SOURCE: “Heroic Vocation: Cervantes, Guillén, and ‘Noche Del Caballero,’” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 93, No. 4, October, 1998, pp. 1021-33.

Miguel de Cervantes was an influential figure not only for Jorge Guillén but for several other writers of the so-called Generation of 1927.¹ In Cántico there are three poems that acknowledge a direct connection with Cervantes: ‘Tarde mayor’ and ‘Los balcones del Oriente’ from the 1945 edition, and ‘Noche del Caballero’ from the 1950 edition. All three poems appear in the fourth section of the volume, entitled Aquí mismo. Cervantes also figures prominently in Clamor, Guillén's second volume of poetry, in the poem ‘Dimisión de Sancho’, and to a lesser extent in the subsequent volumes, Homenjae, Y otros poemas, and Final.

‘Libre nací y en libertad me fundo’ is the epigraph for Guillén's poem ‘Tarde mayor’ and comes from the last line of the sonnet sung by Gelasia towards the end of Cervantes's La Galatea.² The sonnet boldly rejects the petty squabbling characteristic of the human lovers but also establishes a firmer foundation for love, based on the simple pleasures and gentle bounty of nature. The natural world, for Guillén, is a symbol par excellence of the kind of harmonious interaction that is the essence of love. For this reason, many of his poems place human love and lovers within Nature.³ ‘Tarde mayor’ combines lovers, natural world, and history and uses the quotation from the Cervantes original to develop the idea that man can perceive a way to overcome intellectually the destructive power over the human spirit of time and history (in the poem, Spain's Civil War).⁴ The essence of love, which unites the human lovers, has a quality of endurance that is alluded to and confirmed by the references to the natural world and its capacity to survive:

Si tal fronda perece fulminada,
Rumoroso otra vez igual verdor
Se alzará en el olvido del tirano.

(AN, p. 380)

Freedom from the travails of love in the pastoral setting of Cervantes becomes, in Guillén, freedom of an intellectual and spiritual kind that can contextualize and, thereby, rise above the afflictions of our contemporary world.

‘Los balcones del Oriente’ is the first poem of the Aquí mismo section and provides a strong contrast with its counterpart, ‘Paso a la aurora’, at the start of the second section, Las horas situadas.⁵ The latter poem considers dawn emerging from a deluge of rain, and an energetic contemplation of the eternal newness of Creation underpins a similarly vigorous perception of being and existence. Its imagery and freshness contrast with the gloom and monotony of ‘Los balcones del Oriente’, where dawn's light struggles to appear through cloud and smoke in a suburban, quasi-industrial setting. Here, dawn and awakening could not be more different from those of ‘Más allá’, the spirit of whose opening lines is entirely absent:

Madrugada.
Emerge contra la nada
Luchando el ser—de mal ceño.

(AN, p. 339)

In this poem, Guillén's most luminous and illuminating symbol, the sun, is ‘triste’ and seems to share the dreariness of the human context of daily, unrewarding toil, which Guillén loads with negative connotations: ‘¿Todo resurge en suburbio, ❙ En un martes, en un trece?’ The poem ends with a question and implied response that are as precariously balanced as the knife-edge on which life itself appears to be, its daily round lacking anything of universal significance:

¿Siempre la vida en un tris?
Lucha el ser contra la nada.

(AN, p. 342)

The title of the poem comes from the opening words of Chapter 13 in Part 1 of Cervantes's Don Quijote de la Mancha, ‘Mas apenas comenzó a descubrirse el día por los balcones del Oriente’ and Guillén states (AO, p. 118) that his use of the title is ironic, the beauty of the image of dawn standing in stark contrast to that presented by the poem. Surely it is not coincidental, either, that in the original work the rhetorical flourish of the opening lines, so suitable in a tale of a knight-errant, should preface a chapter in which a large part of the story records Don Quijote being called to account for the beliefs and actions of his professed calling. Quijote certainly ‘struggles’ against the nugatory and deflating taunts in the questions posed to him by the gentlemen with whom he is travelling.

‘Noche del Caballero’ was written between 1947 and 1949 and the section in which it appears, Aquí mismo, has an introductory quotation from Lope de Vega:

No es esto filosófica fatiga,
Transmutación sutil o alquimia vana
Sino esencia real que al tacto obliga.

(AN, p. 338)

It is a section that deals with the here and now, with the reality of circumstance. As the Lope de Vega quotation suggests, it deals not with abstracts or illusions but with realities or ‘esencia real’. Essence is not something that one normally associates with touch. For Guillén, the Lope de Vega quotation means that Aquí mismo will present realities or circumstances that require involvement (‘tacto’), from the protagonist of the poems and, of course, from the reader in his dedication to the act of reading and comprehension of the scope of the text.

