Gabriela Mistral
[In the following essay, Rosenbaum examines the appearance and development of such characteristic themes as passion, violence, asceticism, materialism, and pan-Americanism in Mistral's poetry.]
The year that so tragically cut short the career of Delmira Agustini—1914—was to introduce to the Spanish American world of letters another poetess of first rank: the Chilean, Gabriela Mistral. Her best known poems, sprung, most of them, from a common fount of pain (the death, by suicide, of her lover), of Desolation—as her first book is called—are simpler in form than the tortuous ones of Delmira. But they disclose cavernous depths, and their intensity sounds the very pith of human emotion, especially in those where—as in the somber ones that tell of the lover's self-inflicted death—she speaks of “the ineffable” with bland and almost disconcerting serenity and casualness.
1. LIFE AND WORKS
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga—as she was called before she adopted that pseudonym which has now become so famous—was born in the little town of Vicuña, in the fertile and benign valley of Elqui, in 1889. Her father, don Jerónimo Godoy Villanueva, by profession a rural schoolmaster, by vocation a poet of somewhat mediocre talents, left his home—never to return—when Lucila was three years old. Yet, although she had been so early deprived of his “paternal counsel and care,” she always harbored for him a deep filial affection born, perhaps, of a certain similarity of interests and a genuine admiration for that “extraordinary man” who “knew too many things” …1
Among the poems he dedicated to his daughter—and which she remembers “with sweetness and melancholy”—is the following (rather innocuous) cradle-song that might have inspired her to essay that type of composition which is one of her favorites, and in which she has proved so successful:
Duérmete, Lucila, que el mundo está
en calma,
Ni el cordero brinca ni la oveja bala.
Duérmete, Lucila, que cuidan de vos
En tu cuna un ángel, en el cielo Dios.
Duérmete, Lucila, ojitos de cielo,
Mira que tu madre también tiene sueño.
Angel de la Guarda, házmela dormir
Para que a su madre no la haga sufrir.
Angel de la Guarda, cuídame a este
lirio
Que mañana al alba rezará conmigo.
Duérmete, niñita, duérmete por Dios,
Que si no te duermes me enojo con vos.(2)
Her father's bent for “a walking knowledge of geography” left the child Lucila entirely under the care of her mother, doña Petronila Alcayaga, “a very handsome and delicate woman,” with a “soft and pathetic voice” (to whom Gabriela dedicated some of her most tender pages), and of her maternal half-sister, Emelina Molina Alcayaga (“mi santa hermana Emelina”), who became a rural schoolteacher about the time Lucila was born. And so the teaching profession that was to become the guiding motive of her life, and the poetic gift that has made her unique in Spanish American letters, were already present, in one form or another, in her immediate family.
She spent the first twelve years of her life among peasants. And she has always maintained a close contact—and spiritual affinity—with these people of the soil. She likes to speak of her “rurality” and of her humble origin: “vengo de campesinos y soy uno de ellos”. Her work abounds in rural allusions, and a certain earthiness pervades everything that springs from her pen. Without the benefit of “guidance,” and entirely devoid of formal training, this quiet, sensitive and sad child early began to feed her eager mind with random reading. While looking over the scant resources she had at hand, she came upon some poems of her father's—“the first I ever read”—which fired her imagination and started her, at the age of fifteen, upon the literary road she has by now so long and well traversed. Her first compositions were in prose—a mellow prose, well grounded in the long-faltering but still prevalent romantic tradition, and surcharged with “poetic” phrases, with baroque imagery and with sadness. Her poems, which flowed from her dolorous soul almost simultaneously, follow the same stylistic, mental and emotional patterns. These early contributions of Lucila Godoy were published in the local press: El Coquimbo and La Voz de Elqui.
The sad, the grief-filled note—which in her early compositions seems overworked, and somewhat of a pose—becomes tonic, and characteristic of almost all her poems, for very early in life she knew pain to be “the only reality.” In a letter written to a friend when she was about sixteen, she says: “There is something in my being which engenders bitterness; there is a secret hand which filters gall into my heart, even though happiness surrounds me.” And the same thought recurs in her first articles and poems which speak of grief as the genial lyre which intones the most sublime of songs.
“Flores negras,” written in 1905 for the album of “Lolo,” is a typical adolescent poem of disillusionment, anguish, despair, and has little in it to forecast the advent of the great poetess of a decade later:
Yo no puedo cantar porque no brota
El verso ya de mi alma entristecida.
¿Quieres que vibre el harpa que está rota?
¿Quieres que cante el alma que está herida?
Ya no es el tiempo que el papel dejaba
Un reguero de esencias y de amor,
Cuando en mis pobres versos derramaba
Las hojas de la flor de mi ilusión.
Murió la inspiración, tan sólo el llanto
Lleva a mi alma la miel del sentimiento,
Y, si llega a entonar un triste canto,
Es aquel del sollozo y del lamento.
Yo que tan sólo sé llorar,
no dejo
Sino flores marchitas en mi senda,
Y mis canciones, de dolor reflejo,
¿Podrán, dime, formarte alguna ofrenda?
Otoño, ruina, angustias y cenizas
Son los sueños que viven en mi mente.
¿Los juncos mil? Se los llevó la brisa,
¿La idea? Se agotó como una fuente.
Por eso pido que jamás repases,
Estas estrofas que son flores negras,
Sin perfume, sin vida, porque nacen
En el valle otoñal de mi alma enferma.(3)
Gabriela wisely eliminated these early puerile efforts (which were born “in the autumnal valley” of her “sick soul”) from her books, and gave for publication only those that did not mar the general superior tone of her work.
But Gabriela Mistral is not exclusively a writer. She is, above all, a teacher4—“the rural teacher” personified. She was only fifteen when, entirely untaught, she began her didactic career which was to terminate some twenty years later when she was given a pension by the Chilean government in recognition of her work at home and abroad. She started as an assistant in a rural school in La Compañía (Coquimbo) and later became a teacher in several of the primary schools in near-by provinces and towns. About 1908 she sought admittance to the Normal School of La Serena. But the opposition was strong. Because of her writings and strange ways (she “smoked a great deal” and was, moreover, adjudged a girl “with pagan ideas”), she was considered somewhat of a radical. Some three years later, however, in spite of her continued lack of formal training—and through the intercession of her good friend, the future president of Chile, don Pedro Aguirre Cerda—she was considered eligible to teach in the secondary schools. In this capacity she served, with distinction, in the Liceos of Traiguén, Antofagasta and Los Andes. Seven years later she was made Director of the Liceo of Punta Arenas (1918–1920), and then of those of Temuco (1920–1921) and Santiago (1921–1922).
It was at the beginning of this spectacular rise, at Coquimbo, that Lucila met Romelio Ureta, the young man who was so tragically responsible for the flowering and crystallization of her great literary career. He was a handsome railroad employee. It is said that, through no fault of his own—to help “a friend in need”—he was prompted to “borrow” some of the company's funds with the intent of returning them. But it evolved into the familiar story: unable to replace the amount before the “borrowing” could be detected, and abandoned in his plight by his “friend,” he sought escape in suicide—“shattering his temples like delicate glass.” The echo of that shot—says Soiza Reilly5—was “Gabriela Mistral” …
In 1914, five years later, a poetic tournament was to take place in Santiago—undoubtedly to stimulate the somewhat stagnant Chilean poetic talent. Aspiring poets sent their contributions from all parts of the country. But the first prize was awarded to a timid rural school teacher for her powerful and stirring “Sonnets of Death.” With characteristic modesty she refused to be present at the award. (But now she admits that she, silent and unnoticed, watched her triumph from an anonymous seat in the gallery).
Because of her talent in handling difficult rural teaching problems, and because of her literary work—which daily became more esteemed—her name had by now crossed the local, and even national, limits. And in 1922 she was invited to collaborate in the Rural Education Reform which José Vasconcelos was instituting in Mexico. She remained in that country for two years.
From then on, her career becomes international in character. In 1924 she sets out for her first trip abroad and visits the United States, France and Spain. Her government later sends her to Geneva as its representative to the Committee of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. In 1928 she forms part of the administrative council of the Cinematographic Educational Institute founded in Rome. Back from Europe, she comes again to the United States as visiting professor at Columbia University and at Vassar and Middlebury Colleges. She is later given, successively, the Chilean consulship in Naples, Madrid, Lisbon, and finally Nice. At present (1945) she is the cultural attachée of her country's embassy in Rio de Janeiro.
