SOURCE: Cohen, Henry. “Daniel Boone, Moses and the Indians: Ernesto Cardenal's Evolution from Alienation to Social Commitment.” Chasqui: Revista de Literatura-Latinamericana 11, no. 1 (November 1981): 21–32.

Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado has stressed the importance of the Poundian element of el exteriorismo in the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal. As a student at Columbia University in New York during the period 1947–49, the critic writes, the Nicaraguan adopted as one of his prime models Ezra Pound, whose influence is most obvious in Cardenal's contention that “la poesía debe contener historia, y no sólo historia sino también economía, política, mística, sabiduría, incorporando todos los elementos exteriores posibles.”¹ Poetry must not simply resonate with the writer's internal reactions to the outside world; the outside world must flow into and inform poetry.²

However imbued Cardenal's verse may be with philosophy and politics in the first part of his career, the relationship of the poet to the world as the arena of social struggle and change is problematic. Although he currently affirms for himself the role of the socially committed prophet-activist, this is a view of his vocation into which Cardenal has evolved. I will try to demonstrate this gradual development by studying poems written at three successive moments of the middle of his literary career. “Kentucky,” “Estrella encontrada muerta en Park Avenue” and “Marchas pawnees” delineate a turning point in Cardenal's journey from social alienation, through a crisis of faith in the possibility of a social role for the seer-poet, to an affirmation of poetry's transforming efficacy and the acceptance of an inspired social commitment that may be called prophetic.³

In his admirable doctoral dissertation of 1979 written at the University of Arizona, Edward F. Elías traces Cardenal's growth into a full-fledged prophetic vocation. Elías's study is much more comprehensive, beginning with the Epigramas composed in the 1940's and extending all the way through the Canto nacional and the Oráculo sobre Managua of the 1970's. The critic perceives Salmos (1961–65) as pivotal, for in these poems “el amor se ve dirigido a Dios,” but also, for the first time, “la fuerza amorosa se extiende horizontalmente. … El hablante básico se halla ya convertido en vocero de un pueblo” (263). In his analysis of Homenaje a los indios americanos, Elías lays stress on Cardenal's denuncia profética of present-day societies as contrasted with indigenous civilizations, a technique encapsulated in the formula: “La historia es profecía” (175). He portrays the poet along these lines in what is presumably his final stage of development in his most recent poetry:

En Canto nacional, el hablante épico-lírico definitivamente funciona como vocero de su pueblo. Su voz es la del profeta que interpreta la realidad circundante, como lo hace también el hablante de Oráculo sobre Managua, y que enuncia y delinea el camino que debe seguir el pueblo oyente de su mensaje. El amor que motiva a este hablante ya es un amor altruista que se dispersa entre toda la humanidad.⁴

Elías thus details Cardenal's ideas on the social role of the poet, beginning a few years prior to the point at which my analysis will end. I will focus on the period of hesitation and doubt that occurs before the poet resolves his difficulties and assumes social leadership. Our studies would therefore be seen as complementary, even in regard to Homenaje, our point of contact, since we stress different aspects of that book.

“Kentucky,” a Horatian satire on the theme of peior avis aetas, juxtaposes four images of Daniel Boone's idyllic eighteenth-century segundo paraíso with four corresponding images of suburban life and urban pollution in the Kentucky of the 1950's.⁵ The main idea of the poem is contemporary man's alienation from his natural environment. On the one hand, buffalos graze in countless numbers on a prairie; on the other, buses criss-cross the same terrain; in the past, the Ohio River flowed silently, while now a cacaphony reigns, composed of power lawnmowers, clinking highballs, laughter, raucous radios, cries of volleyball- and croquet-players and baseballs slamming into mitts; deer once roamed the forests of the new frontier, but Forest Grove, Prairie Village, Park Forest and Deer Park now are names of suburban subdivisions composed of uniform tract houses placed on lands cleared of trees; the lone pioneer canoeing along the Ohio, with his rifle and tomahawk, from one beaver trap to the next, has been replaced by a dead river, filled with industrial wastes and household detergents, and smelling of phenol; where Boone heard only the distant howling of wolves in the forest, the night is now filled with blaring hi-fi recordings; the lone hunter grilling a deer loin over an open fire beside a spring has given way to a barbecue of meat purchased in a supermarket and mass-produced a thousand miles from the consumer.