The poem takes as its point of departure Chapter 20 in Part 1 of Cervantes's Don Quijote, the episode of the fulling-hammers.⁶ Here, Quijote and Sancho are drawn to cross a meadow in darkness to find the noisy torrents of streamwater that will assuage their raging thirst. A different, loud, and constant noise strikes fear into their hearts, a fear exacerbated by the darkness, the rustling leaves of tall trees, the solitude, the wind, and the stubborn delay of dawn. Quijote determines to resolve the mystery, in true knight-errant fashion, but Sancho prevents his departure by surreptitiously hobbling Rocinante. To pass the time, they entertain each other with story-telling, during which Sancho's fear prevents him from distancing himself from Quijote in order to empty his bowels. This offends Quijote's nostrils and his sensibilities: the respect that ought to exist between knight and squire has been breached. Daylight begins to break, Sancho unties Rocinante and the two proceed nervously towards the noise. When they realize that it comes from nothing more fearsome than six fulling-hammers, Sancho mocks Quijote's previously declared heroic intentions and Quijote beats him on the back with his lance. Quijote's dignity is hurt, but Sancho's sense of merriment is roused, seeing the humour of their adventure as being worthy of retelling. Quijote disagrees and resolves that, in future, Sancho must treat him with greater respect and he himself must exact greater respect from his squire. The episode ends with Sancho vowing to speak only in his master's honour and with Quijote satisfied that the correct knight/squire relationship has been restored.

Guillén's account is more closely linked to the original than either of the two poems already mentioned. It remains faithful to the setting: the dark night, the roaring sound of cascading water, the wood with leaves of trees rustling in the wind, and finally the sound of an even greater noise, frightening and menacing. He gives no indication that this further noise comes from the fulling-hammers, nor does he re-create any of the dialogue or other events of the original. Certainly, mockery is absent.⁷ Guillén is interested primarily in the setting: the harmonious sounds of the landscape, beneath which resounds an additional, threatening noise that is menacing. He is also interested in Don Quijote, the hero-figure, as represented by what the latter says of himself: ‘Yo soy aquel para quien están guardados los peligros, las grandes hazañas, los valerosos hechos’ (DQ, p. 238), and later, ‘Pues todo esto que yo te pinto son incentivos y despertadores de mi ánimo, que ya hace que el corazón me reviente en el pecho con el deseo que tiene de acometer esta aventura, por más dificultosa que se muestra’. In Guillén's poem this hero-figure is referred to as ‘el ya elegido’, ‘el más intenso’, ‘el tan llamado’, ‘el ingenuo’, ‘el siempre dadivoso’, ‘el mejor’, ‘el valeroso’, ‘el sumo viviente’, and finally ‘un hombre más que un hombre’. For Guillén, Don Quijote is an exemplary figure, for the reasons I have suggested (based on the quotations above): because of his conviction of who he is, and his faith in his capacity to face up to any test, however difficult it may be. There is a further element of Quijote's vision of himself that is relevant to this reading of Guillén's poem. Finding that Rocinante is unable to move, Quijote regrets his inability to confront the terror and Sancho suggests he dismount and rest on the grass. Quijote rejects this pusillanimous course of action with scorn, as being unworthy of a knight, and declares his intentions: ‘Que yo haré lo que viere que más viene con mi pretensión’ (DQ, p. 241).

The ways in which Guillén uses this exemplary figure and this setting in his own creative endeavour can be approached initially by reference to El argumento de la obra, Guillén's prose commentary on the fundamental ideas of Cántico. The volume of poems represents ‘un yo en diálogo con la realidad’ (AO, p. 91), and also,

[…] supone una relación relativamente equilibrada entre un protagonista sano y libre y un mundo a plomo. Esta clase de relación, digamos normal, se halla sujeta—lo sabemos todos muy bien—a crisis. […] Un acompañamiento en claroscuro acaba de situar aquellas correspondencias. Es un claroscuro de fondo. La atención converge hacia el luminoso centro sitiado. El azar y el desorden, el mal y el dolor, el tiempo y la muerte dañan, trastornan. Son los ruidos hostiles. […] Todas esas influencias deformadoras o anuladoras constituyen el coro de Cántico, coro menor de voces, secundarias respecto a la voz cantante. Próximas o remotas, subsisten en el foro, muy capaces de figurar como protagonistas. Lo serán en otras escenas y con entonación tan robusta que formarán clamor. Aquí basta su existencia dentro del conjunto. Sólo así el conjunto lo es, sin mutilaciones que alterarían la verdad. […] El hombre no se rinde sin más ni más a sus enemigos. Cántico propugna el esfuerzo por ser, el combate contra el no ser. No es que se acepte el don de vivir. Sobre todo se practica la voluntad de vivir.