In 1937 she was sent by the Chilean government on a cultural mission to most of the countries of Spanish America where she was received with great acclaim and fervor. In 1945 she received the highest international recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It was in 1914 that “Gabriela Mistral” came into being. Until then her compositions had always borne the signature that revealed her dual Basque ancestry: Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. There has been some disagreement as to the origin of the pseudonym of this “mestiza de vasca”—as she likes to call herself. Some, like Silva Castro,6 attribute it to her admiration for the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral whom she mentions among her favorites in her poem “Mis libros”; while others—including Figueroa7—more rightly state that it stems from the name sailors give to the strong wind that blows in the Mediterranean: maestral, minstral or mistral. Mañach,8 saying that she synthesizes the spiritual and the material, sees that fusion in her pen-name: “Gabriela: angelic annunciation, presence of the spirit; and Mistral: warm breath of the earth” …
From the day that the poet Víctor Domingo Silva read her “Sonnets of Death” at the Juegos Florales in Gabriela's “absence,” her name triumphantly resounded throughout the nation. Anthologies and other publications readily sought her collaboration. But as yet no book of hers had appeared.
In 1921, Professor Federico de Onís, of Columbia University, made her the subject of a lecture which he gave in the Instituto de las Españas. His audience, which was composed largely of North American teachers of Spanish, was so impressed by the depth and haunting beauty of her poems, with which Professor de Onís punctuated his critical exposition, that it was eager to become better acquainted with the work of this extraordinary woman—herself a teacher. When it was learned that they had never been published in book form, the idea of collecting these poems was born. Thus, her first book, Desolación, was published in 1922, not in her native Chile, but in the United States where her admirers have since become legion, and where many of her poems have appeared in translation.
A year later, a second edition, with slight modifications and additions, appeared in Chile, with a new prologue by Pedro Prado. This was followed, in 1926, by another (with some variations and omissions) whose value was enhanced by a penetrating study of the poetess by the eminent Chilean critic Alone (Hernán Díaz Arrieta).
The New York edition of Desolación was to give rise to a somewhat steady flow of publications—although most of them were merely to reproduce, at least in part, compositions already included in the various editions of her first book. In 1923 she published an anthology, Lecturas para mujeres, which she compiled during her sojourn in Mexico. It contains, among countless compositions in prose and verse by outstanding writers of the world, many of her own. That same year the editorial house Cervantes of Barcelona published a selection of her poems in volume LXV of its series Las mejores poesías (líricas) de los mejores poetas. In 1924 her children's songs—most of which were already familiar to the readers of Desolación—appeared, also in Barcelona, under the title Ternura.
Her most recent book is another poetic collection: Tala (1938), which, like Desolación, was also born “of a circumstance.”9 In 1941 there appeared an Antología—under the imprint of the Empresa Editora Zig-Zag of Santiago—which contains a generous selection, by the author, of the preferred poems of her two books: Desolación and Tala.
Gabriela Mistral's prose is as important as her verse. It consists of numerous articles10 published in the outstanding periodicals in the Spanish language. These have never appeared in book form. Written in a style that is vigorous, direct, succinct, passionate, they cover a wide and heterogeneous range, as do her interests: history, geography, sociology, literature, politics, life in general. But her main concern is, and has always been, Latin America. And it is its heart-beat that she sounds whether she is speaking of it in general, or of any one specific country: Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Mexico, her native Chile; whether she is describing the Andes, the pampas, the Mexican maguey, the Chilean mining lands; whether she is eulogizing its writers, its statesmen, its patriots; or commenting on its language, its peoples, its myths, its native crafts, its traditions, its heritage.
This Americanism of hers is lost—outwardly—in Desolación where, with the exception of a dreary and limited Chilean landscape, the only spectacle and climate seen and felt are those of her own bitter, ardent, bleeding soul. But in Tala, America—Indoamerica—reappears in all its strength, its glory and its color.
Of the women poets whom we are studying, Gabriela Mistral is the most cosmopolitan, the best known internationally. She is the only one who, besides the general recognition as a poetess and writer, has attained that of being regarded as the spiritual mentor of the Spanish American world in a degree rarely equaled before by any man and never by a woman.
Jorge Mañach best defines this poetess in the title of his warm and penetrating essay: “Gabriela: alma y tierra.”11 For she is, indeed, a rare, an extraordinary example of the difficult and not always felicitous wedding of the spiritual and the material, of the abstract and the concrete, of “soul and earth” … In her work a perfect blending is achieved, however, not in the conceptual or stylistic sense which results in ideologic or formal antithesis, but in a manner which transcends the artistic. For it is born of a faithful reflection of her personality and manner. Her mind elaborates trenchant thoughts—of almost divine essence—which her pen clothes in the most natural, the most current, the most casual, the most soil-rooted, the most familiar of expressive garb. And this in Gabriela is not forced, nor rhetorical. For it springs directly from her need of close contact with the earth, with reality, with the material, even when expressing the conceptual and the abstract. Her thoughts, therefore, however winged and abstruse, are always earth-bound by her expression which, like her manner, is characterized by its directness, its lack of flourish or ostentation, its homespun quality.
But this corporeality is, as we have said, merely formal; for there is no one further removed from the material than she. Her tastes, in all ways, are ascetic; the mundane foibles and adornments, and all the wiles of feminine allure, hold no meaning for her. She is utterly lacking in that narcissism so characteristic of other women poets—notably Juana de Ibarbourou. When she speaks of herself—which is seldom—she is prone to stress her plainness (which only love can turn to beauty). She never expresses any delight in the materialistic, sensual side of life; no zest in its pleasures. And the thought of death, merely as a devastator of all that is ephemeral or deteriorative, does not haunt or perturb her. Her conception of love is never carnal, for she knows that the flesh is perishable and transitory. The soul alone harbors the all-essential. And the essence of the kiss is there, not on the lips. Therefore death, the disintegrator of all matter, is not—cannot be—the end of love. She is confident that, within the earth, the lover waits for her, unchanged in spirit, although bereft of flesh and of desires; and that when, the weary journey over, she finally takes her place beside him, they will know one another again, and talk for an eternity:
Sentirás que a tu lado cavan briosamente,
Que otra dormida llega a la quieta ciudad.
Esperaré que me bayan cubierto totalmente …
¡Y después hablaremos por una eternidad!
(“Los sonetos de la muerte”, II)12
Delmira Agustini was, stylistically, still dominated by the sumptuous—and ofttimes fatuous—elegance and ornateness of the Modernists. Gabriela Mistral, although she also underwent the modernist influence, is typical of the sober, realistic, more prosaic reaction. Her poems do not exhibit any of the princely and palatial attributes of the Rubendarian school: its pearls, its diamonds, rubies; its agates, emeralds and marbles; its gardens, fountains, parks; its roses, its swans, its doves. And, rather than the mythical Olympian fields, her feet tread the solid ground. They feel beneath them the earth, the soil, “the common clay.” Instead of the intoxicating, sensuous waves of incense, of the voluptuous and exotic perfumes, she breathes the clear, pure, clean, natural rural air. And her eyes do not feast themselves on impossible, unattainable, celestial, super-human or glittering visions, but on “the gold and sweetness of wheat,” on “sacred roads,” on “the green handkerchief” of the trees. Her dictum—so felicitously realized in her life and in her work—has always been: “Give me simplicity, and … profundity.”
Definite—although widely heterogeneous—influences have been ascribed to her work. She herself has, verbally and in writing, hailed many “masters”: … el arte me fué revelado en la persona de un libro … de aquél que es mi Maestro y al que profeso una admiración fanática, un culto ciego …: Vargas Vila”;13 “Es agradecimiento todo en mi amor de Martí, agradecimiento del escritor que es el Maestro americano más ostensible en mi obra”;14 “Mis maestros en el arte para regir la vida: la Biblia, el Dante, Tagore y los rusos”.15 And in a poem, “Mis libros”,16 she has given what one might call a sentimental bibliography: her favorite writers and books—all of which have been viewed as possible sources:
¡Biblia, mi noble Biblia, panorama
estupendo,
En donde se quedaron mis ojos largamente,
Tienes sobre los Salmos como lavas hirvientes
Y en su río de fuego mi corazón enciendo.
.....
Antes que tú me moriré: y mi espíritu
En su empeño tenaz,
Sentándose a las puertas de la muerte,
Allí te esperará.
Allí donde el sepulcro que se cierra
Abre una eternidad …
Todo cuanto los dos hemos callado
Lo tenemos que hablar!
Después de ti, tan sólo, me
traspasó los huesos
Con su ancho alarido, el sumo Florentino.
A su voz todavía como un junco me inclino;
Por su rojez de infierno fantástica atravieso.
Y para refrescar en musgos con rocío
La boca requemada en las llamas dantescas,
Busqué las Florecillas de Asís, las siempre frescas
¡Y en esas felpas dulces se quedó el pecho mío!
Poema de Mistral, olor a surco abierto
Que huele en las mañanas, yo te aspiré embriagada!
Vi a Mireya exprimir la fruta ensangrentada
Del amor y correr por al atroz desierto.
Te recuerdo también, deshecha de dulzuras,
Verso de Amado Nervo, con pecho de paloma,
Que me hiciste más suave la línea de la loma,
Cuando yo te leía en mis mañanas puras.
