cosmology and the world-view it implies; on the other, they participate in a literary tradition whose locus is a previous, completely different, intellectual environment. It is, in fact, the environment of sixteenth-century Spanish mysticism. The central imagery of "Sueño de las dos ciervas" can be directly traced back to the poetry of San Juan, and, in particular, to one of his lesser known poems ["La fonte"]. Alonso's poem derives its meaning from the collision of the diachronic and synchronic planes of symbolism and the subsequent disarticulation of the former. San Juan runs into Lemaítre and comes out the worst for wear. (p. 165)

The two poems differ precisely because in San Juan the search is not incessant. From the outset there exists an absolute certainty of reaching the fountain …, and the certainty is justified when, in the last stanza, the seeker finds the fountain in Christ, the bread of life ("Aquesta viva fuente que deseo, / en este pan de vida yo la veo"). In "Sueño," on the other hand, the goal is unattainable ("Ay, nunca formas llegarán a esencia, / nunca ciervas a fuente fugitiva"). The poems, starting from the same point, arrive at opposite conclusions. (p. 168)

["Sueño" depicts a] passage from dream to nightmare, from the stable, well-organized cosmos of San Juan to the exploding universe of Big-Bang theories, from illusion to reality. (p. 169)

The complexities of "Sueño de las dos ciervas" in particular and of the motif of the exploding universe in general can be reduced to one unitary thought: man is doomed to incompleteness; he cannot help but live in the imperfective aspect, always yearning for a stasis and never achieving it. The Big-Bang conception and its metamorphoses furnish so many ways of visualizing this condition, whose cause, as "Sueño" makes clear, is theological in nature. Accepting Catholic teaching, Alonso assumes that man is not whole until he rests in the Lord. For this reason the insertion of mystical symbolism in the poem is pertinent and poignant; the writings of San Juan illustrate paradigmatically the feasibility of the union of God and man. With the dismantlement of the world-view that makes possible this union, man is left wandering aimlessly in space…. (p. 170)

[In Alonso's poetry] we find the motif of the unanswered question repeatedly imbricated with the Big-Bang…. "Sueño" builds toward a series of increasingly strident questions. The interlacing of motifs is logical, for an unanswered question is an abortive attempt at conversation, a mutilated dialogue, and as such, manifests also a kind of incompleteness. This device relates the rhetoric of the poems to their metaphorical and philosophical content. The question is to the answer as the deer are to the fountain as man is to God. And neither God nor the fountain nor the answer is to be had.

The encompassing theme of imperfection (understanding the word in its etymological and grammatical acceptation) explains one last feature of "Sueño," the division into parts. The fact that the poem does not end where it first appears to end, points to the error of thinking that anything comes to a stop. Unexpectedly, as the reader reaches the end of "Oscura noticia," he discovers that the initial poem continues. But one can go further. The "Continuación" also continues. "Oscura noticia" contains an additional poem, "Copla," which states (what else?) that nothing is ever consummated, that conclusions do not exist…. (p. 171)

Gustavo Pérez Firmat, "Cosmology and the Poem: Dámaso Alonso's 'Sueño de las dos ciervas'," in Hispanic Review, Vol, 46, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 147-71.