[In the following essay, González-Gerth reviews Bécquer's Rimas in light of the author's poetic philosophy.]

During his short life, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Seville 1836—Madrid 1870) wrote about seventy-five short poems or Rimas which were not published in book form until after his death. They are now numbered among the lesser treasures of Spanish literature. Into these generally brief lyrics, Bécquer projected tremendous intensity of feeling without resorting to the verbal effusiveness so characteristic of his time. He made the poems into vehicles for subtle confession, devoid of artificiality. And his simple sincerity, restraint of expression, and tenuous, unrhetorical phrasing made Bécquer a favorite of contemporary Spanish poets from Juan Ramón Jiménez¹ to Jorge Guillén and Rafael Alberti, of whom the last two are specific assayers of his work as well. However, Bécquer's stories and articles do not show the same admirable conciseness and directness as his poetry, and consequently did not exert the same influence. Nevertheless the prose is as important as the poetry when studying his literary development and poetics.²

Bécquer, once an apprentice painter, whose father and brother were talented painters, and always an enthusiast of the plastic arts, finally decided that his métier was really that of the writer; but, as has been proved conclusively,³ he continued to look upon his subjects, concrete or abstract, with the eye of the pictorial artist. This explains his elaborate prose descriptions, full of details which a painter might remark, descriptions that do not altogether conform with those of Bécquer's contemporaries which are more typical of a period given to rhetoric. Apparently, it did not take Bécquer long to realize that to write is just as difficult as to paint—if not more so; that it requires great effort to express “feelings” and “visions” in any medium, language being perhaps the least adequate.⁴ Thus, there takes place in Bécquer a peculiar artistic evolution: he moves from painter-on-canvas to painter-in-words, and from poet-in-prose to poet-in-verse. Moreover, for Bécquer the very goal of verse-writing is a tremendous problem: for him it does not simply presuppose a literary composition which follows certain arbitrary rules established by men. As far as Bécquer is concerned, poetry is nothing less than an entity that exists independently of all earthly objects, including the poet, although it may suddenly irradiate almost anything with a peculiar glow that only the poet can detect.

I

Throughout his work, we encounter numerous suggestions which would lead us to believe Bécquer considered poetry as something like an eternal, iridescent hummingbird, and the poet as a hunter, whose net is not fine enough to let him effect its capture.

In his Historia de los templos de España, Bécquer employs an analogous simile when he seeks to describe thoughts provoked by the sight of the basilica of Saint Leocadia:

… eran tan rápidas las ideas, que se atropellaban entre sí en la imaginación, como las leves olas de un mar que pica el viento; tan confusas, que deshaciéndose las unas en las otras, sin dar espacio a completarse, huían como esos vagos recuerdos de un sueño que no se pueden coordinar; como esos fantasmas ligerísimos, fenómenos inexplicables de la inspiración, que al querer materializarlos pierden su hermosura, o se escapan como la mariposa que huye dejando entre las manos que la quieren detener el polvo de oro con que sus alas se embellecen.⁵

It would seem that what is most significant and characteristic of Bécquer's notion of poetry is his conviction that it exists apart from and independent of both the poet and the poem; that it is something fleeting, unclear, vague, fantastical, aery, inexplicable, incorporeal, beautiful, formless, mysterious, winged, and luminous. All of these adjectives are keys to Bécquer's vocabulary and thought. Poetry, as he sees it, is ephemeral, fleeting. The poet, hunter of hummingbirds and butterflies, is usually forced to recognize his limitations, and to mold poems only out of golden dust and delicate plumage. Poetry does not need the poet as he needs poetry. Bécquer expresses this attitude perfectly in “Rima iv”:

          No digáis que agotado su tesoro,
de asuntos falta, enmudeció la lira.
Podrá no haber poetas, pero siempre
                    habrá poesía.

The rest of the poem says, in effect, that while there exist in the world, however diffused, light, harmony, mystery, feeling, hope, memory and beauty, that as long as these transitory, intangible elements exist and arouse emotion in the sensitive man, even though he cannot express them, there will be poetry.