Stylistic similarities and spiritual affinities have been established between this autochthonous Chilean poetess and the Spanish writers of the Golden Age—notably the mystics for their lyric fervor, their expressive vigor, and their verbal “concretion” of the spiritual—, Omar Kháyyám, Victor Hugo, Guerra Junqueiro, Walt Whitman, Rubén Darío, Unamuno, Amado Nervo, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Romain Rolland, Ada Negri … But in spite of all these palpable or implied sources of inspiration, her work—both prose and verse—has a marked and unmistakable stamp. For although, especially in the earlier stages, she may have come under the preponderant influence of one writer or another, the very fact that these have been so dissimilar—Vargas Vila, Martí, Tagore—has made her style (which she has gleaned and fashioned from such wide, diverse, and almost contradictory sources) a singular, distinct, and wholly personal one.
2. ANALYSIS OF DESOLACIóN
The title Desolación applies aptly only to a section of the book—“Dolor”—for not all the compositions included in it are the bitter fruit of that desolation into which the lover's death plunged her. There are poems which disclose a deeply religious nature; poems of rich Biblical flavor; poems that reveal the depth of an overpowering, but frustrated, maternal feeling; children's poems; poems that are inspired by her profession; and, finally, those that spring directly from that tragedy that made her feel that it was her tortured heart that bled its red into the sunsets … The book closes with a section of “Prose” which contains the “Teacher's Prayer,” the “Poems of the Mothers,” the “Motifs of the Clay,” the “Poems of Ecstasy,” and other lyrical non-poetic compositions including some children's tales such as “Why the reeds are hollow,” “Why the roses have thorns,” etc. At the end there is a “Voto” in which the author says: “God forgive this bitter book … In these hundred poems there lies bleeding a past in which the song became blood-drenched to relieve me” …
LOVE
Tu eres un vaso vaciado. Te volcó un grande amor y ya no te vuelves a colmar más …
In the pages of Desolación she recalls with nostalgic and live passion all the phases of that love which to her was never sensual gratification—never ecstasy, nor exhilaration, nor joy. For love, as she knew it, was “a bitter exercise.” It was not merely that “stubborn, weary sheaf” that is the body, but a wind or breath of God that cuts deep into the “racemes” of the flesh. “It's what is in the kiss”—she says—“not on the lips.” And that is why she tells the lover not to touch her—expecting to find love in her arms, her mouth, her neck … For one day all this will vanish; her body will disintegrate, and she whom he kissed will lie—without lips—in the moist ground (“Intima”).
She looks upon love, one might say, as a religion—as something almost tragically serious; something one enters into everlastingly—not “until death do us part,” but on to eternity. Death severs the mortal bonds, but love lives on to be resumed beyond this life in “the quiet city” … And because love holds so vital a meaning for her; because she fears she may some day lose that which she now considers an inalienable part of herself, she loves with passion, with an overbearing feeling of possession, of ownership—which is deemed more characteristic of man than of woman. In this she is the antithesis of Juana de Ibarbourou and other poetesses who, like her, are the quintessence of femininity in their “weakness,” in their surrender, in their whims and irrationalities in love. Gabriela is demanding—domineering. She does not plead with the man to be faithful; she threatens him with heavenly wrath—and with vengeance—if he breaks the sacred tie that binds them. She makes God her conspirator in this, implying that He does not want the lover to live without her. This implication that his faithfulness is demanded by an exigent God is poignantly expressed in her powerful poem, “Dios lo quiere”:
Dios no quiere que tú tengas
Sol, si conmigo no marchas.
Dios no quiere que tú bebas
Si yo no tiemblo en tu agua.
No consiente que tú duermas
Sino en mi trenza ahuecada
(D,17 107)
From the day she saw “him” pass along the road—a light song upon his “careless mouth”—she felt the lash of love, and knew that, perhaps, henceforth her face would be bathed in tears; for since she (who had so long walked alone) saw him cross her path, God had clothed her in pain:
Iba sola y no temía;
Con hambre y sed no lloraba;
Desde que lo vi cruzar,
Mi Dios me vistió de llagas
(D, 98)
She knew the torturing allure of love, its tyranny, and its inevitability. For once one comes under its spell, one cannot escape it—one has to hearken to it, harbor it, believe in it, although one may sense, as she did, that all that leads to death (“Amo amor”).
And because the love she felt was so overpowering, so intense, it was ineffable—she could not trust its utterance to the obscure words of man. Moreover, it came from so deep within that its “burning torrent” died before it reached the throat. The excruciating pain of that forced silence was more atrocious to bear, she thought, than death … (“El amor que calla”).
She who had been ashamed of her sad mouth, her broken voice, her rough, coarse knees, was transfigured and made beautiful by the lover's glance and by his kiss (“Vergüenza”). Yet she, a beggar now turned queen, lived in constant fear of his leaving her, and would ask—even in dreams—if he were still with her:
Como soy reina y fuí mendiga, ahora
Vivo en puro temblor de que me dejes,
Y te pregunto, pálida, a cada hora:
“¿Estás conmigo aún? ¡Ay! no te alejes!”
Quisiera hacer las marchas sonriendo
Y confiando, ahora que has venido;
Pero hasta en el dormir estoy temiendo
Y pregunto entre sueños: “¿No te has ido?”
(D, 109)
Her love delved its way so deep, became so passionate, so desperate, that she was seized with a Medean jealousy which would not tolerate the least transgression on the lover's part. And even as the world had become more beautiful since love “pierced” them with its fragrance, so now “the earth would cast forth snakes”—she warned him—if his soul betrayed her soul. The kiss that he gave another would, inevitably, reach her ears; the caves would re-echo his perfidious words to her; and the clouds would mirror above her the face of her whom he loved. “Go forth like a thief to kiss her”—she said—“but when you lift up her head, you will find my tear-stained face.” Even death could not free him from the dire retribution of her wrath: for ten years he would lie beneath the earth, with hands outstretched, to receive her scalding tears:
Pero te va a brotar víboras
La tierra si vendes mi alma;
Beso que tu boca entregue
A mis oídos alcanza,
Porque las grutas profundas
Me devuelven tus palabras.
El polvo de los senderos
Guarda el olor de tus plantas
Y oteándolo, como un ciervo,
Te sigo por las montañas …
A la que tú ames, las nubes
La pintan sobre mi casa.
Vé cual ladrón a besarla
De la tierra en las entrañas;
Mas, cuando el rostro le alces,
Hallas mi cara con lágrimas
(D, 107)
But her fears were founded in truth. And when she saw him pass by “with another” (“Balada”), she asked God what reason there was now for her to be upon the “pallid earth” (“Extasis”). In her maddening wrath against this other Judas (“me vendió el que besó mi mejilla”), she fervently prayed the Lord to snatch the faithless one from the clutches of those “fatal hands,” or to sink him in “the long sleep” which He alone knows how to give (“Sonetos de la muerte”, III) …
When the lover himself broke “the tremendous pact” and died without having awaited God's signal; when he, voluntarily, stayed “the rosy bark of his living,” she at first could not grasp the significance of that dire meaning. And forgetting that his “light foot” had now turned to ashes, she again went to their usual meeting-place:
Yo me olvidé que se hizo
Ceniza tu pie ligero,
Y, como en los buenos tiempos,
Salí a encontrate al sendero
(D, 123)
Thoughts of him became an obsession, and she constantly saw his image: he touched her in the night-dew, bled in the sunsets, looked for her in the moonbeams:
Me toca en el relente;
Se sangra en los ocasos;
Me busca con el rayo
De luna, por los antros
(D, 125)
Life became aimless and bitter—everything in her mouth acquired “a persistent taste of tears.” And yet,—as she went along singing her “beautiful vengeance”—she had one consolation: no longer would his mouth know the shame of that kiss which “dripped concupiscence”; nor would the hand of any other woman dispute with her over his handful of bones! She longed to see him again—it mattered not where, she said, nor how:
… Volverlo a ver, no importa dónde,
En remansos de cielo, o en vórtice hervidor,
Bajo unas lunas plácidas o en cárdeno horror!
(D, 131)
—to wrap herself about his bleeding neck …
And although she was aware of the sin he perpetrated by taking his own life, she begged God to forgive him, calling Him “Father,” for that word “tastes more of love.”18 He was her “all”—she told Him—in a passage vibrant with beauty and poignant simplicity: her glass of freshness, the honeycomb of her mouth, the lime of her bones, the sweet reason of her day, the chirping in her ear, the girdle of her dress! (“El ruego”). And she felt ashamed to live on in so cowardly a manner—for she neither went in search of him nor succeeded in forgetting (“Coplas”).
Yet gradually his image faded, and as she desperately, but vainly, “scratched” her wretched memory in an attempt to recover it, she felt that she was never more like a beggar than now—without the memory of him. For having his semblance was like having a child of his—like a fragrance emanating from her bones … But perhaps, she thought, it was not merely his image that she had lost, but her own soul on which she had once hewn his likeness like a wound (“Coplas”). Her “premature widowhood,” as Rafael Estenger19 aptly calls it, left her desolate—bereft of the two beings who would have made her life complete and rich: the husband and the potential son.