(AO, pp. 107, 116, 119)

Cántico, then, takes as its basic point of departure a belief in an orderly state of harmony between man and the world. Harmony is, however, subject to threats, to crises, or, as Guillén explains, a form of semi-darkness that never actually extinguishes the potential for harmony, the ‘luminoso centro sitiado’. ‘Desorden’ is one of the circumstances that Guillén maintains can upset that harmony; it is one of the ‘ruidos hostiles’. In the poem, night, water, trees, rustling leaves represent harmony, and the ‘estruendo mayor’ symbolizes the disorder that threatens the harmony of the night, functioning as a metaphor for deliberately unspecified but potentially negative circumstances. Cántico contains both a ‘coro menor’ and a ‘voz cantante’: symbolic disorder, together with a symbolic affirmation of the harmony of life in Creation. In many of the poems of Cántico Guillén demonstrates that man's reaction to the ‘coro menor’, to hostile forces, is not one of submission.⁸ Like the hero, like the protagonist of Cántico, man struggles to confront those hostile forces, and in so doing salvages his own being, his validity as a human being, from those negative aspects of life (listed by Guillén in the first of the quotations above from El argumento de la obra as, ‘el azar, el desorden, el mal y el dolor, el tiempo y la muerte’) that could diminish him. He must above all put into effect ‘la voluntad de vivir’. He does not just accept life as it is, he actively strives to participate in life, to make his own being real and effective. It is this concept of ‘practicar la voluntad de vivir’, which can be seen in Don Quijote's comments about himself, quoted above, that makes Don Quijote an exemplary figure for the author of Cántico.

The poem begins: ‘Todo está preparado.’ Title and epigraph have already told us that it will deal with the knight and be based on Chapter 20 of Part 1 of Don Quijote. Two-thirds of Section i of the poem are used to set the scene, beginning with simple statements, with no verbs, to draw in the details (darkness, breeze, and silence, broken by the noise of water by a meadow in a wood (ll. 2-6)) and developing to a point where danger threatens and the knight is ready for whatever may be the nature of this next ‘adventure’. The place that is the centre of the action of this poem has no name. Indeed, it cannot have a name, since the reality of place, in spite of the minutely detailed description, is not important. Guillén implies, in fact, that even were there to be a place-name, which would in theory ‘reveal’ where the action takes place, nothing fundamental would be gained. This is because the place, and all that happens there, is an extended metaphor for the existential self-knowledge that is acquired, which is a fundamental aspect of the long poems distributed so carefully throughout Cántico. The place is important, however, in terms first of all of the reality of encounter, confrontation, and the discovery of a steady determination to come to terms with danger, fear, and the unknown. Secondly, it is important in relation to the questions that such experiences raise with regard to an individual's ability and desire to confront them: to confront his own nature and the resources he possesses to distinguish between, on the one hand, the threats to existential strength and, on the other, the foundations of that existential strength. Both threats and foundations exist in the world beyond the individual and also within him.⁹

At a superficial level, of course, the place is unknown because of the darkness. Nevertheless, though sight, so fundamental in Cántico, hardly operates, other senses do: hearing helps the branches to be divined or guessed at (‘frondas adivínadas’), it also helps to focus moving leaves whose sound is like a fragmented whisper (‘un balbucir de voz en poco viento’) and whose movement is like darting glances actually trying to discern shape in the darkness (‘sensibles ❙ A un aire que ya fuese ❙ Movilidad de una mirada humana’). The setting must be a poplar wood, on the basis of the noise rising up, as through trees (‘A juzgar por aquellas tan seguidas escalas de rumor en ascensión’). The water, too, is perceived by hearing (‘tan sonora’ and ‘resonante’). The thundering noise, unseen but heard as it crashes against stones, sparks off in the mind the idea of splashing, glistening water, but it is not really seen, ‘por entre los reflejos que se anegan’.¹⁰

The all-important sense of sight is inoperative, but the setting can be perceived and understood. There is no threat in this natural setting, in spite of the darkness: ‘Frondas adivinadas ❙ Como espesuras leves’, ‘Escalas de rumor en ascensión ❙ Trémulamente firme’. The water has a ‘majestuoso poderío’, which is likened to a song whose ‘compás agreste’ relieves an otherwise monotonous sound. Its power and lack of beginning or end endow it with mystery and constant life, ‘más veloz, más invasor, más duro’. The tranquillity (‘silencio bajo ruido’) is interrupted by an additional noise, very different from those already commented on, one that gradually imposes, ‘se distingue, se impone, se establece’. It symbolizes a threat to the natural harmony of the night: ‘Más incógnito aún ❙ Como gemido en forma de amenaza, ❙ Un estruendo mayor’. The questions that follow (p. 432, ll. 21-24) indicate the fearsome nature of the noise, the third one suggesting it may have the power to turn tranquillity and harmony (the night-time setting) into a menacing beast: ‘¿Se enfurecen las fauces de la noche?’ The obscurity and indistinctiveness of the night have been understood,¹¹ but now an awareness of menace prevails and ‘vaivenes de negruras abalanzan ❙ Su incógnita a la tierra’. Guillén, by not mentioning, as Cervantes does, ‘los mazos de batán’, is able to suggest in Section i that it is harmony itself that is under threat (‘Acecha un fondo hostil’). The night is now ‘de mucha perdición’ but the knight is also alert. He is now ‘el ya elegido’ (my italics) and the important word ‘ya’ refers us back to the entire process of careful perception and investigation of the nature of the surroundings that hold both harmony and disorder, an investigation that has been suggested by means of the expressive richness of the poetry.¹² The details of the text include both informative source material (the specific chapter from Don Quijote), and the narrative development that brings us to the point of confrontation between the knight and his ‘adversary’. Because of the literary source we read the poem with Don Quijote in mind, but the poem has also elaborated many of the concepts in the sections quoted from El argumento de la obra above: ‘un yo en diálogo con la realidad’; ‘El hombre no se rinde sin más ni más a sus enemigos’; ‘Cántico propugna el esfuerzo por ser, el combate contra el no ser’; ‘Sobre todo se practica la voluntad de vivir’. These, in turn, are echoed by Quijote's commentary on himself, also quoted above.