It is only natural that Bécquer should try from time to time to define more specifically—if not to pinpoint—the emotion which incites his aspirations towards ideal beauty. And at this point, he tends to erupt into paradox, as in “Rima xxi”:

“¿Qué es poesía?”, dices mientras clavas
en mi pupila tu pupila azul.
“¿Qué es poesía? ¿Y tú me lo preguntas?
Poesía … eres tú.”

Apparently—but only apparently—it is woman, above all a beautiful woman, that represents poetry to Bécquer, because apart from her beauty, woman has in her make-up something of primitive harmony and mystery, of feeling, hope, and eternity. He himself says this in letter i of Cartas literarias a una mujer.

En una ocasión me preguntaste:

“¿Qué es la poesía? …”

Y exclamé, al fin:

“¡La poesía …, la poesía eres tú! …”

La poesía eres tú, te he dicho, porque la poesía es el sentimiento, y el sentimiento es la mujer.

La poesía eres tú, porque esa vaga aspiración a lo bello que la caracteriza, y que es una facultad de la inteligencia en el hombre, en ti pudiera decirse que es un instinto.

La poesía eres tú, porque el sentimiento, que en nosotros es un fenómeno accidental y pasa como una ráfaga de aire, se halla tan íntimamente unido a tu organización especial, que constituye una parte de ti misma.

Ultimamente la poesía eres tú, porque tú eres el foco de donde parten sus rayos …

En la mujer … la poesía está como encarnada en su ser; su aspiración, sus presentimientos, sus pasiones y su Destino son poesía: vive, respira, se mueve en una indefinible atmósfera de idealismo que se desprende de ella, como un flúido luminoso y magnético; es, en una palabra, el verbo poético hecho carne.

Sin embargo, a la mujer se la acusa vulgarmente de prosaísmo. No es extraño; en la mujer es poesía casi todo lo que piensa, pero muy poco de lo que habla.⁶

We have here Bécquer's apparent intention to embody poetry, an intention logically destined to fail because it attempts rational postulates and resolves itself into an almost mystical metaphor. In addition, the poetic qualities Bécquer assigns to woman are all ephemeral: “feeling,” “that vague desire after the beautiful,” “her prescience, her passions and her destiny,” “an indefinable aura of idealism … like a luminous, magnetic fluid,” “almost all she thinks.” It is well known that Bécquer's married life was not a happy one, and there is no direct evidence of any long-lasting love affair. Is, then, this poetic woman of Bécquer's a woman of flesh and blood? Only the ideal woman can unite and retain all the qualities enumerated, and the ideal woman does not exist—at least, she does not exist materially. It is this ideal woman, who, because she is insubstantial, can be composed of insubstantial elements: she is the one the poet seems to crave, not the woman of flesh and blood, as he himself explains in “Rima xi”:

          “Yo soy ardiente, yo soy morena,
yo soy el símbolo de la pasión;
de ansia de goces mi alma está llena.
¿A mí me buscas?” “No es a ti, no.”
          “Mi frente es pálida; mis trenzas, de oro;
puedo brindarte dichas sin fin;
yo de ternura guardo un tesoro.
¿A mí me llamas?” “No; no es a ti.”
          “Yo soy un sueño, un imposible,
vano fantasma de niebla y luz;
soy incorpórea, soy intangible;
no puedo amarte.” “¡Oh, ven; ven tú!”

But let us carry the analysis further. If, apart from her incorporeality and intangibility, this impossible dream is a “phantom of mist and light,” it may be an ideal, but not an ideal in the actual shape of a woman. “Rima xv” is revealing in this respect:

          Cendal flotante de leve bruma,
rizada cinta de blanca espuma,
                                        rumor sonoro
                                        de arpa de oro,
beso del aura, onda de luz,
                                        eso eres tú.
          Tú, sombra aérea, que cuantas veces
voy a tocarte te desvaneces
como la llama, como el sonido,
como la niebla, como el gemido
                                        del lago azul.
          En mar sin playas, onda sonante;
en el vacío, cometa errante;
                                        largo lamento
                                        del ronco viento,
ansia perpetua de algo mejor,
                                        eso soy yo.
¡Yo, que a tus ojos, en mi agonía
los ojos vuelvo de noche y día;
yo, que incansable corro y demente
tras una sombra, tras la hija ardiente
                                        de una ilusión!