One of the qualities of Gabriela which distinguish her from most of the other women poets is her chastity. For she is one of the very few poetesses who view love soberly and purely. Perhaps the use of the words “esposo” and “hijo” lends a tone of propriety to her poems of love which are wholly lacking in that erotic abandon and carnal urge so characteristic of Delmira, for instance, for whom the body was “a divan of delight.” And how different the connotation, in her poems, of the words flesh, body, arms, hands, mouth, lips, tongue … from that which they assume in the ardent and voluptuous verse of so many other poetesses.
MATERNITY
Una que amó, y cuyo amor pidió, al recibir el beso, la eternidad …
Her conception of love is, as we have said, profoundly religious and pure. Its purpose is not to appease desire, to satisfy carnal appetities, but soberly to give thought to the richest, the most precious, the most sacred heritage of woman: maternity.20 That, as she says in the introduction to Lecturas para mujeres, is woman's only reason for being in this world:
Y sea profesionista, obrera, campesina o simple dama, su única razón de ser sobre el mundo es la maternidad, la material y la espiritual juntas, o la última en las mujeres que no tenemos hijos …
Sterility, therefore, is woman's greatest tragedy and shame:
La mujer que no mece un hijo en el regazo,
Cuyo calor y aroma alcance a sus entrañas,
Tiene una laxitud de mundo entre los brazos;
Todo su corazón congoja inmensa baña.
¡Y una mendiga grávida, cuyo seno florece
Cual la parva de Enero, de vergüenza la cubre!
(D, 18)
Yet woman is, instinctively, a mother. And she who was never to cradle a child in her own bosom; who was never to feel its “warmth and aroma” permeate the innermost fibers of her being; who was never to dissolve into tenderness for the fruit of her own womb, feels maternal towards all children.21 That is why her profession has always been so sacred to her, for she feels that through it she fulfils, at least in part, the mission of all women: spiritual—if not physical—maternity. In her now famous “Teacher's prayer” she asks God to make her more maternal than the mothers so that she may “love and defend,” as they do, those who are not flesh of her flesh …
The thought of her impotent motherhood recurs to torture her:
No espigará entre mis rodillas
Un niño rubio como mies
(D, 28)
Baldías del hijo, rompo
Mis rodillas desoladas
(D, 106)
but nowhere more tragically than in the first part of the “Poema del hijo”:22
¡Un hijo, un hijo, un hijo! Yo quise
un hijo tuyo
Y mío, allá en los días del éxtasis ardiente,
Decía: ¡un hijo!, como el árbol
conmovido
De primavera alarga sus yemas hacia el cielo.
Sus brazos en guirnalda a mi cuello trenzados;
El río de mi vida bajando hacia él, fecundo,
Y mis entrañas como perfume derramado
Ungiendo, en ese infante, las colinas del mundo.
Al cruzar una madre grávida, la miramos
Con los labios convulsos y los ojos de ruego,
Cuando en las multitudes con nuestro amor pasamos.
¡Y un niño de ojos dulces nos dejó como ciegos!
En las noches, insomne de dicha y de visiones,
La lujuria de fuego no descendió a mi lecho.
Para el que nacería vestido de canciones,
Yo extendía mi brazo, yo ahuecaba mi pecho …
El sol no parecíame, para bañarlo,
intenso;
Mirándome, yo odié, por toscas, mis rodillas;
Mi corazón, confuso, temblaba al dón inmenso;
¡Y un llanto de humildad regaba mis mejillas!
(D, 138–139)
Yet, later, when the hope of maternity vanishes, she rationalizes that a child of hers might have had her “tired mouth,” her “bitter heart,” her “defeated voice”; that it might have been born with the lover's poisonous heart, his lips (which would have again abjured); that it might some day have said, with rancor, what she herself had inwardly said to her father: “Why has your flesh been fecund?” And so she blesses her fruitless womb, and is content to know that her hapless race has died within it …
But the maternal urge is so strong in her that she sees its reflection in every aspect of life, in all manifestations of nature. The earth itself is a woman with a child in her arms; the mountain, too, is a mother, and in the afternoons the fog plays about her shoulders and knees like a child; the tree is but a “sweet womb” that harbors nests; the open furrow, in its soft depths beneath the sun, is like an ardent cradle; the vine—like a newly-delivered mother—is fatigued from its abundant producing;23 the rain is fearful and sad, like a suffering child. And even God is invested with maternal feelings as He sings His cradle-songs to that saintly “maestra rural” who gave herself so noiselessly to death:
Y en su Dios se ha dormido, como en cojín
de luna;
Almohada de sus sienes, una constelación.(24)
Canta el Padre para ella sus canciones de cuna
¡Y la paz llueve largo sobre su corazón!
(D, 44)
She who saw her own dire love bring only bitterness and sorrow; she who had been often harsh and commanding, exigent and domineering, melts into maternal tenderness when he who “passed with another” and aroused her wrath and the desire for vengeance, lies defenseless, like a dolorous child—and no longer alluring—in the pallid sleep of death:
Te acostaré en la tierra soleada, con
una
Dulcedumbre de madre para el hijo dormido,
Y la tierra ha de hacerse suavidades de cuna
Al recibir tu cuerpo de niño dolorido
(D, 118)
No book of hers has appeared without a section of cradle-songs. And although they never reach the intensity, the perfection and the depth of those poems in which she unveils the bleeding tragedy of her soul, they are, nonetheless, so tender and moving that another poetess, María Olimpia de Obaldía, herself a mother, asks her where she learned the rhythm of the cradle-song which she sings low, with the softness of moonlight:
¿Dónde aprendiste el ritmo de la canción
de cuna
Que cantas quedamente, con suavidad de luna?
DEATH
Owing, undoubtedly, to the spiritual crisis which she had so recently suffered, she shows in Desolación a constant preoccupation with death; death which in her mind is so irrevocably linked with destiny—that “fatal mixture of blood and tears.” It is the thought that we have to die, that we are but “flesh of the grave” that causes the Thinker in the initial poem of the book, “El Pensador de Rodin,” to twitch in bitter anguish. And no tree twisted by the sun in the plain—she tells us—, no lion of wounded flank, suffers the pain, the agony and the terror of this man who meditates on death:
Con el mentón caído sobre la
mano ruda,
El Pensador se acuerda que es carne de la huesa,
Carne fatal, delante del destino desnuda,
Carne que odia la muerte, y tembló de belleza.
Y tembló de amor, toda su primavera
ardiente,
Y ahora, al otoño, anégase de verdad y tristeza.
El “de morir tenemos” pasa sobre su frente,
En todo agudo bronce, cuando la noche empieza.
En la angustia, sus músculos se hienden,
sufridores.
Cada surco en la carne se llena de terrores.
Se hiende, como la hoja de otoño, al Señor fuerte
Que le llama en los bronces … Y no
hay árbol torcido
De sol en la llanura, ni león de flanco herido,
Crispados como este hombre que medita en la muerte
(D, 5)
Still, we all know that the “long weariness” of living will grow upon us some day, and that the soul will tell the body that it no longer wants to drag its weary mass along the rosy path that men, happy to live, traverse (“Los sonetos de la muerte”: II). And that at the thought of our “orphanhood,” of our solitude, as we go alone through the world, “all flesh, with anguish, asks to die” (“In memoriam”). These are the conflicting thoughts that burden her mind at nightfall …
The process of disintegration repeatedly comes to her mind when she thinks of that “disgregadora impura” which is death. That is why, perhaps, the flesh, as we have seen, holds no real meaning for her; for it is merely the guileful, perishable covering of that divine essence—that “breath of God”—we have within; a “weary, reticent sheaf” that crumbles when She of the Deep Eyes casts her dire, somber and withering glance upon it.
Always prone to be concrete, her descriptions of death are graphic and specific. Not content with the mere suggesting of its outward signs and symptoms, she seems to find a certain morbid delight in evoking, with precise detail, its lurid physical aspects:
Y la tremenda albura cayó sobre tu faz
(D, 26)
¿Quién te alcanzó en los ojos el estupor
de Dios?
(D, 27)
… Todo
El estupor que blanquea las caras
En ìa agonía …
(D, 102)
Me olvidé de que te hicieron
Sordo para mi clamor.
Me olvidé de tu silencio
Y de tu cárdeno albor,
De tu inerte mano torpe
Ya para buscar mi mano;
¡De tus ojos dilatados
Del inquirir soberano!
(D, 124)
These descriptions become more harrowing and gory when applied—as in the case of the lover—to suicide:
¿Cómo quedan, Señor,
durmiendo los suicidas?
qUn cuajo entre la boca, las dos sienes vaciadas,
Las lunas de los ojos albas y engrandecidas,
Hacia un ancla invisible las manos orientadas?