Section i ends as it began, with the line ‘Todo está preparado’, but what has happened in the intervening lines has been a gradual move from the declared source material, Don Quijote, i, 20, and the non-verbal statements (ll. 2-6) of the essentials of the setting from the original, into a description of that setting in terms that inexorably insert the knight and his adventure into the poetics of Cántico. As Guillén says, ‘Cántico [sic] de contemplación y de acción. La una y la otra se dirigen hacia un solo fin: vivificar la conciencia de nuestro pleno ser en el mundo’ (AO, p. 120). Thus, all is ready for further development, where there is much contemplation on the nature of the encounter, and the action is not direct and physical but instead philosophical and ethical.

The first verse of Section ii of the poem provides a recapitulation of the description of the natural setting (p. 433, ll. 15-21), where what is stressed is the harmony of creation, whose innate strength lies in the correspondences that unite nature.¹³ The atmospheric silence, trees growing beside water, leaves moved by the breeze, the ageless, rushing torrent, all have a power that is mysteriously pacific yet forceful: ‘un silencio ❙ Muy dúctil que resiste’; the torrent is ‘inextinguible’ and ‘de son de luna’. All these represent a moment of time, the night, as well as a more philosophical aspect, harmony. The totality of ‘la noche y su concierto’ (p. 433, l. 23) is a metaphor for that which the knight feels called upon to protect. In the way of fable, night has the potential to be benign or harmful (‘la noche y su concierto’, elaborated already in lines 15-21, or ‘de mucha perdición’): in short ‘¡Hermosura, peligro!’ (l. 14).¹⁴ At the heart of this scene are the two antagonists, again familiar from the world of fable, the knight and the demon, but also securely incorporated into the vision of Cántico. The knight is understood from such phrases as ‘está en su centro’ and ‘todo le exalta a él, allí surgido ❙ Para salvar la noche y su concierto’, the demon by ‘desgarra’, ‘aquellos ayes’, and ‘Contratiempo, destiempo, discordancia’ (p. 434, ll. 1, 12, 14).¹⁵ The knight knows that he faces both order (‘la noche al cielo unido’ (p. 434, l. 5)) and potential, threatening disorder (‘rota, múltiple, ❙ Aquella soledad vociferada’ (p. 434, ll. 6-7)). The menacing sounds are a threat to him too, he whose hearing was so fundamental in establishing this situation in Section i:

Al oído avizor
¿No le habrán de doler aquellos ayes
Que de repente irrumpen?
Contratiempo, destiempo, discordancia.
Lo atajará quien vela.

(AN, p. 434, l. 11)

The second verse breaks up what could be called the narrative line of the poem to reflect upon its implications. It is here, roughly the centre of the poem, that the heroic dimension of the Knight is clearly articulated in terms of the philosophy of Cántico. As Havard states: ‘He is heroic because of his unselfish commitment to reality's cause, […] because of his preparedness to leave the self and execute the “aventura” or “hazaña”, in the doing of which he paradoxically discovers his own self’¹⁶:

Se descubre ante un hombre
La excelsitud que le descubre a él,
Firme en la encrucijada
Que le anuncia su clave.

(AN, p. 434. l. 19)

The crossroad mentioned above would, in the Cervantes original, be the point at which Quijote launches himself into the adventure, and which turns out to be an entertainingly comic but depressing trivialization of Quijote's heroic intentions. In Guillén's poem it becomes the moment when the hero's unselfish commitment to defending harmony reveals to him the harmony or ‘excelsitud’ of his own being. He discovers his full potential in the very moment of committing himself to the reality beyond him. He thus brings together, harmonizes, self and reality, man and world. As Guillén says, ‘Todo arranca de aquella intuición primordial. Una conciencia amanece en una conexión de armonía’ (AO, pp. 92-93). Don Quijote does not hesitate when ‘una aventura’ calls him, neither does his Guillénian counterpart hesitate here. Otherwise, of course, there would be no point in calling the poem ‘Noche del Caballero’ and announcing the link between ‘él’ and Don Quijote by the epigraph. Moreover, the hero-figure in the poem has until now always been referred to in the third person. Suddenly, at this point, Guillén addresses him as ‘tú’, securing Don Quijote as an exemplary figure who can illumine the nature of the protagonist of Cántico. Guillén addresses him with a kind of exaltation and admiration:

Y tú, tú la descifras
Porque te escoge a ti con tu potencia
Que ha de irradiar en acto,
Dichoso de existir
Hasta su agotamiento.