Edmund King, in his excellent study Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: from Painter to Poet, comes to the following conclusions:

Is Bécquer, in “Rima 60/xv” and others, writing about a real woman? Clearly not. Is he writing about an imaginary woman? Hardly. The flaming daughters of sensation, of his delirium, of a vision, are what he elsewhere calls pure thoughts, impossible to express in words. Bécquer is poetizing his state of mind. … His mind is filled, then, with intangible (inexpressible) ideas, which he longs to capture in words. The words that he finds all belong to the realm of the evanescent, the ineffable, that he personifies as a woman, not a woman whom he endows with the qualities of the ineffable. What he is trying to capture really is the pure thought, “delusion's ardent daughter,” light. The anguish he expresses is the anguish of not being able to unite with pure light.⁷

Bécquer's absolute ideal is, in effect, light—real and symbolical light—an element combining the utmost of evanescence and luminescence. Even in the few selections from his work already quoted, one will note his preoccupation, or, more accurately, his obsession, with light and its effects: “golden dust” on the wings of the poetic butterfly; the light of “Rima iv”; the radiant “source” (i. e. focal point) and the “luminous magnetic fluid” that partially compose the ideal woman; the heat of passion in the form of woman; the “golden tresses” of the equally transubstantiated tenderness; the “phantom of mist and light” (the ineffable idea); the “zephyr's kiss” and the “wave of light”; “the flame”; “delusion's ardent daughter.” But one will also note the steady contrapuntal effect that shadow plays: “vague memories of a dream”; the “mystery” of “Rima iv”; the “veil of sea-foam floating weightless”; the “mist” that evaporates and the shadow the poet pursues. It appears that there is in Bécquer's work a conflict between the elements of obscurity and brilliance, between the shadow that always lures him on and the tenuous, sporadic light of his poetic vision. The light that shines within or without his mind is a lure that will ultimately lead him astray, as it does Manrique, the protagonist of the story “El rayo de luna”; it is the powerful attraction of an unapproachable idea. Those who have repeatedly called Bécquer “guest of the mists” (huésped de las nieblas) should really have used a double epithet; “guest of the mists and seeker of light.” Bécquer himself says it is a “thread of light” that unites the disparate ideas arising in the poet's mind,⁸ and he calls the lures at which his mind anxiously strains “pinpoints of light”—like the stars, like will-o-the-wisps, like the brilliant eyes of a woman. They are like those “pinpoints of light” he admires so much in Rembrandt's chiaroscuro as symbols of artistic fulfillment.⁹

Yet it is undeniable that light and not shadow is Bécquer's true poetic ideal. Bécquer leads us to this conclusion when he writes about the vision of the Virgin of Veruela, during which the limits of sight would be steeped in total light, “light within light.”¹⁰ Bécquer suggests that not even Murillo could reproduce such light. In this instance, Bécquer the poet and Bécquer the Catholic agree that the poetic ideal and the exalted absolute are light. (Of the relation in Bécquer between religion and poetry, more will be said below.) The ideal light of poetry, like the fiat lux of Genesis and the mystical perception of the true visionaries, shatters the gloom and illuminates the shadows, as in “Rima iv”:

Mientras las ondas de la luz al beso
          palpiten encendidas;
mientras el sol las desgarradas nubes
          de fuego y oro vista;

as long as this is so, “there will be poetry.”

Even the ineffable beauty that seems, at first glance, to take the shape of Manrique's (i. e. Bécquer's) ideal woman in the tale “El rayo de luna”¹¹ is actually no more than a moonbeam—that is, light. In “Tres Fechas,”¹² this ineffable beauty is a dream turned woman, a phantom, though not like Wordsworth's “phantom of delight” which is, conversely, a woman; this image resolves itself in the “ray of light” of “Rima lxxiv.”