(D, 121)
She seems obsessed with the care and “adjusting” of the dead after the last agony—perhaps because she herself was not present when the lover's defenseless, desolate body most needed her tender care and ministration (“¿Qué tú, amortajadora descuidada / no cerraste sus párpados / ni ajustaste sus brazos en la caja!”):
¿Quién te juntó las manos? ¿Quién
dió, rota la voz,
La oración de los muertos al borde de tu lecho?
(D, 27)
¿O Tú llegas después
que los hombres se han ido,
Y les bajas el párpado sobre el ojo cegado,
Acomodas las vísceras sin dolor y sin ruido
Y entrecruzas las manos sobre el pecho callado?
(D, 121)
RELIGION
Her poems reveal a deep religiousness which, like all her other emotions—her love, her jealousy, her maternal feeling—is also strong and vehement. But her religion is not conventional, dogmatic or doctrinal. For as Nieto Caballero25 says, “she carries her cathedral within.”
Rather than to the Virgin, to whom Juana de Ibarbourou dedicates such tender and devout pages, Gabriela, in her Calvary, speaks to Christ—not the benign, the gentle Christ, the Shepherd, but to the tortured and bleeding One:
Cristo, el de las carnes en gajos abiertas;
Cristo, el de las venas vaciadas en ríos …
(D, 7)
or to a God of wrath and vengeance—He of the “terrible and strong” breast, Who knows how to mete out just punishment. Some of the poems are definite prayers or hymns (“Al oído de Cristo”, “Himno al árbol”, “Plegaria por el nido”, “Hablando al Padre”, “Tribulación”, “Nocturno”, “El ruego” …); others—in their themes, in their allusions, in their imagery—breathe and exhale the serene, the noble, the patriarchal air of that “stupendous panorama” which is the Bible.
In her prayers there is always the passionate note, and a forceful—and almost commanding—tone which could be considered irreverent were it not born of that vehemence and one-purposeness so characteristic of her in all things. This is seen, better than elsewhere, in “El ruego” where she threatens to fatigue His ear with prayers and with sobs for the rest of her life—or until He pardons him (whom she loved) for having shattered his temples:
Aquí me estoy, Señor, con la
cara caída
Sobre el polvo, parlándote un crepúsculo entero,
O todos los crepúsculos a que alcance la vida,
Si tardas en decirme la palabra que espero.
Fatigaré tu oído de preces
y sollozos,
Lamiendo, lebrel tímido, los bordes de tu manto,
Y ni pueden huírme tus ojos amorosos
Ni esquivar tu pie el riego caliente de mi llanto.
¡Di el perdón, dilo al fin!
(D, 136)
NATURE
Although Gabriela Mistral is not what is conventionally known as a poet of nature—for her descriptions are seldom objective, seldom purely esthetic—there is in this book the constant presence of the soil that nurtured her, of the rustic scenes and labors, and of the various natural phenomena with which more than once she identifies herself.
The rural surroundings in which she passed the earlier part of her life left their lasting imprint on her soul and on her work, and the familiar landscapes are depicted, not merely as such, as we have already said, but more often to reflect a personal state of mind or emotion. Her “nature background,” therefore, is somewhat limited; for she selects, for the most part, those aspects of it that best mirror and interpret her moods—especially when she was felled by the driving wind of tragedy. And succumbing to the so-called “pathetic fallacy,” she is prone to infuse her own feelings into what would otherwise be “static” nature. Characteristic of these “nature-moods” are her descriptions of desolate and arid expanses:
En la tierra yerma,
Sobre aquel desierto
Mordido de sol …
En la estepa inmensa
En la estepa yerta
De desolación …
(D, 48)
solitary, suffering trees:
En el medio del llano,
Un árbol seco su blasfemia alarga;
Un árbol blanco, roto
Y mordido de llagas …
(D, 151)
Uno, torcido, tiende
Su brazo inmenso y de follaje trémulo
Hacia otro, y sus heridas
Como dos ojos son, llenos de ruego
(D, 153)
sobbing and howling winds:
El viento hace a mi casa su ronda de sollozos
Y de alarido …
(D, 149)
… el viento, vuelto
Mi desesperación, aúlla y pasa
(D, 151)
fearful, sad, plaintive, “vanquished” rain:
Esta agua medrosa y triste
Este fino llanto amargo
No llueve: es un sangrar lento
y largo.
Este largo y fatigante
Descender de aguas vencidas …
(D, 166)
mute, incessant snow:
Siempre ella, silenciosa …
… siempre su azahar sobre mi casa;
Siempre, como el destino, que ni mengua ni pasa …
(D, 150)
Her dolorous spirit, moreover, does not look to the hope or promise of dawn, but rather to the blackness of night in which to lose sight of the mantle of tears that clothes her. Night, therefore, lends its bleakness, its dourness, its tragedy, to these “tone poems” of hers. But they are more frequently infused with the burning red of the bleeding sunsets (“la hora de la tarde, la que pone / su sangre en las montañas”) which are so colored, she sometimes thinks, by the gaping wounds that sorrow and pain left within her:
¿Seré yo la que baño
La cumbre de escarlata?
Llevo a mi corazón la mano, y siento
Que mi costado mana
(D, 164)
Y en cualquier país las tardes
Con sangre serán mis llagas
(D, 108)
Her descriptions—and comparisons—are rich in nature imagery (with which she constantly evokes spiritual analogies):
Estoy lo mismo que estanque colmado
Y te parezco un surtidor inerte
(D, 101)
Si tú me miras yo me vuelvo hermosa
Como la yerba a que bajó el rocío
(D, 110)
En esta hora, amarga como un sorbo de mares
(D, 114)
Cada surco en la carne se llena de terrores.
Se hiende, como la hoja de otoño, al Señor fuerte
(D, 5)
Eran sus barbas dos sendas de flores
(D, 15)
Pecho, el de mi Cristo,
Más que los ocasos,
Más, ensangrentado …
(D, 20)
Más espeso que el musgo oscuro
De las grutas, mis culpas son;
Es más terco, te lo aseguro,
Que tu peña, mi corazón!
(D, 30)
… En mis días,
Como la lluvia eterna de los Polos, gotea
La amargura …
(D, 139)
And the more active and vital aspects of rural life—the harvest, the vintage—are often pictured, especially in her imagery of such superb earthy and live quality:
Creo en mi corazón, el que en la siembra
Por el surco sin fin fué acrecentado
(D, 36)
Ruth, más callada que espiga vencida
(D, 16)
Ya en la mitad de mis días espigo
Esta verdad con frescura de flor.
La vida es oro y dulzura de trigo …
(D, 24)
No espigará entre mis rodillas
Un niño rubio como mies
(D, 28)
Pasó por él su fina, su delicada esteva,
Abriendo surcos donde alojar perfección
(D, 44)
Te acordaste del negro racimo,
Y lo diste al lagar carmesí;
Y aventaste las hojas del álamo
Con tu aliento en el aire sutil.
¡Y en el ancho lagar de la muerte
Aún no quieres mi pecho exprimir!
(D, 116)
Apacenté los hijos ajenos, colmé el troje
Con los trigos divinos …
(D, 141)
Maternity is logically related to harvesting:
Y una mendiga grávida, cuyo seno florece
Cual la parva de Enero …
(D, 18)
Segar te ví en Enero los trigos de tu hijo …
(D, 17)
Sometimes nature is obdurate and remains insensible to her joy or to her sorrow:
Le he encontrado en el sendero.
No turbó su ensueño el agua
Ni se abrieron más las rosas
(D, 97)
Sin un ímpetu la tarde
Se apagó tras de los álamos.
Por mi corazón mendigo
Ella no se ha ensangrentado …
(D, 159)
But more often she—like God—is her conspirator in love: “The very earth will disown you / if your soul barter my soul” …26
La tierra se hace madrastra
Si tu alma vende a mi alma.
Llevan un escalofrío
De tribulación las aguas.
Pero te va a brotar víboras
La tierra si vendes mi alma …
Beso que tu boca entregue
A mis oídos alcanza,
Porque las grutas profundas
Me devuelven tus palabras.
El polvo de los senderos
Guarda el olor de tus plantas …
A la que tú ames las nubes
La pintan sobre mi casa …
(D, 106–107)
The image of the lover—after his death—is not only carried deep within (engraved upon her soul) but is reflected in the sunsets, in the moonbeams, the wind, the snow, and other sympathetic aspects of nature:
Me toca en el relente;
Se sangra en los ocasos;
Me busca con el rayo
De luna, por los antros.
Le he dicho que deseo
Morir, y él no lo quiere,
Por palparme en los vientos,
Por cubrirme en las nieves;
Por moverse en mis sueños,
Como a flor de semblante,
Por llamarme en el verde
Pañuelo de los árboles
(D, 125)
STYLE
There is never any gaiety in her poetry—nor lightness—for her emotions are always ardently passionate (in the love poems), intensely serious (in the “philosophic” or religious ones), or poignantly tender (in the maternal ones, or cradle-songs). Her tone, when not tragic, is preeminently sad. For life, love, nature—which, at some time or another, may smile at other poets—turn only a tear-stained face to her.