(AN, p. 434, l. 23)

This clears from the reader's mind any lurking doubts about Quijote's suitability as an exemplary figure. It does not matter to Guillén that Quijote's notions of reality may be dubious or irrational. What does matter is that Quijote's willingness, in the original work, to plunge into any adventure reveals the nature of the protagonist of Cántico, whose potential as an individual being realizes itself unreservedly and constantly when commitment is made to the world beyond, to reality, which actively welcomes and needs that commitment (‘te escoge’) to be itself revealed completely.¹⁷ This element of activity on the part of reality is expressed in the lines that follow:

¿No llama ese horizonte?
A todos solicita

(AN, p. 435, l. 1)

Here ‘horizonte’ stands for the boundaries of reality, holding within its scope ‘sus oscuridades, ❙ Su injusta confusión, ❙ Su malestar a tientas, sus vestiglos’ (p. 435, ll. 3-5). The knight, here described as ‘el más intenso’, has no doubts about his course of action, and his connection with the protagonist of Cántico is once more underlined:

Serás tú quien responda,
Así, desemparado de la fama,
Desde tu noche oscura
Serás tú quien se arroje,
Quien llegue a ser en plenitud de acción
Ese tan impaciente que se obstina
Clamando y esforzándose, posible,
Hacia su realidad.

(AN, p. 435, l. 21)

Section iii starts with the lines ‘¡Oh potencia ya heroica: ❙ Gran juego a vida o muerte!’, which have a rhetorical flourish entirely fitting to the adventures of knight-errantry. In terms of Guillén's work, however, the phrase ‘potencia ya heroica’ underlines the preoccupations of Cántico: ‘El hombre se afirma afirmando la Creación’ (AO, p. 93). Quijote, whose encounters with his foes confirm both his belief in himself (as a knight) and the validity of the world he inhabits (knight-errantry) is in the same situation as the protagonist of Guillén's poems, facing the existential pressures of ‘being in the world’, of self and circumstance. The hero-figure is thus described as making his own destiny, ‘se destina, se elige, con la fatalidad de su pureza, con su vigor de fe’ (my italics). He has not been influenced by any external factors (‘Luceros favorables no le inducen ❙ Ni musas le embriagan’); the choice has been arrived at through his own efforts, his own will, based on a simple faith in ‘el rumbo del vivir inmarcesible’: the simple beauties and harmonies of the natural world, and the belief that those harmonies are possible in human existence too, ‘de persistencia en quien ❙ Lo aspira, lo comprende’. Such a simple faith, like that seen in Don Quijote, makes him more responsive to the realities and experiences the world offers, and which he is predisposed to expect:

¿No es más apto el ingenuo,
El siempre dadivoso
Para acoger impetuosamente
Los deseos del orbe
Tras esa invitación
Que aguza todo ser desde su espera,
Forma ofrecida por el simple objeto,
Pulso del animal,
Vocablos, radiaciones, oleajes?

(AN, pp. 436, l. 21)

That steadfast openness to the stimuli of being and reality confers stature and status: ‘Vive más el mejor’, so that the hero-figure's launching of himself into the adventure raises the blood; in terms of Cántico's premiss, this represents the heights of ontological risk and reward.

Earlier on, reference was made to the fact that action in the poem is not direct and physical but philosophical and ethical and this accords well with the absence of knightly ‘action’ in the original. There are several passages of extraordinary, descriptive power which focus on antagonistic forces, variously tagged as ‘el dragón’, ‘una gárgola’, and ‘el endriago’, but the poem is also given a curious stillness that is maintained by the use of the verb ‘velar’ at the end of Section i, in the middle of Section ii, and twice in this third section, where the present continuous form is particularly remarkable at this stage of the poem in which culmination is clearly envisaged. ‘Velar’ is a verb that sits comfortably in a poem that displays such closeness to its literary source, but supplies within the poetics of Cántico an implication of philosophical and ethical contemplation invested with vigour and energy. The hostile forces and their violent antagonism are the ‘darkness’ with which the verb ‘velar’ is traditionally associated, the symbolic threat to the light that informs and enlightens. ‘Velar’ in Guillén's poem thus comes to represent ontological vigilance, awareness, that is accorded heroic status in the poem:

Allí donde la sangre
Recorre dominando
La cúspide que exige el gran esfuerzo.
Hasta allí mismo asciende todo el hombre,
Allí velando aguarda
Su ambición. ¡Alta vida,
Alta vida en sus riesgos eminentes!