The contemporary Spanish poet Jorge Guillén has written incisively of Bécquer that “all texts converge on a single line of theory.”¹³ King, in the work already cited, completes the analysis. “To be sure, light is not the only evanescent property of real things, and Bécquer finds others that will express his concept of ideal beauty. … But light is still the most constant, the climactic image.”¹⁴ It is a fact that the great majority of the terms Bécquer tentatively experiments with in describing abstract beauty are employed because of some aspect of their luminosity.

Bécquer, a man to the core, says that poetry is woman because he considers woman to be closer to the beau ideal than any other living thing. This is nothing more than a rationalization of his poetized state of mind regarding evanescent light. For Bécquer, white skin, golden hair and brilliant eyes make of woman a more immediate anthropomorphic image of light. Also woman, in general, is more fragile and gentle—and, theoretically, more sentimental. This is the argument he will use in shifting from the visual to the psychological plane. In order to make his analogy, Bécquer says that “poetry is feeling.” Later, in Cartas literarias a una mujer, letters ii and iii, he pursues the matter:

… el sentimiento no es más que un efecto, y todos los efectos proceden de una causa más o menos conocida. ¿Cuál lo será? ¿Cuál podrá serlo de este divino arranque de entusiasmo, de esta vaga y melancólica aspiración del alma, que se traduce al lenguaje de los hombres por medio de sus más suaves armonías sino el amor?

Sí; el amor es el manantial perenne de toda poesía, el origen fecundo de todo lo grande, el principio eterno de todo lo bello; y digo el amor porque la religión, nuestra religión sobre todo, es un amor también, es el amor más puro, más hermoso, el único infinito que se conoce …

El amor es la causa del sentimiento …

… es la suprema ley del universo; ley misteriosa por la que todo se gobierna y rige, desde el átomo inanimado hasta la criatura racional; que de él parten y a él convergen como a un centro de irresistible atracción todas nuestras ideas y acciones; que está, aunque oculto, en el fondo de toda cosa y—efecto de una primera causa: Dios—es, a su vez, origen de esos mil pensamientos desconocidos, que todos ellos son poesía, poesía verdadera y espontánea …¹⁵

Here one gets a clear look at Bécquer the poet, the Christian, the idealist, and—in embryo—the literary theorist. In his preface to La Soledad, the collection of poems by Augusto Ferrán Fornés, Bécquer further distinguishes between popular and literary types of poetry:

Hay una poesía magnífica y sonora; una poesía hija de la meditación y el arte, que se engalana con todas las pompas de la lengua, que se mueve con una cadenciosa majestad, habla a la imaginación, completa sus cuadros y la conduce a su antojo por un sendero desconocido, seduciéndola con su armonía y su hermosura.

Hay otra natural, breve, seca, que brota del alma como una chispa eléctrica, que hiere el sentimiento con una palabra y huye, y desnuda de artificio, desembarazada dentro de una forma libre, despierta, con una que las toca, las mil ideas que duermen en el océano sin fondo de la fantasía.

La primera tiene un valor dado: es la poesía de todo el mundo.

La segunda carece de medida absoluta, adquiere las proporciones de la imaginación que impresiona: puede llamarse la poesía de los poetas.

La primera es una melodía que nace, se desarrolla, acaba y se desvanece.

La segunda es un acorde que se arranca de un arpa, y se quedan las cuerdas vibrando con un zumbido armonioso.

Cuando se concluye aquélla, se dobla la hoja con una suave sonrisa de satisfacción.

Cuando se acaba ésta, se inclina la frente cargada de pensamientos sin nombre.

La una es el fruto de la unión del arte y de la fantasía.