Pain, therefore,—the pain of life, the pain of love, the pain of death—bitter, burning, disconsolate or excruciating pain, is the constant companion of Desolación. And there are few poets who express it in richer detail, with more plasticity, or with greater violence than she. For she seems to find sensual—almost perverse—pleasure in depicting mental and physical anguish, agony, terror; in voicing the moans, the cries, the shrieks that such pain induces; in evoking the image of open, gaping, oozing wounds; of flesh rent into palpitating shreds; of veins emptying into rivers of blood …
Her vocabulary27—which, in general, is not uncommonly rich or varied—acquires then an extraordinary force and intensity, mainly through the repetitious, constant use of certain words suggestive of bodily suffering and pain: of burning, of piercing, of rending, of cutting, of cleaving, of bleeding.28
The following verbs of violence appear again and again in Desolación: hender (to cleave, to split), romper (to break, to cut asunder), rasgar (to rend, to claw, to lacerate), morder (to bite, to gnaw), clavar (to nail, to gore), socarrar (to singe, to scorch), hurgar (to stir, to poke, to dig—as a wound), taladrar (to bore, to perforate), arañar (to scratch, to claw), tronchar (to chop off, to break with violence), trizar (to break into fragments—as with a blow), llagar (to wound), desgarrar (to rend, to tear), magullar (to mangle), azotar (to whip, to lash). Equally abundant are the incisive and piercing instruments: garfio (hook), hierro (iron—instrument to wound with), zarpa (claw), cuchillo (knife), puñal (dagger), clavo (nail, iron spike). The words llaga (sore), herida (wound), and sangre (blood)—a logical result of all this flogging and cutting—abound, as does entraña (entrail) to designate the depth of her feeling, her pain, her passion … There is no dearth of examples, for almost every page contains lines like the following:
¡Garfios, hierros, zarpas, que sus
carnes hiendan
Tal como se hienden quemadas gavillas;
Llamas que a su gajo caduco se prendan,
Llamas de suplicio: argollas, cuchillas!
(D, 8)
Pecho, el de mi Cristo,
Más que los ocasos,
Más, ensangrentado …
Costado de Cristo,
Otro labio abierto
Regando la vida:
Desde que te he visto
Rasgué mis heridas!
(D, 20)
Tengo ha veinte años en la carne hundido
—Y es caliente el puñal—
El que vino a clavarlo en mis entrañas
Tenga piedad!
(D, 22)
Los hierros que le abrieron el pecho …
(D, 43)
Mi Dios me visitió de llagas
(D, 98)
Rasga vasos de flor, hiende el hondo glaciar
(D, 99)
Y me clavo con un dejo
De salmuera en tu garganta
(D, 108)
Me socarró la boca …
(D, 114)
Por la mojada puerta de las hondas heridas
(D, 121)
… Sabía suya la entraña que llagaba
(D, 136)
She is prone to use words that intensify the feeling or expression—sometimes resorting to hyperbole:
… Socarradura larga
Que hace aullar!
(D, 23)
A la sombra de Dios grita
lo que supiste …
(D, 27)
Fatigaré tu oído
de preces y sollozos
(D, 136)
Cristo, el de las carnes en gajos abiertas;
Cristo, el de las venas vaciadas en ríos …
(D, 7)
Raza judía, río de amargura …
Y crece aún tu selva de clamores …
(D, 10)
Manos que sangraron con grafíos
y en ríos
(D, 39)
People—and things—are twisted, knifed, bitten by the sun, by anguish, by sores, by thirst and hunger:
… árbol torcido
de sol …
(D, 5)
El sol caldeo su espalda acuchilla
(D, 14)
… desierto
Mordido de sol …
(D, 48)
Un árbol …
… mordido de llagas
(D, 151)
Retorcido de angustia y sol
(D, 155)
Te muerden la sed y el hambre
(D, 107)
And although her manner has an outward calmness—“the exterior serenity of a rock”—her actions and gestures, as expressed in her poetry, are indicative of a vehement, turbulent, tempestuous and volcanic nature:
Baldías del hijo, rompo
Mis rodillas desoladas
(D, 106)
Boca atribulada y convulsa …
(D, 127)
Deshechas las rodillas, retorcida la boca
(D, 140)
Araño en la ruin memoria;
Me desgarro y no te encuentro
(D, 143)
Yo muerdo un verso de locura
(D, 34)
Yet, in spite of all this verbal violence, there are few people more tender than this “maestra rural” whose eyes are hollowed deep to harbor more tears, and whose smile is but a way of weeping with kindness … That is what is so extraordinary about her poetry which has the rare power of disclosing, simultaneously, a vehemence which disconcerts, and a softness and tenderness which are not common—even in women.
3. ANALYSIS OF TALA
Tala, published in 1938, is the vintage of sixteen years of intense and errant living. This is a more complex book than the first, and reflects the spiritual vicissitudes which attended her for nearly two decades. Its mastery, its sureness of style and precise choice of words reveal the mature artist who has gone through the bitter exercise of attaining that much-prized “difficult simplicity.”29 The tragic love note, the morbid preoccupation with death, the vehemence—dominant in Desolación—are now superseded by far more varied motifs, by a serenity that reveals an emotion more contained (whose key note is hope), and by an expression less tortured.
Yet, basically, this book is not so very different from the other (as one might suppose at a cursory glance). And Gabriela is the first to recognize it: “This book carries a small residue of Desolación”, she says in the notes, “and the book that follows it—if one is to follow—will also carry a residue of Tala.” She then gives a homely, rural illustration of this process of “continuity” which applies to artistic endeavor as well as to nature: “It is thus in my valley of Elqui with the pressing of the grapes. Pulp upon pulp remains in the fissures of the wine-press. The peons of the vintage come upon them afterwards. The wine has already been made and that is left for the next round of the baskets.”
In the “Voto” of Desolación, where she spoke of that “bleeding past” which her poems disclosed, she expressed the hope that in the future, in a more clement spiritual clime, she would sing “words of hope” without looking again at her heart. And in the poem “Palabras serenas,” also of that first book, she had said:
Mudemos ya por el verso sonriente
Aquel listado de sangre con hiel
(D, 24)
For in the mid-course of her life she (who before had seemed to revel in the pleasurable cold—“gustoso frío”—of the knife of pain that cut her) “harvested” this truth: that life is the gold and sweetness of wheat; that hate is brief, while love is “immense”; that a brooklet can make us smile, even though our eyes be heavy with weeping; and that the mere singing of a lark makes us sometimes forget that “it is hard to die.” And knowing that “the fruits of grief” are neither good nor beautiful, in Tala, too, she strives to give us “the praise of happiness,” as the “tremendous voyage” across the “thick fog” of sorrow (her mother's death) finally ends in the hope of the “Locas letanías”:
¡Recibe a mi madre, Cristo,
Dueño de ruta y de tránsito,
Nombre que ella va diciendo,
Sésamo que irá gritando,
Abra nuestra de los cielos,
Albatros no amortajado,
Gozo que llaman los valles.
¡Resucitado, Resucitado!
(T, 34)
If the crucial moment of the lover's death brought about the tortured pages which gave title to her first book, that of her mother's results in several poems of a calm, mystic flavor. And the maternal note—so strong, so passionate, so persistent in Desolacíon—is more subtly, perhaps, but no less forcefully present in this book whose very birth reveals a maternal gesture of the highest order.30
Already in Desolación one saw her ascetic disregard for the material in her interpretation of love, of life, of death. But in Tala one can discern, with greater clarity, this process of “de-materialization” as she denudes herself of all mundane wants and fears, and emerges pure and serene in “the sweet air” of her hope and of her faith. She is spiritually richer now (“Tengo la dicha fiel / y la dicha perdida”), and she is reconciled to the duality of life which has the sensuous delights of the rose and the poignant prick of the thorn (“¡“Ay! qué amante es la rosa / y qué amada la espina”). She rests content in the knowledge that there are two angels that watch over her simultaneously—one that brings her happiness, and one that brings her pain:
No tengo sólo un Angel
Con ala estremecida:
Me mecen como al mar
Mecen las dos orillas
El Angel que da el gozo
Y el que da la agonía …
(T, 47)
And so not even the loss of deep spiritual joys can wring from her a “cry of agony,” nor dampen her newly-found peace, for she now knows that “the eternal soul” suffers no loss:
Tuve la estrella viva en mi regazo,
Y entera ardí como un tendido ocaso.
Tuve también la gruta en que pendía
El sol, y donde no acababa el día.
Y no supe guardarlos …
Y los perdí, sin grito de agonía,
Que vengo de una tierra
En donde el alma eterna no perdía
(T, 38)
Some of her lines recall the mystic fervor of Saint Theresa (with whom she has more than once been compared), and of Saint John of the Cross31—both in concept and in style:
Algún día ha de venir
El Dios verdadero
A su hija robada, mofa
De hombre pregonero.