(AN, p. 437, l. 7)

Ontological reward is the ‘alta vida’, ontological risk is to be seen in the ‘riesgos eminentes’. These will always assail the individual, against which he will always be able to supply, expressed by a marvellously concise image: ‘desconcertado ardor’. When faced with such circumstances (‘Se ha interpuesto el dragón o es una gárgola ❙ Que vomita, se ríe. ❙ ¡Rebeldes contra el ser!’), that ‘desconcertado ardor’ responds:

¡Insufrible ruptura! No haya escape:
Negar la negación
Y vencer a su tropa. Sacrificio.

(l. 13)

In these lines are echoes of Don Quijote, in language that expresses the philosophy of Cántico. The notion of sacrifice is not immediately consistent with Cántico's poetics, but its purpose is clarified in the following verse, where the vocabulary of the first three lines (‘los mejores’, ‘sumo viviente’, ‘él es quien más afirma’) moves the poem forward from the jolting full-stop that seems to end the previous verse. The question ‘sacrifice or victory?’ is posed and followed by yet another unleashing of antagonistic forces, which both effectively brings to the fore the source material's presentation of impending conflict and repeats Guillén's skilful reworking of this anticipatory tension (an example of the involvement or ‘tacto’ heralded by the Lope quotation at the beginning of Aquí mismo). As in the original, nothing happens here, and Guillén merely describes the knight, mounted on his horse, calmly awaiting his next challenge. However, the language provides another key to the importance of Don Quijote as an exemplary figure for Cántico:

Y joven, a sabiendas entregado,
Tan cabal entregándose,
Decide su existencia más creada

(AN, p. 438, l. 17)

Don Quijote is not young, some would say he is mad, but in his heroic fervour, dedication to his profession, and faith in the way the world is ordered, he represents unbounding, ethical energy and the wisdom of unfailing commitment. If, as Guillén says, there are no old people in Cántico (AO, p. 102), then here, in ‘Noche del Caballero’, Don Quijote becomes the very embodiment of the volume's vital protagonist. Wise and consummate commitment are the qualities that make the individual's existence into something that is consciously and conscientiously created.

The notion of victory has thus been securely confirmed, and in the following verse the notion of sacrifice is also put into context. Cántico establishes a reciprocal relationship of individual and reality, which has to be forged constantly and which constantly rewards. ‘Noche del Caballero’ records this in terms that maintain links with the Cervantes original, where individual is ‘el héroe’ and reality is ‘la aventura’. Forging the relationship is expressed metaphorically in the rustling leaves and the rushing waters of the landscape whose agitated movement and sound is the natural power of creation (‘la noche y su concierto’ from Section ii) that the knight is called upon to protect, which represents the harmony of creation, the belief in which confirms the validity of self for the individual. Such commitment and dedication finds their reward, expressed in the line: ‘Vive la noche en torno a un corazón’ (AN, p. 439, l. 4) and in these lines:

Bajo su comba el ámbito
Rodea la figura
Como si la amparase.

(l. 8)

The question that follows:

¿Dónde la soledad y el abandono
Para quien se levanta,
Más allá de la paz de sus latidos,
A trascender el límite
De la luz compartida?

(l. 11)

seems to deny any notion of sacrifice, for, as the poem has shown, the individual does indeed commit himself to go beyond the self in order to discover the depths of reality, to go beyond the limits of the visible world in order to find the philosophical foundations of his own full potential.

The last two verses of the poem use language whose tranquillity is typical of Cántico's luminous serenity. In the Cervantes original, the coming of dawn is the moment when Don Quijote discovers the truth of the scene, and suffers the trivializing of the adventure and Sancho's mockery of his heroic intent. In Guillén's poem, the atmosphere is one of peace (‘territorio amigo’), growing light (‘espacios despejados’), and vigorous life (‘agua, más agua’). The anticlimactic pain of the original has no place here because the initial committed stance and heroic aspiration have been fulfilled. The last two lines echo reminiscently the general trajectory that Cervantes gives Don Quijote; after one adventure he rides off into another:

Allá va, prado arriba, disparada
La vocación de un hombre más que hombre.

(AN, p. 439)

The connotations, from ‘disparada’, of reckless, thoughtless, precipitate action are familiar to us in relation to Cervantes's hero. But in Guillén's poem, ‘disparada’ is used to qualify the word ‘vocation’, and the conjunction of adjective and noun contrive to end the poem with a surprising and energizing vigour. The vocation that has enabled the discovery of heroic self-knowledge and the equally heroic reciprocal relationship with reality, have created an ontological strength that is the springboard for the continued realization of the full potential of each.