La otra es la centella inflamada que brota al choque del sentimiento y la pasión.¹⁶

Although Dámaso Alonso¹⁷ has demonstrated that either directly or indirectly Bécquer took several of these ideas from Claude Fauriel, it is interesting to consider the distinction Bécquer makes between the two kinds of poetry. Clearly, he preferred the second kind, and in the last analysis it is the popular element, more or less stylized, that one finds in Bécquer's poems. Apart from the recognized influence of Heine, both through the Lieder and French imitations, as well as other influences pointed out by Alonso, the influence most deeply evident in Bécquer's poetry is that of the folk poetry of his native Andalusia. One should not, then, be surprised to find him so appreciative of the popular lyric tradition, because one finds in the coplas and seguidillas elements that usually thrive outside of verse: the suggestive, the amorphous, the traditional as well as the spontaneous. The kinds of poetry which Bécquer distinguishes remind us that Lorca would have attributed the first to the muse and the second to the demon.

          Yo sé un himno gigante y extraño
que anuncia en la noche del alma una aurora,
y estas páginas son de ese himno,
cadencias que el aire dilata en las sombras.
          Yo quisiera escribirlo, del hombre
domando el rebelde, mezquino idioma,
con palabras que fuesen a un tiempo
suspiros y risas, colores y notas.
          Pero en vano es luchar; que no hay cifra
capaz de encerrarlo, y apenas, ¡oh hermosa!,
si, teniendo en mis manos las tuyas,
pudiera al oído cantártelo a solas.

II

In “Rima v,” Bécquer expresses the notion that there resides in the poet a unique spirit, which one may view, in non-Platonic terms, as human awareness of the mysterious, the fantastic, the legendary, the long-ago, the fleeting. The poet, then, has a privileged soul.

          Yo soy el invisible
anillo que sujeta
el mundo de la forma
al mundo de la idea.
          Yo, en fin, soy ese espíritu,
desconocida esencia,
perfume misterioso
de que es vaso el poeta.

One must remember that during the Romantic period the poet attained more importance than ever before. It was during this period that the individual “I” reached out desperately to affirm itself. It was then that the poet, the intellectual with active feelings, began to assert his “I” to his contemporaries by means of his poetry. But at the same time the Romantic poet was no longer a creator in the intrinsic sense, as he thought himself to be during the Renaissance. He was no longer a minor god, having his way with language. On the contrary, he is almost helpless—or such, preeminently, is Bécquer's testimony. There is a certain touch of atavism in the Romantic concept of the poet, which is seen in his dependence on a power outside himself. Even Rubén Darío at the turn of the century reveals the Romantic outlook when he calls poets “towers of God,” that is to say, receivers whose mission is to be a link with the divine.

As a result of his relationship with the supernatural, the poet is, according to the Romantics, an individual endowed with a special vision that controls his life, and one who can come to know more of man than the scientist with his microscopes and telescopes.

Bécquer's idea of the poet is Romantic, to be sure, but he stresses strongly the poet's own spirit, as incorporeal as poetry itself. The physical portion of the poet is no more than a “flask,” a receptacle, and from another point of view, a hindrance. The poet's spirit, according to Bécquer, needs inspiration—or so he seems to suggest in “Rima vii,” one of his loveliest.

          Del salón en el ángulo oscuro,
de su dueño tal vez olvidada,
silenciosa y cubierta de polvo,
          veíase el arpa.
¡Cuánta nota dormía en sus cuerdas,
como el pájaro duerme en las ramas,
esperando la mano de nieve
          que sabe arrancarlas!
¡Ay!—pensé—. ¡Cuántas veces el genio
así duerme en el fondo del alma,
y una voz, como Lázaro, espera
que le diga: “¡Levántate y anda!”