Space limitations permit me to offer only one example each of how skillfully Cardenal uses musical and lexical elements to reinforce his disappointment. The combination of diphthongs and sifflants in the opening lines creates a softness akin to the silence of the scene as well as a sense of infinite expansion along a horizontal plane represented by prairies and river:

Fue en busca de Kentucky andando hacia el oeste, y divisó desde un monte la planicie de Kentucky, los búfalos paciendo como en haciendas de ganado y el silencioso Ohio que corría por las anchas llanuras bordeando Kentucky …

(p. 73)

Against this smooth westward flow is set the shockingly unmellifluous phrase “fraccionamientos suburbanos” with its idea of rupture and containment. In the final stanza, in which is described the pollution of the river, a trio of words beginning with the prefix de-/des-, which intimates loss through attrition, summarizes the loss of the earthly paradise via industrialization:

Y ahora en el Ohio desembocan todas las cloacas, desperdicios industriales, sustancias químicas. Los detergentes de las casas han matado a los peces.

(p. 74)

Cardenal's Daniel Boone is le bon suavage, living in balance with nature, more Indian than European. Conserving natural resources, religiously respectful of his surroundings and in tune with their rhythm, Boone is naive, good, untainted by the preoccupation with property, and ruggedly self-sufficient, in short, a foil for everything that the poet finds distasteful in modern U.S. society. The modern Kentuckian is seen as stationary, hedonistic, dependent, cut off from nature, consumerized, threatened with industrial poisoning and anonymous in his mass identity.

The key to our understanding of this poem lies, I think, in Cardenal's own life experience. In 1957, he entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani, Kentucky, for besides being a political radical, he was—and is—a contemplative Christian. I believe that we can interpret the depiction of the contemporary U.S. in this poem as a reflection of the alienation that the poet was feeling at that particular time, and his image of Daniel Boone as a projection of his desire to recapture his own primitive purity, sereneness and equilibrium with nature. Like a monk, Boone is celibate, for rather than finding himself in Eden, he is in an Edenic state, but without an Eve, and therefore without the possibility of the Fall. This Daniel Boone is not even in a position to learn the distinction between good and evil, since the Tree of Knowledge is not visible for the forest, as it were. As God placed Adam in a paradise where all his physical needs would be met, Cardenal sets Boone in similar circumstances. But the Boone who is portrayed here is an anachronism, since he is infantile and devoid of moral and psychological complexity, as Adam was before Eve. It is interesting that Cardenal also depicts the modern Kentuckian as a child; he is characterized by laughter, playful screams, involvement in games and the immediate satisfaction of carnal appetites:

el tintinear de los highballs, las risas, el ronco radio, los gritos del juego de croquet y de volleyball

(p. 73)

But while Daniel Boone's childishness is viewed in positive terms because it is seen as reflective of and participating in a natural order that is harmonious and clean, quiet and peaceful, the modern man's childishness is censurable because it is associated with an attempt to escape or cover over, through anesthesia, artificially produced harmony and organized pleasure, an essentially corrupt and artificial order of things. Cardenal's contemporary American is surrounded by petty paradis artificiels because Boone's segundo paraíso has disappeared. One characteristic of Paradise is that it is there to be lost and never to be found again. The opening lines of the poem are ironic, for one does not search for paradise. Paradise being the absence of any need to search (since everything is perfect as it stands), because he is conscious of searching for paradise, Boone will not find it in Kentucky. Neither will Kentucky remain Edenic. In the same way, Cardenal's search for a contemplative paradise in the Trappist monastery will lead him back into the world, for there the monk and poet Thomas Merton would convince him that the true contemplative must not isolate himself from social problems and political struggles.⁶ Eventually Cardenal would leave Gethsemani to begin a non-monastic religious commune in the Nicaraguan archipelago of Solentiname: he has recently emerged into the world again in his role as the Sandinista government's Minister of Culture.