Guillén's interpretation of Cervantes's chapter focuses attention on the potential adventure of the original, which comes to nothing, but gives it status in those sections of the poem that clearly allude to confrontation, in language that is familiar in Cántico for the expression of life's conflicts. The original is thus fully incorporated into the dynamics of Cántico. In this way, Guillén is able to concentrate attention not on heroic deeds, as such, but on heroic vocation, much mocked in Don Quijote but much prized in Cántico as a loving vigilance that seeks to plumb the depths of being and reality, for the greater joy and security of both. Don Quijote lives in the poem, not in his fictional quixotry but in the faith of his vocation, and he supplies for the protagonist of Cántico an example of enduring human fulfilment.

‘Noche del Caballero’ was written in the late 1940s, the decade when Guillén wrote many of the poems in Cántico that prefigure Clamor, the second volume of poems. Here the harmonious world of man in Creation gives way to the less harmonious world of man's society and all its problems. The subtitles of each volume are ‘Fe de vida’ and ‘Tiempo de historia’ respectively. In Clamor there are six long poems that exist as entire subsections in the three different parts, and all six use mythical or literary sources for their subjects.¹⁸ One is ‘Dimisión de Sancho’, a poem that records Sancho's loss of the Isle of Barataria and his realization of the trickery of the Duke and Duchess. Sancho is humiliated, and Guillén uses his experience in the poem as another example: this time of man/the individual experiencing humiliation from a cruel act perpetrated by other human beings, but gaining self-knowledge from it. All six poems use mythological or literary sources to provide exempla and ‘Noche del Caballero’ is an early indication of the use Guillén will go on to make of other creative artists in his own work: the six poems mentioned in Clamor and, later still, parts of the Homenaje volume, subtitled ‘Reunión de vidas’, where entire sections are dedicated to the works of other artists.¹⁹ Cervantes's influence continues to appear in the later volumes (Smerdou Altolaguirre, p. 277) and the relationship between Alonso Quijano and Don Quijote is discussed by Guillén in a lengthy article, published in 1952, which throws further light on his understanding of Don Quijote,²⁰ incorporating too, perhaps, his conclusions from his rereading of Ortega y Gasset's Meditaciones del Quijote.²¹ For Guillén ‘bajo la locura de don Quijote se siente un fondo de gran estabilidad intelectual, moral, estética’ which is the essence of Alonso Quijano. Guillén quotes Quijote's claim ‘Yo sé quien soy […] y sé que puedo ser, no sólo los que he dicho, sino todos los doce Pares de Francia’ (DQ, p. 106), and continues: ‘Apártese la hipérbole delirante y quedará la verdad, que no es sólo frenesí de querer sino conciencia de ser: voluntad, sí, pero al servicio de esa conciencia. Se trata de una profunda, continua, irresistible vocación’ (‘Vida y muerte de Alonso Quijano’, pp. 99-100). However, this vocation is given over to Quijote, whose knightly failures, in Guillén's view, serve only to throw into relief the validity of that vocation. Out of those failures and Quijote's disillusionment at the end of the novel, emerges Alonso Quijano, ‘la sustancia de hombría que colma de gravedad y pasión a don Quijote, nunca muñeco frívolo, nunca juguete sin trascendencia’ (p. 101). In the ending of the novel, the death of Quijote/Quijano, Guillén finds a perfect culmination. Renunciation of books of chivalry and their disastrous consequences is possible, but not the renunciation of the vocation of the ‘caballero’, With Ortega, he sees in Quijano ‘trágica desharmonía entre una vocación y un destino, entre una potencia y sus actos, sus obras: las obras y los actos para los que el ser existe’ (p. 102). This view of Quijano as a tragic character who does not achieve his potential stands in marked contrast to the hero-figure/protagonist of Cántico in ‘Noche del Caballero’, in whom Quijote/Quijano's exemplary vocation is realized. In the article we see Jorge Guillén using his skills as an academic and critic to provide an interpretation, in an analysis of great perception and concision, of the whole of Cervantes's Don Quijote de la Mancha. It can be seen as a forerunner of the masterly analyses of the work of other Spanish creative writers that were given when he was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1957-1958.²² The poem ‘Noche del Caballero’, however, shows us Jorge Guillén, the poet, using his literary heritage for his own creative purposes. The specific episode from Don Quijote was chosen to develop a fundamental premise of Cántico, that of the realization of the potential harmony between vocation and destiny. Forged from the impulse of his own creative imperatives and the example of an illustrious forebear, Guillén establishes in the poem a truly heroic protagonist, a ‘knight’ of the twentieth-century, who:

                                                            se levanta,
Más allá de la paz de sus latidos,
A trascender el límite
De la luz compartida.