One could not find a more serene and sublime metaphor for the phenomenon of inspiration. How does this come about? In his own introduction to his works, Bécquer writes that “mi musa concibe y pare en tal misterioso santuario de la cabeza, poblándola de creaciones sin número. …”¹⁸ He attributes to the conventional protagonist of poetic phenomena a physiological function as frank as it is grotesque. Nevertheless, one must warn that Bécquer's consciousness of inspiration is really developed more specifically, as he shows in letter ii of Cartas literarias a una mujer:

… cuando siento no escribo. Guardo, sí, en mi cerebro escritas, como en un libro misterioso, las impresiones que han dejado en él su huella al pasar; estas ligeras y ardientes hijas de la sensación duermen allí agrupadas en el fondo de mi memoria hasta el instante en que, puro, tranquilo, sereno y revestido, por decirlo así, de un poder sobrenatural, mi espíritu las evoca, y tienden sus alas transparentes, que bullen con un zumbido extraño, y cruzan otra vez a mis ojos como en una visión luminosa y magnífica.

Entonces no siento ya con los nervios que se agitan … siento, sí, pero de una manera que puede llamarse artificial; escribo como el que copia de una página ya escrita …

Todo el mundo siente. Sólo a algunos seres les es dado el guardar como un tesoro la memoria viva de lo que han sentido. Yo creo que estos son los poetas. Es más: creo que únicamente por esto lo son.¹⁹

It is clear, then, that memory plays a very important part in the production of what one may describe as “the poetic state of the soul,” a condition in which remembered emotion induces ideas by association. This process of poetic creation in Bécquer has obvious affinity with the principle expressed by Wordsworth, who asserted that the writing of poetry depended on “emotions recollected in tranquility.”²⁰

However, the call of inspiration, that attraction between the complex spirit of the universe and the unique spirit of the poet, that sensation which prompts him to write, is usually needed for him to understand himself, although the poet is, in spite of himself, a man more or less supplied with reason. This is the dramatic theme of “Rima iii”:

          ideas sin palabras,
palabras sin sentido:
cadencias que no tienen
ni ritmo ni compás;
          memorias y deseos
de cosas que no existen;
accesos de alegría,
impulsos de llorar;
          actividad nerviosa
que no halla en que emplearse;
sin rienda que lo guíe,
caballo volador,
          locura que el espíritu
exalta y enardece;
embriaguez divina
del genio creador …
          ¡Tal es la inspiración!
          Gigante voz que el caos
ordena en el cerebro,
y entre las sombras hace
la luz aparecer;
          brillante rienda de oro
que poderosa enfrena
de la exaltada mente
el volador corcel;
          hilo de luz que en haces
los pensamientos ata;
sol que las nubes rompe
y toca en el cenit;
          inteligente mano
que en un collar de perlas
consigue las indóciles
palabras reunir; …
          ¡Tal es nuestra razón!
          Con ambas siempre en lucha
y de ambas vencedor,
tan sólo el Genio puede
a un yugo atar las dos.

In “Rima viii” Bécquer subjectively synthesizes his conviction that the poet's spirit possesses a supernatural gift:

          En el mar de la duda en que bogo,
                    ni aun sé lo que creo;
¡sin embargo, estas ansias me dicen
                    que yo llevo algo
                    divino aquí dentro!

There is no doubt that in spite of his many points of difference with the Romantic poets that preceded him, Bécquer concurs with all of them in granting the poet tremendous importance. This would not make sense if he were dealing with the useless and inactive sort of man. But for the Romantics, and I include Bécquer here, the poet has a mission in life.

III

Bécquer reveals an idea of the poet's mission which is ambitious, tragic, and sublime. Such a mission is the difficult, perhaps impossible task of capturing all the ineffable aspects of life. Bécquer, the artist who seeks the quintessence of beauty—light—proposes to make precise what is vague, to express the inexpressible, to describe the indescribable, to capture what is fugitive. All of which is to say he means to seize the luminous poetry of the ideal.

Bécquer's poetic goal is primarily personal, although, on another plane, he may have a goal which is humanitarian and universal. But it is a goal very distant from one like that of Espronceda, with his socially-victimized Adam (El diablo mundo) and his desire to express the suffering of human life; Bécquer's goal is far from that of Rivas with his foundling, Mudarra (El moro expósito), and his liberal political preoccupation; it is also far from the goal of Zorrilla with his haughty, aristocratic Don Juan, and his ambition to be the national bard.