The poem “Kentucky” creates the impression that Cardenal would like to retreat from the world, a world unworthy of the social involvement of the poet because it is so corrupt as to have broken ecological faith with the Creator. Cardenal will overcome his pique and his aversion, but not all at once and even then not definitively as we shall see by examining two later poems.

The hablante of “Estrella encontrada muerta in Park Avenue” awakens in the middle of the night as a thunder and lightning storm breaks over New York.⁷ Next, the nocturnal activity of the city-dwellers and their means of transportation are evoked. Finally, a quotation from the next morning's edition of the Times reports the suicide of a star in her luxury apartment at the height of the storm.

Embedded in the initial description of the storm is the following Biblical quotation, perfectly clear in its reference to the central episodes of Exodus, yet puzzling in its shifting of the apostrophe from Moses to God:

No nos hables Tú. No nos hables Tú que moriremos
..........Que nos hable Moisés.
No nos hables Tú que moriremos.

(p. 75)

The source of this supplication is found in Exodus 19:17–20:17, when Moses leads his people to the foot of Mt. Sinai to meet God. The mountain is described as smoking and quaking as the Lord descends upon it (Exodus 19:18), much like New York on the night of the storm:

Me despertaron los rayos
como un ruido de mudanzas y de rodar de muebles …
...............y parecía que venían todos los rayos del mundo

(p. 75)

When Moses, having ascended Sinai to receive the Law, returns to reveal them to the Hebrews, they are still afraid:

And all the people perceived the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled, and stood far off. and they said unto Moses: “Speak thou with us; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.” And Moses said unto the people: “Fear not; for God is come to prove to you, and that His fear may be before you that ye sin not.”

(Exodus 20:15–17)

The themes of a confused humanity, a stern yet fatherly divine protector and an effective intermediary whose words both clarify and assuage, reappear in this referential context. The intertextual problem is the striking inversion of the Biblical quotation by which the dreaded God is addressed directly while the supposed intermediary Moses seems to be absent.

Indeed, the speaker of the modified Biblical text is ambiguous. Is it the narrator? Is it the star about to kill herself with an overdose of sleeping pills? Is it all the New Yorkers who fear God? The poem's tone is mixed and its discourse is splintered: personal (description of narrator's sense perceptions), reportorial (quotation from New York Times article), Biblical, descriptive (New York at night). This splintered discourse, with its various functions, authors and points of view, reinforced by the inaccurate reproduction of the presumably immutable Word of God, reflects an equally splintered universe, one which has lost its center and thus its meaning. We are left without the means of decoding the universe, in our day and age, whereas when Moses ascended Sinai there was a single source of truth, God, a single conduit of transmission, the prophet chosen by God and recognized and trusted by the people, and a single message tapped into stone in ten commandments which seemed to cover most social situations.

The poem's final image reflects the absence of unequivocal moral communication in the modern world; when the star's corpse is found, she is engulfed by meaningless static noise:

y en el aposento un radio sonando a todo volumen sin ninguna estación.

(p. 76)

The simplicity of the Sinai situation has been replaced by a confusing proliferation of authors, messages and decoders, with the result that modern man is informationally overloaded and thus much more susceptible to sin, despair and death. How can one tune in to the Word of God when there are so many stations on the dial? Not that being cut off from God has produced a thoroughly evil humanity. Cardenal furnishes a balanced portrait of ordinary people left to their own devices, and with a vague memory of the Mosaic Law sinning (ilegítimos amores; los que … roban allá arriba una caja de hierro; los que violan a una muchacha; el grito … de una mujer en el parque) and engaged in non-sinful activities ranging from the banal to the sublime (se masturban; los que se están desvistiendo; legítimos amores; los que rezan). What is clear is that God is not there to guide them through the urban concrete wilderness, to intervene miraculously in their threatened lives, to place a reassuring prophet in their midst who will tell them which are the true laws to be followed.

The idea that there is a Moses figure in the poem is suggested by the privileged point of view of the speaker, who is able to perceive the entire city from above, just as Moses could survey his people from atop Mt. Sinai. In the opening lines of the poem, from the very limited point of view of a person lying abed with the blinds drawn, so that he can only guess at the source of the noise and light, he is suddenly placed in a position to see the lightning criss-crossing from the Upper West Side to Times Square and from the Woolworth Building to the Chrysler Building. He can also simultaneously perceive the Third Avenue El on the East Side and the New York Central trains emerging from the Grand Central Station tunnel at West 125th Street as well as what is visible through apartment windows and in Central Park.