Me soplará entre la boca
Beso que le espero,
Miaja o resina ardiendo
Por la que me muero
(T, 41)
Acaba de llegar, Cristo, a mis brazos,
Peso divino, dolor que me entregan …
(T, 31)
“En los filos altos
Del alma he vivido:
Donde ella espejea
De luz y cuchillos,
En tremendo amor
Y en salvaje impetu,
En grande esperanza
Y en rasado hastío.
Y por las cimeras
Del alma fué herido.”
“Y ahora me llega
Del mar de mi olvido
Ademán y seña
De mi Jesucristo,
Que, como en la fábula
El último vino,
Y en redes ni cáñamos
Ni lazos me ha herido.”
“Y me gdoy entero
Al dueño divino
Que me lleva como
Un viento o un río”
(T, 178)
While others seem to stem from that “popular”—folkloric—vein in which Spanish poetic tradition is so rich:
La mañanita
Pura y rasada
Quedó linda
De la venteada.
.....Y yo me alcé
Con lucerada;
Medio era noche,
Medio albada
(T, 54–55)
There is in Tala a keener mental subtlety, a more volatile and hermetic quality (notably in the sections “Alucinación” and “Historias de loca”) than in the first book where plasticity and directness always made the meaning clear—perhaps because now some things are seen through the inventive and scintillating facets of the imagination and fantasy, or through the undulating maze of allegory.
But she has not lost touch with the earth. And like Antaeus she always seems to gain new vitality, new strength, new confidence from her contact with it. That is what lends such vigor and warmth and “substance” to her “Materias,” which sing of the simple, the elemental, the vital things: bread, salt, water, air—all of which seem so much a part of her and of her work:
Huele a mi madre cuando dió su leche,
Huele a tres valles por donde he pasado:
A Aconcagua, a Pátzcuaro, a Elqui,
Y a mis entrañas cuando yo canto.
Otros olores no hay en la estancia
Y por eso él así me ha llamado;
Y no hay nadie tampoco en la casa
Sino este pan abierto en un plato,
Que con su cuerpo me reconoce
Y con el mío you reconozco.
Pan de Coquimbo, pan de Oaxaca,
Pan de Santa Ana y de Santiago.
En mis infancias yo le sabía
Forma de sol, de pez o de halo,
Después le olvidé, hasta este día
En que los dos nos encontramos,
Yo con mi cuerpo de Sara vieja
Y él con el suyo de cinco años.
(“Pan”. T, 75–76)
Mano a mano nos tenemos,
Como Raquel, como Rebeca.
Yo volteo su cuerpo roto
Y ella voltea mi guedeja,
Y nos contamos las Antillas
O desvariamos las Provenzas
Ambas éramos de las olas
Y sus espejos de salmuera,
Y del mar libre nos trajeron
A una casa profunda y quieta;
Y el puñado de Sal y yo,
En beguinas o en prisioneras,
Las dos llorando, las dos cautivas,
Atravesamos por la puerta …
(“Sal”. T, 79–80)
Hay países que yo recuerdo
Como recuerdo mis infancias.
Son países de mar o río,
De pastales, de vegas y aguas.
Quiero volver a tierras niñas;
Llévenme a un blando país de aguas.
Tenga una fuente por mi madre
Y en la siesta salga a buscarla,
Y en jarras baje de una peña
Un agua dulce, aguda y áspera.
(“Agua”. T, 81–82)
En el llano y la llanada
De salvia y menta salvaje,
Encuentro como esperándome
El Aire.
Cuando camino de vuelta,
Por encinas y pinares,
Todavía me persigue
El Aire.
Al amanecer, me duermo
—Cuando mis cabellos caen—
Como la madre del hijo,
Rota del Aire …
(“El Aire”. T, 85–87)
There is nostalgia in her evoking of scenes—of games—of her childhood, and it is only through these basic, unchangeable, unfailing, tangible, material things that she can feel herself secure and firm in the billowy sea of doubt, of fear and of uncertainty …
The first section, “Muerte de mi madre”, recalls, in substance, some of the well known pages of Desolación. But how different these poems (“La fuga”, “Lápida filial”, “Locas letanías …”) from the “Nocturno”, “Los sonetos de la muerte”, “Interrogaciones”, “La espera inútil”, “La obsesión”. What had been passion and tragic despair is now more often serenity and hope. She has, for the most part, discarded the ardent, impassioned tone which tragedy awakens in youth. Life has mellowed her somewhat rude expostulations, and her prayers—no less fervent—reveal a comfort and a certainty in salvation that did not exist in the earlier book where she felt she had to fatigue the ear of Christ with her prayers for the redemption of the dead lover.
Her maternity now reaches unfathomed, unforeseen, prodigious depths, for it embraces all things—all people. And her protective “mother instinct” surges wild and passionate at the thought of her own mother wandering aimlessly and alone in the mystic pale of death; of Christ nailed piteously on the Cross. Her feelings for her mother, for the Father, are not “filial” then, but “maternal”32 This dual parent-child, child-parent relationship which is more or less present in all forms of love, is expressed factually, in the poem “Cascada en sequedal” where she calls the water both “mother mine” and “child of mine”:
¡Agua, madre mía,
E hija mía, el agua!
(T, 84)
But her maternal feeling is more conventionally, concretely and specifically expressed in her “Canciones de cuna”:
Duerme, mi sangre única
Que así te doblaste,
Vida mía, que se mece
En rama de sangre.
Musgo de unos sueños míos
Que te me cuajaste,
Duerme así, con tus sabores
De leche y de sangre.
Mi semillón soterado
Que te levantaste;
Estandarte en que se pára
Y cae mi sangre;
En la noche, si me pierde,
Lo trae mi sangre.
¡Y en la noche, si lo pierdo,
Lo hallo por su sangre!
(T, 197–198)
in the admirable poem, “La cuenta-mundo,” where the mother explains to her infant child the magic and the wonder of the air, the light, the larks, the mountain, the water, the animals, the butterflies, the fruit, the pine tree, the fire, the house, the earth …; and in the tender and nostalgic poem “Niño mexicano”:
Hace doce años dejé
A mi niño mexicano;
Pero despierta o dormida
Yo lo peino de mis manos …
¡Es una maternidad
Que no me cansa el regazo
Y es un éxtasis, que tengo
De la gran muerte librado!
(T, 117–118)
Tala is, undoubtedly, a more objective book than the first in that it often goes beyond herself for inspiration. Desolación had sung of life, of death, of nature, of motherhood—all in relation to her own emotions; all facets of her own self exegesis. But in this book we see her transcend the personal and disclose “the outer world”—and especially that part of it which has always been her main concern: America. Her Americanism, in its richest and warmest sense, is patent here, not only in the section properly called “América”, but in all those poems which sing, in one form or another, of its landscapes, its places, its flora, its fauna, its people, its heritage, its destiny … There is an attempt—an ideal—to disregard and efface national boundaries and to fuse all into that “heart-shaped” beautiful land (land of the Incas and of the Mayas, of the Quichés, the Quechuans and Aymarans) which is her America; an ardent wish to see those “downtrodden racemes of sacred vine”—which are the Indians of old—restored to their pristine destiny; and a fervent promise to abide with and restore the greatness of their heritage:
Gentes quechuas y gentes mayas
Te juramos lo que jurábamos.
De ti rodamos hacia el Tiempo
Y subiremos a tu regazo;
De ti caímos en grumos de oro,
En vellón de oro desgajado,
Y a ti entraremos rectamente
Según dijeron Incas Magos.
¡Como racimos al lagar
Volveremos los que bajamos …
(T, 96–97)
And so in the part called “América” she essays two “hymns”33 in almost epic manner: one to the tropical sun (“sol de los Incas, sol de los Mayas, maduro sol americano”) and one to the Andes (“carne de piedra de América”). This natural union which the “ripe American sun” and the “stony flesh” of the Cordillera effect is what she hopes to see, in fact, in those lands which “speak the language of Saint Theresa, of Góngora and Azorín.”
Not the least interesting and valuable part of the book are the “Notas” with which it ends. In them she gives “the reason” for Tala, elaborates on some points of her ars poetica, explains and justifies the use of particular words34 and rhyme schemes,35 and comments on some of the poems. She also makes interesting and characteristic references to her preferred choice of certain words of distinct rural flavor36 (for to her “el pueblo” is “la mejor criatura verbal que Dios crió”) and ascribes the origin of some of the archaisms37 which she is fond of using, to the popular speech of her own country, rather than to the Spanish classics—as has been so frequently stated. These notes are personal, and in the best Mistralian tradition: a meaty, wholesome prose written in a homely, conversational tone.
Notes
-
These biographical references, and those that follow, were drawn, mostly, from the two books on Gabriela: Virgilio Figueroa, La divina Gabriela, Santiago de Chile, 1933; and Raúl Silva Castro, Estudios sobre Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile, 1935.