From the instant that Bécquer knows himself to be a poet, his quest for fame actually begins to abate: the dream of glory so coveted by the Romantic poets diminishes and indeed almost disappears for him. There remains with the mature young poet only the wild desire to realize his mission as completely as possible.

According to Bécquer there is still another element which, although somewhat more solid, is nevertheless fleeting. In letter iv of Cartas literarias desde mi celda,²¹ we find a long digression on historical tradition and what is incumbent upon the poet who would follow that tradition. Customs broadly viewed as modes of life, ancient architectural styles, in fact all which speaks of the past, is, in some way, tradition. On the surface it might seem that this “poetic” concept of tradition lies within Romantic traditionalism. But if we further analyze Bécquer's position, we discover that his concept of tradition differs from that of Zorrilla, for example, who considered it purely in terms of national history. Bécquer sees tradition as something more universal, something in the process of disappearing little by little in its continual clash with modern civilization; something that, nevertheless, seems able to account for itself by leaving behind certain characteristics or features as vague as they are profound. One portion of Bécquer's poetic mission is to find these elements and give voice to them.

In “Tres fechas,” he alludes to the “silenciosos restos de otras edades más poéticas que la material en que vivimos y nos ahogamos en pura prosa.”²² In “El castillo real de Olite,” Bécquer affirms that “para el soñador, para el poeta, suponen poco los estragos del tiempo: lo que está caído lo levanta; lo que no ve, lo adivina; lo que ha muerto, lo saca del sepulcro y le manda que ande, como Cristo a Lázaro.”²³

It is not surprising for a Romantic poet to feel such an attraction for the past, but Bécquer feels more than attraction: he feels love and tenderness, and the need for conservation. He is not content to walk among picturesque ruins; instead he would keep worth-while things from falling into a ruinous condition, at least from the artist's point of view. In “Tres Fechas,” we find another revealing passage:

Hay en Toledo una calle estrecha, torcida y oscura, que guarda tan fielmente la huella de las cien generaciones que en ella han habitado, que habla con tanta elocuencia a los ojos del artista y le revela tantos secretos juntos de afinidad entre las ideas y las costumbres de cada siglo, con la forma y el carácter especial impreso en sus obras más insignificantes, que yo cerraría sus entradas con una barrera y pondría sobre la barrera un tarjetón con este letrero:

“En nombre de los poetas y de los artistas, en nombre de los que sueñan y de los que estudian, se prohibe a la civilización que toque a uno solo de estos ladrillos con su mano demoledora y prosaica.”²⁴

Hence, it would seem that Bécquer was a conservative when it came to material things in order to further the possibilities of art, of human emotions, even of history. The preservation of the sources of ineffable beauty was paramount in his mind.

Now, in “Rima xxvi,” we find concepts which are apparently ambiguous. “Tú sabes y yo sé que en esta vida, con genio, es muy contado quien la escribe. Y con oro, cualquiera hace poesía.” “Quien la escribe” doubtless refers to the ones who succeed, that is to say, the poets. One must remember that according to Bécquer, poetry is captured in verse. His contention is that no one creates poetry. How then is it that “con oro, cualquiera hace poesía?” It seems that this poem expresses ironically the poet's disillusionment with his own life, and gives us his view of the “coarse” and “prosaic” nineteenth century. However, within this state of mind, Bécquer wants to reiterate the idea that true poetry is, among other things, beauty, love, and happiness, and is to be captured by the poet, while any fool with money can make something artificial that pretends to be a substitute for the real thing.