This hablante does not prophesy to the New Yorkers; neither does he seem to maintain contact with God, whose very presence here is problematic. Rather, he contributes to our mystification, leaving us with additional questions about the relationship between man and God. While the Biblical Moses mediates between the human and the divine, the hablante is a kind of anti-Moses, who remains on his own mountain and whose knowledge is limited to what he sees, hears from his vantage point and reads in the newspapers. He is non-judgmental and therefore non-prophetic, but he is sympathetic toward suffering humanity, accepting of both the good and the bad in their character and their lot. The reader is left in need of an explanation, awaiting a modern Moses as he too wanders, fearful and unsure of his destination, in the desert of ignorance. Living in New York with the masses, the speaker is in fact more a confused Hebrew than a Moses. His sense of solidarity with humanity is expressed by his sharing of its limitations and search. (For example, he admits not even knowing whether the fire truck whose siren he can hear is on the way to his own building or not.) He is a humble and humane moralist, rather than the detached and disgusted moralizer of the poem “Kentucky.”

Cardenal suggests so many possible meanings that the very theme of his poem seems to be the search for meaning in an absurd universe. Nearly every event and object seems polyvalent. Perhaps the lightning at night signals that God is still guiding His people. Or it may be a sign of God's wrath visited on the urban sinners for violating the Commandments. Has the star died because she has indeed heard the word of God (as the Hebrews were convinced would happen to them) or because, having had no communication, she has committed suicide out of despair? Is the coincidence of the star's death and the storm a trivial event, reducible to a mere obituary in the Times, or does the reminiscence of the death of Christ, itself attended by the outbreak of terrifying natural forces, signify that the death of the star is analagous to the Passion, that each individual's death recreates the myth of human redemption and eternal rebirth? Is the cathedral-N.Y. Times-Woolworth-Chrysler rapprochement a symbol of the new Sinai (suggested by the fact that all these are towers), making new capitalist commandments for the Consumer Society to live by? Is God venting his anger on those institutions because they have conspired to violate his law? Or are all these secular and non-secular skyscrapers the symbols—as Vincente Cicchitti maintains—of the modern Babel, the symbol of non-communication, human disunity and punishment for aspiration to God-head?⁸ The poem may simply be an expression of Cardenal's misgivings and apprehensions about the meaning of life and the place of man in the world. If we accept this premise, different aspects of the poet himself could be understood to be represented by the various personages of the poem: the hablante (privileged yet still partial vision), the Times reporter (insufficiency of perceived phenomena to explain either life or death), Moses (overview and service to his people), and the dead star (separation from God, feeling of abandonment).

This poem seems to be a systematic expression of the opposite of prophecy, as this concept is defined, as distinguished from poetry, by the Biblical scholar Abraham J. Heschel:

In contrast to the inspiration of the poet, which each time breaks forth suddenly, unexpectedly, from an unknown source, the inspiration of the prophet is distinguished, not only by an awareness of its source and of a will to impart the content of inspiration, but also by the coherence of the inspired messages as a whole (with their constant implication of earlier communications), by the awareness of being a link in the chain of the prophets who preceded him, and by the continuity which links the revelations he receives one to another.⁹

Nevertheless, if “Kentucky” represents the world as unworthy of redemptive prophecy, “Estrella encontrada muerta en Park Avenue” at least opens up the possibility of prophecy in the modern world by demonstrating its need and the desire of some of humanity to make contact with a prime authority or ultimate source of wisdom and salvation. The poet seems willing to sympathize with and ready to commit himself to mankind. No longer the anti-social Daniel Boone questing for an unattainable paradise, he seems almost prepared to assume the role of a Moses—albeit an ignorant and confused one—and to attempt to bridge the gap between the secular and the sacred.