(p. 439)

Notes

1. See ‘Miguel de Cervantes y los escritores del 27’, ed. by Ana Rodríguez-Fischer, Suplementos Anthropos, 16 (julio-agosto 1989), 1-150, containing articles by V. Aleixandre, D. Alonso, M. Altolaguirre, M. Aub, F. Ayala, J. Bergamín, L. Cernuda, R. Chacel, G. Diego, J. Guillén, P. Salinas, S. Serrano Poncela, M. Zambrano, and G. de Torre; M. Smerdou Altolaguirre, ‘Cervantes en la generación del 27 (Esbozo de un libro)’, in Actas del II Coloquio Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991), pp. 273-79.

2. La Galatea, ed. by F. López Estrada and M. T. López García Berdoy (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995), p. 615.

3. For a supreme example, see ‘Salvación de la primavera’, Aire nuestro (Milan: All'insegna del pesce d'oro, 1968), pp. 103-13 (henceforth AN).

4. See Jorge Guillén, El argumento de la obra y otras prosas críticas, ed. by D. Martínez Torrón (Madrid: Taurus, 1985), p. 122 (henceforth AO).

5. See O. Macrí, La obra poética de Jorge Guillén (Barcelona: Ariel, 1976), p. 196, n. 39, for a brief summary of the composition history of the two poems.

6. Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, Vol. 1 (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1978), pp. 237-51 (henceforth DQ).

7. Even in Cervantes's original work, mockery does not seriously affect Quijote's belief in himself. There still remains dignity in his self-belief, something that Guillén incorporates into his own poem.

8. See, for example, ‘Muerte a lo lejos’ (AN, p. 291) and ‘Cara a cara’ (AN, pp. 524-33).

9. There is, inevitably, an echo here of the beginning of Cervantes's own work, ‘En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme’. Again, the specific details of place are not important, even though the intentions of each writer in this regard may be different.

10. The quality of description, achieved by metaphor and simile, of the senses combating darkness in order to perceive the surroundings, is an example of the enormous scope of the phrase ‘un yo en diálogo con la realidad’, so fundamental to an understanding of Cántico.

11. The process, that of the effort to perceive shape or form, is familiar in other poems in Cántico: for example, ‘Naturaleza viva’ (AN, p. 50); ‘Elevación de la claridad’ (AN, p. 100). See Chapter 2 of my book The Structured World of Jorge Guillén—A Study of ‘Cántico’ and ‘Clamor’ (Liverpool: Cairns, 1985).

12. See Biruté Ciplijauskaité, ‘Tensión adverbial aún—ya en la perfección del círculo Guilléniano’, in Wellesley College—Homenaje a Jorge Guillén (Madrid: Ínsula, 1978), for an illuminating account of Guillén's use of certain apparently insignificant words.

13. Compare the links and correspondences in the natural world developed in the poem ‘Las doce en el reloj’ (AN, p. 485).

14. Compare with ‘Anulación de lo peor’ (AN, p. 333).

15. See ‘Cara a cara’ (AN, pp. 524-33) for a similar poem of confrontation between ‘hero’ (the protagonist of Cántico) and ‘antagonist’ (reality, with all its rewarding and disconcerting complexities).

16. R. Havard, Jorge Guillén: ‘Cántico’ (London: Grant & Cutler and Tamesis Books, 1986), p. 109.

17. The poem connects Don Quijote and the protagonist of Cántico. At this point, there is also a connection with the reader of the poem, of Cántico, whose preparedness to use his or her intellectual powers to decipher the meaning, or reality, of the poetry and its poetics is another kind of ‘voluntad de vivir’.

18. ‘Luzbel desconcertado’ (AN, pp. 604-25); ‘La hermosa y los excéntricos’ (AN, pp. 670-87); ‘Lugar de Lázaro’ (AN, pp. 734-51); ‘Huerto de Melibea’ (AN, pp. 898-917); ‘Dimisión de Sancho’ (AN, pp. 967-77); ‘Las tentaciones de Antonio’ (AN, pp. 1023-37). For commentary and analysis of these poems, see my study of the major poems in Cántico and Clamor, cited above.

19. See, for example, ‘1. Al margen’ (from Genesis to Cántico itself (AN, pp. 1092-05)); ‘2. Atenciones’ (in Section i, the work of Juan Ruiz, Fray Luis de León, Lope de Vega, Rubén Darío, A. Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez (AN, 1208-23), and in Section iv, the work of José Moreno Villa, Pedro Salinas, Emilio Prados, Federico García Lorca, Manuel Altolaguirre (AN, pp. 1281-93)); ‘5. Variaciones’ (translations and glosses of various artists' work (AN, pp. 1458-1551)).

20. ‘Vida y muerte de Alonso Quijano’, Romanische Forschungen, 64.1/2 (1952), 102-13. Also reproduced in Rodríguez-Fischer, pp. 97-102.

21. This took place in the late 1940s. See J. Ruiz de Conde, El ‘Cántico’ americano de Jorge Guillén (Madrid: Turner, 1973). Havard (see note 16) skilfully clarifies Guillén's indebtedness to Ortega.

22. See Language and Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); Castilian version, Lenguaje y poesía (Madrid: Alianza, 1969).