For Bécquer, reality is the idea, the spirit, the feeling, and the dream. True knowledge is found in imagining—in fantasy, emotion and illusion. What is material does not and must not take on any importance. What is material is anti-poetical. Thus, as the poem represents the difficult, almost impossible capture of poetry, poetry itself is the fleeting yet eternal spirit which animates the true form of things. In this assumption, he appears to show a certain agreement with Keats' famous lines from the Ode on a Grecian Urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all / ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Clearly, Bécquer's concept of poetry and of the poet and his mission does not represent a new Romantic rebellion. It represents, rather, a flight, an escape from the “materialistic” and “prosaic” world, which is at the same time a search for the poetic ideal, like Manrique's chase in “El rayo de luna,” or, as Bécquer explains in “Rima xv” (already quoted) and in “Rima ii”:

          Saeta que voladora
cruza arrojada al azar,
sin adivinarse dónde
temblando se clavará …
          eso soy yo, que al acaso
cruzo el mundo, sin pensar
de dónde vengo, ni adónde
mis pasos me llevarán.

The sources of Bécquer's Platonism have not yet been fully determined. Doubtless, he absorbed it from both his readings and conversations, for after all, by his time, the neo-Platonic elements of Romantic idealism were very much in the Spanish air, seducing all those who were as prone to such subtle notions as Bécquer was. But aside from his incapacity to comprehend properly its philosophical implications, the fact remains that Bécquer's poetics is essentially Platonic, and that it led him to create a small volume of poems whose language was to be rediscovered, admired and tapped—though not precisely imitated—by generations of poets after him. His continued popularity and prestige between 1888 and 1948, one of the most splendid periods of Hispanic literature, proves him to be not only a literary figure but also a literary influence of note.

It may be asserted that the three poets of the Spanish language whose works have attained the most instantaneous success and who have been most frequently read by the general public in modern times (the evergreen Romancero aside) are Bécquer, Rubén Darío and García Lorca. Such recognition is only a fitting tribute to Bécquer's genius. It is, ironically, the recompense for a man whose life was brief, whose desire for fame was short-lived, whose career was more a thwarted project than a well-rewarded occupation, and who conceived of poetry as a fleeting and unapproachable entity, and the poet as a desperate human being whose mission is destined to fail.

Notes

1. Guillermo de Torre, “Contemporary Spanish Poetry,” The Texas Quarterly (special issue Image of Spain, ed. R. Martínez-López), IV (Spring 1961), 58.

2. Joaquín Casalduero, “Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer,” in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, ed. Horatio Smith (New York, 1947). This is an excellent short article on Bécquer in general. For the most complete list of references to date, see Rubén Benítez, Ensayo de bibliografía razonada de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Buenos Aires, 1961).

3. Edmund L. King, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: From Painter to Poet, Together with a Concordance of the Rimas (Mexico, 1947).

4. Jorge Guillén, Language and Poetry (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 125-156.

5. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Obras Completas (Madrid, 1954), p. 910. All of the quotations from Bécquer in the article are from this edition.

6. Obras, pp. 663-667.

7. King, op. cit., pp. 123-124.

8. See below, Rima iii, “… hilo de luz que en haces / los pensamientos ata. …”

9. King, (op. cit., p. 28), comments upon this: “When Bécquer's references to painting and painters—comparatively rare—are brought together, they show how important the effect of light is for him. Thus, in all his works there is no more than passing mention, for instance, of Velázquez and El Greco, and no mention at all of the giants of the Italian School. Rather he selects Claude Lorrain because of that painter's treatment of the twilight haze, and Rembrandt for his use of chiaroscuro, or as Bécquer puts it more particularly, el punto de luz.” Consult this book about the many important relationships between Bécquer and the pictorial arts.

10. Obras, p. 652.

11. Ibid., pp. 174-187.

12. Ibid., pp. 381-404.

13. Jorge Guillén, La poética de Bécquer (New York, 1943), p. 9.

14. King, op. cit., p. 123.

15. Obras, pp. 671-675.

16. Ibid., pp. 1297-1298.

17. Dámaso Alonso, “Originalidad de Bécquer” in Ensayos sobre poesía española (Buenos Aires, 1946), pp. 270-276.

18. Obras, p. 43.

19. Ibid., pp. 668-669.

20. See the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads.

21. Obras, pp. 579-581.

22. Ibid., p. 392.

23. Ibid., p. 1068.

24. Ibid., p. 382.