The figure of the poet-redeemer emerges optimistically in “Marchas pawnees,” one of the key poems of Cardenal's monumental Homenaje a los indios americanos.¹⁰ The poem contrasts nineteenth-century North American Indians, who make peace among the tribes within the framework of religious understanding, and the twentieth-century leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex who wage war on their fellow human beings in order to sustain an expanding capitalist economy. It is a powerful piece of political propaganda, using the Utopian idealization of native Americans as a foil for the most flagrant examples of inhumane statements and behavior by U.S. governmental, industrial and military leaders during the Vietnam War. Part of Cardenal's message is that peace and profits are simply incompatible in the capitalist system. But instead of stopping with satire, as he does in Kentucky, he moves beyond cynical condemnation to suggest that the gap can (and very well may) be bridged between the human and the dehumanized, the caring and the callous, the sacred and the profane.

The structure of the poem is one of hope, for the means to convert white Americans to a sense of the sacredness of life is there, if only they will grasp and heed the message. Several references to birds are scattered throughout the poem, beginning in an oblique way that sheds no immediate light on the meaning of the whole:

era en primavera, cuando se aparean los pájaros
o en verano, cuando hacen sus nidos

(p. 172)

o en otoño, cuando vuelen en bandadas.
No en invierno cuando está dormida la vida

(p. 173)

These early references to birds draw our attention because of their seemingly utter inappropriateness in the context. They are surrounded by images of Vietnam War troop movements and by lists of percentages of return on stocks in giant corporations. Besides preparing the reader to eventually recognize the ornithological theme as the key to the poem, our ability to focus on something regarded by the Establishment as insignificant is a confirmation of the message of the poem, as we shall see.

An Indian priest contends that birds are privy to certain truths which, if his people learned them, would bring them happiness:

Una vez un sacerdote iba por una pradera
y vio un nido escondido entre el zacate y se dijo
si mi pueblo aprendiera de los pájaros
la tribu estaría alegre, llena de niños.

(p. 174)

In the lines immediately preceding, we read that the winds, although invisible, have great force, a truth known to birds, of course, who fly on air currents. Cardenal is telling us that the most powerful forces in the world are unseen and impalpable, and that the essence of life escapes and contradicts the capitalists' aggressivity and materialism. Not only are birds wise, but they can also communicate their wisdom. Another Indian priest is able to interpret a sparrow's song for his people because he is sensitized to it by virtue of his sacred function and because the message seems to lie in its very form:¹¹

Un sacerdote oyó cantar un pájaro una mañana
con notas más alegres y agudas que los otros
lo buscó y era el gorrión, el más débil
se dijo: ésta es unha lección para mi pueblo
todos pueden ser felices y tener una canción.

(p. 176)

Song is thus established by the poet as the medium by which life's important truths are transmitted. Near the end of the poem, an old Indian agrees to record the sacred songs of the U.S. plains Indians for Alice Fletcher, a frontier ethnologist. That act is analogous to the birds' transmission of wisdom, via the priests, to the Indians.¹² The sacred chants of the peacemaking Pawnees are recorded on Miss Fletcher's gramophone. Like the sparrow, the Indians, the weakest people of the continent yet the ones with the clearest song (here, read: “cultural values,” “world-view”), hold the key to wisdom and happiness and are willing to pass it on to the white man. The parallel between birds and Indians is underlined throughout the poem by allusions to their common migratory and flocking patterns. We also know that the potential for effective communication exists between whites and Indians, for we learn in the poem that the former have taught the latter to profane tobacco, which had formally fulfilled a strictly sacred function in their culture, and we suppose that this communication conduit is reversible. We are also told that Indians know the means of mediating between God and man. To the white man Indians can teach wisdom and happiness by giving to him that sense of the sacred which has been lost in the exploitation of nature, as well as the art of peace-making, which is seen as anathema by capitalism:

And, man
dice el vice-presidente de la Cámara de Comercio
de Wichita, Kansas
                    aquí hay prosperidad. La verdad
          es que si mañana terminara la guerra
habría pánico

(p. 173)

“epidemia de paz” dijo [President Lyndon] Johnson (Time, Feb. 17, 67) (p. 174)

On the level of economics, if corporate capitalism is bellicose, exploitative and destructive of the natural and social orders, it must be replaced. Its substitute is clearly indicated in the references to the Pawnees:

          Una manta. Unas cuentas de colores
          una pipa labrada por Gabilán Azul
                                        gratuitamente de tribu en tribu
en un intercambio no comercial sino religioso
gratis, a través de grandes extensiones
de los Estados Unidos.