-
Figueroa, op. cit., p. 42.
-
Figueroa, op. cit., p. 61.
-
… la enseñanza es mi preocupación … la primaria se lleva mis preferencias.” (Ibid., p. 145.)
-
Juan José Soiza Reilly, Mujeres de América, Buenos Aires, [1934], p. 43.
-
Op. cit., p. 3.
-
Op. cit., p. 72.
-
Jorge Mañach, “Gabriela: Alma y tierra”, in Revista Hispánica Moderna, New York, 1937, III, p. 108.
-
“Alguna circunstancia me arranca siempre el libro que yo había dejado para las Calendas por dejadez criolla. La primera vez el Maestro Onís y los profesores de español de Estados Unidos forzaron mi flojedad y publicaron Desolación; ahora entrego Tala por no tener otra cosa que dar a los niños españoles dispersados a los cuatro vientos del mundo”.
(Tala, p. 271).
-
“He vivido veinte años haciendo un periodismo fatigante con el que apenas puedo” …
(Figueroa, op. cit., p. 257).
-
Loc. cit.
-
Bécquer, in his Rima XXXVII, expresses an almost identical thought
-
Silva Castro, op. cit., p. 5. In the light of such fervent admiration on her part, the
“Master's” judgment of her—some years later—is somewhat severe: “La Mistral es un caso patológico. Para estudiarla hay que recurrir a los libros de medicina”. (R. Maya, “Entrevista con Vargas Vila”,
Nosotros, Buenos Aires, 1924, XLVII, pp. 252–253).
-
G. Mistral, La lengua de Martí, La Habana, 1934, p. 41.
-
Silva Castro, op. cit., p. 8.
-
Appears in the second edition of Desolación, Santiago de Chile, 1923, pp. 52–54.
-
In this study we will use “D” when quoting from Desolación (New York, 1922); “T” will be used for Tala (Buenos Aires, 1938).
-
Te llamaré
Padre, porque
La palabra me sabe a más amor …(D, 75)
The Spanish dramatist of the Golden Age, Mira de Amescua, offers a similar distinction between the words “Señor” and “Padre”:
Señor,—dije mal “señor”
Que en este nombre hay rigor
Por la sucesión del hombre—
Padre digo, porque es nombre
De más dulzura y amor.(El esclavo del demonio).
-
“Gabriela Mistral, virgen y madre”, in Cuba Contemporánea, La Habana, 1927, XLIX, p. 220.
-
… “la santidad de la vida comienza en la maternidad, la cual es, por lo tanto, sagrada”. (D, 185).
-
One of her best poems, “El niño solo” (D, 19), expresses this sentiment:
Como escuchase un llanto, me paré en el repecho
y me acerqué a la puerta del rancho del camino.
Un niño de ojos dulces me miró desde el lecho
¡y una ternura inmensa me embriagó como un vino!La madre se tardó, curvada en el barbecho;
el niño, al despertar, buscó el pezón de rosa
y rompió en llanto … Yo lo estreché contra el pecho,
y una canción de cuna me subió, temblorosa …Por la ventana abierta la luna nos miraba.
El niño ya dormía, y la canción bañaba,
como otro resplandor, mi pecho enriquecido …Y cuando la mujer, trémula, abrió la puerta,
me vería en el rostro tanta ventura cierta,
¡que me dejó el infante en los brazos dormido! -
“My most deep-felt poem”—she once said—“is the ‘Poema del hijo’, lament of my useless existence”.
-
She follows through the analogy in intellectual “production”, and feels that her verse, like a child, is nurtured with her blood: “Como un hijo con cuajo de mi sangre se sustenta él”. And in “The artist's decalogue” she gives as one of the precepts: “You shall give forth your work as one gives a child: drawing blood from your heart” …
-
These two lines are reminiscent of Delmira's: “El dios duerme, Julieta; su almohada es de estrellas” …
-
L. E. Nieto Caballero, “Gabriela Mistral”, in Repertorio Americano, San José, Costa Rica, January 11, 1930.
-
“God wills it”. Translation of “Dios lo quiere”, by Katherine Garrison Chapin, in Poetry, Chicago, 1941, LIX, 123–125.
-
Silva Castro has made a special study of it in his Estudios sobre Gabriela Mistral, pp. 149–227.
-
Silva Castro speaks of her verbal and ideologic sadism, and of how “she seems to be seized with delirium when speaking of hooks and knives” … (Retratos literarios, Santiago de Chile, 1932, p. 157).
-
Gabriela once said: “Yo he sufrido mucho para llegar a cierta sencillez”. (Figueroa, op. cit., p. 138).
-
See p. 176, note 1.
-
In Desolación, also, there were passages which recalled the manner—and expression—of the author of Cántico espiritual. San Juan in his “Canciones entre el Alma y el Esposo” wrote:
Ni ya tengo otro oficio,
.....
Que ya sólo en amar es mi ejercicio.Después que me miraste:
Que gracia y hermosura en mi dejaste.Gabriela, likewise, uses the words “oficio” and “ejercicio” in reference to love: and the loved one's glance, in her case, too, can transform plainness into beauty:
Ya no tengo otro oficio
Después del callado de amarte …(D, 127)
Y amar (bien sabes de eso) es amargo ejercicio …
(D, 136)
Si tú me miras, yo me vuelvo hermosa …
(D, 110)
-
Pero a veces no vas al lado mío:
Te llevo en mí, en un peso angustioso
Y amoroso a la vez …(T, 12)
Acaba de llegar, Cristo, a mis brazos
Peso divino, dolor que me entregan …(T, 31)
-
It is time—she says, commenting upon them in the notes—that the “minor tone” which came as a violent reaction, and repugnance, to the pompous, bombastic, romantic “epic trumpet”, and which is so appropriate for the singing of the intimate, simple aspects of life so dear to present-day writers in Spanish America, be discarded now in favor of the “major tone” which is needed to sing of that “formidable spectacle” which the American scene and heritage present.
-
[Saudade] …“encabezo una sección de este libro, rematado en el dulce suelo y el dulce aire portugueses, con esta palabra Saudade. Ya sé que dan por equivalente de ella el soledades castellano. La sustitución vale para España; en América el sustantivo soledad no se aplica sino en su sentido inmediato, único que allá le conocemos”.
(T, 277).
[Albricia] “En el juego de las Albricias que yo jugaba en mis niñeces del valle de Elqui, sea porque los chilenos nos evaporamos la s final, sea porque las albricias eran siempre cosa en singular—un objeto escondido que se buscaba—la palabra se volvía una especie de sustantivo colectivo … El sentido de la palabra en la tierra mía es el de suerte, hallazgo, o regalo. Yo corrí tras la albricia en mi valle de Elqui, gritándola y viéndola en unidad. Puedo corregir en mi seso y en mi lengua lo aprendido en las edades feas—adolescencia, juventud, madurez—pero no puedo mudar de raíz las expresiones recibidas en la infancia. Aquí quedan, pues, esas albricias en singular”.
(T, 279).
-
“Nocturno de la Consumación”—“Cuantos trabajan con la expresión rimada, más aún con la cabalmente rimada, saben que la rima, que escasea al comienzo a poco andar se viene sobre nosotros en una lluvia cerrada, entrometiéndose dentro del verso mismo, de tal manera que, en los poemas largos, ella se vuelve lo natural y no lo perseguido … En este momento, rechazar una rima interna llega a parecer … rebeldía artificiosa. Ahí he dejado varias de esas rimas internas y espontáneas. Rabie con ellas el de oído retórico, que el niño o Juan Pueblo, criaturas poéticas cabales, aceptan con gusto la infracción”.
(T, 274–275).
“Beber”—“Falta la rima final, para algunos oídos. En el mío, desatento y basto, la palabra esdrújula no da rima precisa ni vaga. El salto del esdrújulo deja en el aire su cabriola como una trampa que engaña al amador del sonsonete. Este amador, persona colectiva que fué millón, disminuye a ojos vistas, y bien se puede servirlo a medias y también dejar de servirlo …” (
T, 277).
-
“Estos Recados llevan el tono más mío, el más frecuente, mi dejo rural con el que he vivido y con el que me voy a morir”.
(T, 280).
-
“No sólo en la escritura sino también en mi habla, dejo, por complacencia, mucha expresión arcaica, sin poner más condición al arcaísmo que la de que sea fácil y llano. Muchos, digo, y no todos los arcaísmos que me acuden y que sacrifico en obsequio de la persona antiarcaica que va a leer. En América esta persona resulta siempre ser una capitalina. El campo americano—y en el campo yo me crié—sigue hablando su lengua nueva veteada de arcaísmos abundantes. La ciudad, lectora de libros doctos, cree que un tal repertorio arranca en mí de los clásicos añejos, y la muy urbana se equivoca” …
(T, 275)
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