(p. 172)

Era también un intercambio de bienes
y así los productos artesinales y artísticos de una tribu
iban gratis de tribu en tribu
a través de los Estados Unidos.

(p. 175)

The opposition between peace linked with spirituality on the one hand and war tied to materialism on the other is simplistic in its starkness. Behind it lies an elaborate piece of thinking on economics and culture which can be understood only from a reading of the entire work Homenaje a los indios americanos. Since such an analysis lies beyond the compass of the present study, suffice it to say that a Utopian transformation in society such as that envisioned and even thought possible by Cardenal must take place simultaneously on several levels: psychological, spiritual, economic, cultural and political. Cardenal casts himself in the role of the messenger/redeemer of the dominant North American culture. If song is the medium, then the poet is unquestionably the hero.

In summary, we see that Cardenal, having exhibited enough of a social commitment to engage in youthful clandestine activities against the Somoza regime, yet reticent about remaining in a corrupt world, seeks to withdraw in the late 1950's to a monastic retreat in order to recapture a lost innocence and purity.¹³ And like a new Daniel Boone, he is cut off from the rest of the human race, for which he appears to have little patience or understanding.

The poet then leaves behind this self-indulgent and self-righteous posture, casting himself in the role of a skeptical anti-Moses, affirming the superiority of his perspective on human problems, yet doubting the continuing commitment of God to the human race, identifying with the mass of confused and suffering humanity, yet uncertain of the efficacy of prophetic leadership in a world whose center has been dislodged.

Finally, Cardenal has moved to an optimistic conception of the social function of the poet and of the efficacy of the poetic word to transform the outer world. His self-image retains both the Edenic innocence of Daniel Boone and the prophetic quality of Moses, while taking on the philosophical wisdom of the Amerindian and the instinctual force of the animal kingdom.¹⁴

Notes

1. Cardenal quoted in José Luis González-Balado, Ernesto Cardenal: poeta, revolucionario, monje (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1978) p. 78. For a detailed analysis of Cardenal's assimilation of Poundian techniques, one should consult Robert Pring-Mill's introduction to his volume of translations, Marilyn Monroe and Other Poems (London: Search Press, 1975), pp. 12–28.

2. “Behind this colossal effort lies a conviction that there must be such interpenetration of specialized knowledge if there is to be a real civilization, and further that poetry alone, in this uniquely muscle-bound age, could liberate the knowledge so industriously collected and stored away by others.” George Dekker, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963) p. 135.

3. The chronology of Cardenal's poetry is problematic. Pring-Mill dates and cites specific documentary sources for several poems, based on conversations with the poet himself. Although “Kentucky” was first published in Oración por Marilyn Monroe y otros poemas (Medellín: La Tertulia) in 1965, I believe that it could have at least been begun when Cardenal's impressions of Kentucky were fresh, either when he was in the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Ky. in 1957–1959, or shortly afterward. Pring-Mill tells us that while a novice Cardenal composed no poetry, but that he did keep “a notebook of loosely structured prose meditations, on the theme of love as the matrix of existence,” which later became Vida en el amor (loc. cit., p. 18). He may also therefore have kept notes that were to become future poems. Since Cardenal went to Medellín, Colombia early in 1961 to finish his seminary training and since he published Oración por Marilyn Monroe in that city, we can be fairly sure that the poem dates from the early 1960's at the latest.

   “Estrella encontrada muerta” was first published in Zona franca in 1968 (No. 58, p. 4), but since Cardenal seems to be referring in the poem to the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, it could have been written at any time during the six-year interim. If he had composed it before 1965, however, one could presume that he would have included it in Oración por Marilyn Monroe; it was therefore probably completed between 1965 and 1968, or approximately four to eight years after “Kentucky.”

   “Marchas pawnees” first appeared in Homenaje a los indios americanos in 1969 (León: Universidad Autónoma de Nicaragua), so it was written fairly soon after “Estrella encontrada muerta.” Pring-Mill informs us (loc. cit., pp. 18, 27) that only after Cardenal took up residence in Solentiname, Nicaragua did he turn his interest from pre-Columbian to less advanced civilizations such as that of the Pawnees. This narrows that date of composition to between February 1966 and 1969 and points to the abruptness of the shift from the vocational tentativeness of “Estrella encontrada muerta” and the self-assuredness of “Marchas pawnees,” a sudden optimism probably linked to Cardenal's undertaking his social-evangelical commune project in Solentiname.

4. Edward F. Elías, “Ernesto Cardenal: nuevo lenguaje, nueva realidad,” Diss. University of Arizona 1979, p. 263.

5. Ernesto Cardenal, Nueva antología poética (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1978) pp. 73–74. Subsequent references to Cardenal's poetry in the body of the article will be followed by page numbers in parentheses; those numbers refer to this edition.

6. While a student at Columbia University in 1947–49, Cardenal first read and was deeply influenced by Merton's early poetry: Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), Figures for an Apocalypse (1948) and The Tears of the Blind Lions (1949). He would later publish translations of some of this poetry in Antología de la poesía norteamericana, published with José Coronel Urtecho in Madrid by Aguilar in 1963. Cardenal's desire to enter the Gethsemani, Kentucky monastery was probably spurred by Merton's presence there. Although they had never met, both were leftists and serious Catholics. In the 1930's Merton had been a member of a Communist youth organization. He had entered Gethsemani in 1941 and had been ordained in 1949. At the time of Cardenal's entry into the monastery, Merton was the Master of Novices, which would have placed him in close contact with Cardenal. Merton would later publish translations of Cardenal's poetry in New Directions anthologies. [Vide González-Balado, p. 94, and Janet Lynne Smith, An Annotated Bibliography of and about Ernesto Cardenal (Tempe, Ariz.: Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State Univ., 1979), entries VI. 8, VI. 35, VI. 37, pp. 52, 56.]

7. Nueva antología poética, pp. 75–76.

8. Vicente Cicchitti, “Homenaje a los indios americanos de Ernesto Cardenal” in Elisa Calabrese (ed.), Ernesto Cardenal: poeta de la liberación latinoamericana (Buenos Aires: Fernando García Cambeiro, 1975) pp. 140, 147.

9. Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) pp. 388–389.

10. Nueva antología poética, pp. 172–177.

11. Mircea Eliade, in his essay “La nostalgie du Paradis dans les traditions primitives,” lists as a primary trait of paradisiacal man in many world cultures his ability to comprehend the language of the animals. More specifically, in many civilizations shamans imitate the cries of birds when entering a trance-like state leading to mystical union with the deity. Knowledge of animals' language is a widespread sign of contact with higher truth:

    Remarquons tout de suite qu'oublier l'amitié des animaux (…) n'implique pas, dans l'horizon de la mentalité archaïque, une regression dans une condition biologique inférieure. D'une part, les animaux sont chargés d'un symbolisme et d'une mythologie trés importants pour la vie religieuse; par conséquent, communiquer avec les animaux (…) équivaut à s'approprier une vie spirituelle beaucoup plus riche que la vie simplement humaine du commun des mortels. D'autre part, les animaux ont, aux yeux du “primitif,” un prestige considérable: ils connaissant les secrets de la vie et de la Nature …

    (Mythes, rêves et mystères, Paris: Gallimard, 1953, p. 85.)

12. Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America (Boston: Small Maynard, 1900). The two bird episodes quoted in the text are imitated by Cardenal from “Story and Song of the Bird's Nest” and “The Story and Song of the Wren,” pp. 30–32 and 53, 56, respectively, of Fletcher's collection.

13. Cardenal's conspiratorial role and that of his friends are told in “Hora O,” Nueva antología poética, pp. 27–51.

14. “Su palabra se instala entre la poesía y la profecía: su poesía, principalmente política, es cantada por un profeta que busca la efectiva comunicación con el pueblo para entregarle una palabra nueva, sin corrupción, originalmente revolucionaria.” Jaime de Giorgis, “Tres poemas de Ernesto Cardenal: ‘Hora O,’ ‘Economía de Tahuantinsuyu,’ ‘Oración por Marilyn Monroe’” in Calabrese, p. 44.