The duality of chaos and order plays a significant role in the poetry of Jorge Guillén, as various critics, as well as Guillén himself, have noted. The trajectory of his poetic development over time reflects this duality, with the harmony predominant in Cántico giving way in Clamor to the disorder that the title suggests. Yet, although Guillén at times permits chaos and disorder to surface thematically in his poetry, he never flags in creating in his work an ordered poetic whole, nor does he abandon the posture he adopted in 1921 regarding the importance of poetic order: “… la medida y el número … no entorpecen el fuego, antes lo avivan. Quien considere inconciliables la pasión con el orden ignora el meollo mismo del arte poética.”¹ As Ignacio Prat has shown, Guillén in fact intensifies his insistence on formal symmetry when chaotic historical and personal events come to the fore in his work.² His art thus not only reflects the elements of order and chaos that he sees in the world beyond the poem, but also serves as a positive force in the ordering of experience and as a bulwark against chance and confusion.

Guillén expresses the opposition of chaos and order in many ways in his poetry—through the contrast between light and dark, through the emergence of a plaza from a confused jumble of streets, or, as might be expected from his characterization of his work as song,³ through musical themes and imagery. The most obvious of the musical references that abound throughout his poetry are the titular comparisons of his works to musical compositions, beginning with Cántico (1928) and extending to his latest book Final⁴ (1981), which he likens, in an epigraphic verse, to a finale in the musical sense. Additionally, he makes frequent metaphorical use of such terms as “concierto,” “acorde,” “coro,” “canto,” “contrapunto,” and “orquesta,” often to suggest the harmony that has long led music to be associated with order. He not only uses music as metaphor, however, but also depicts many actual musical events, as in the poems “Música, sólo música” (AN, p. 102),⁵ “El concierto” (AN, pp. 189-93), and “Naturaleza con altavoz” (AN, p. 102). At times, music serves as his model for his work, as his comments in prose and certain poems indicate.⁶ In more than one case it has become his reader's model; Joaquín Casalduero views Aire nuestro as a kind of giant symphony, with “movimientos,” “tiempos,” and “melodía,”⁷ and Federico García Lorca, in a personal letter, praises in one breath the mathematical order of Bach's music and Guillén's poetry: “Yo me admiro cuando pienso que la emoción de los músicos (Bach) se apoya y está envuelta en una perfecta matemática. Tus poemas tienen (sobre todo las décimas) polos y ecuador. ¡Así! Altísimo poeta.”⁸

In according music a special place within his depiction of a harmonious universe, Guillén falls in line with a long-standing Western tradition linking music to cosmic order, and it is worthwhile to examine this tradition and its general relationship to Guillén's poetry before attempting to analyze specific poems. Guillén has stated that “above all, Cántico is a song in praise of the oneness of all being,” and he insists as well on the unity of his works (“… lo que a mí más me importa: el conjunto armonioso, a través de su gran variedad—de Aire Nuestro [sic]).”⁹ Music—with its connotations of consonance—is an important element in Guillén's exaltation of unity. He uses musical metaphors to underpin his hierarchical vision of “the wholeness of being on this earth” (Cántico: A Selection, p. 11). The harmony he perceives exists on many levels—between parts of the cosmos, between lovers, between parts of the self, between past, present, and future, even between the poet and the reader with whom he communicates. Human beings, as he stresses, are always subordinate to the greater whole.

The musical metaphors that Guillén uses to suggest harmony and union represent his appropriation and adaptation of ancient traditions. As John Hollander has shown, a vision of hierarchical cosmic order similar to Guillén's originated in the theories of music of antiquity and was passed down to the Renaissance through Medieval thinkers. As Hollander suggests, “universal order” encompassed for the ancient Greeks the harmony both of “the parts of the cosmos” and “the parts of the human psyche.” This idea of harmony, he states, led to the reinterpretation of the myth of the music of the spheres as a “metaphysical notion, characterizing not only the order of the universe but the relation of human lives to this cosmological order.”¹⁰ In the Middle Ages, Boethius transformed these theories into his classification of music as either musica mundana (universal harmony), musica humana (“the tempering of various parts of the human soul, thoughts, feelings, the relation of the soul to the body, etc.” [Hollander, p. 25]), and musica instrumentalis, or actual sounded music. Another medieval division that became part of the patrimony of Western civilization was that between musica artificialis and musica naturalis (Hollander, p. 24). Traces of these divisions underlie Guillén's musical references and metaphors. As is clear from his title Cántico, Guillén also shares in the long-standing Western tradition that identifies poetry with music (Hollander, p. 13). Finally, the sacramental significance with which Guillén endows this identification of the poetic logos with song (he describes his song of praise as “an ascension toward love” [Cántico: A Selection, p. 9] and habitually capitalizes both words in his title Aire nuestro) has an interesting, if somewhat remote, parallel in early Christian thought, which in large part derived from the Greeks; Clement of Alexandria, in the second century, saw humans as instruments of God, and Christ as “both Word and Song.”¹¹ Guillén, though decidedly not doctrinaire, on a symbolic level shares an affinity with this point of view. The presence of the above musical elements in Guillén's work reveal in him a subtle but extraordinary assimilative power.

The vastness of Guillén's oeuvre precludes an exhaustive review of the presence of music in specific poems in the space of a few pages. A look at several poems in which music occupies a significant place, however, can provide a sense of its range and importance within his works and of its relationship to the poles of harmony and disorder. The first poems I shall examine use music only figuratively to convey the concord of the universe, the harmony between humankind and nature or between parts of the self, and the accord of love between two individuals. “Más allá” (AN, pp. 26-35), in which musical imagery is absent until the very end of the poem, opens with a two-fold renewal of harmony as the protagonist, awakening, reestablishes through light his visual links with the physical world and regains the coordination of mind and body that characterizes the state of consciousness:

(El alma vuelve al cuerpo,
Se dirige a los ojos
Y choca.)—¡Luz! Me invade
Todo mi ser. ¡Asombro!

(p. 26)

This initial impulse towards union and harmony culminates almost 200 lines later with a resounding chord that banishes solitude:

Y con empuje henchido
De afluencias amantes
Se ahinca en el sagrado
Presente perdurable
Toda la creación,
Que al despertarse un hombre
Lanza la soledad
A un tumulto de acordes.

(p. 35)

In “Primavera delgada” (AN, p. 123), a similar effect occurs. Here the word “coro” expresses the interconnectedness between various elements of a river scene—the sinewy river, the wakes of rowers' shells, the “ondulación suavísima del cielo.” Nature harmonizes with humans at play; the river reflects the sky, but mirrors as well the concerted, trained efforts of the rowers. The poem's form, with its alternating 11- and 5-syllable lines strung out as a continuous utterance, echoes the river's curving course, its ripples and the softly moving breeze. Thus the poem itself is brought into a larger totality of mirroring and reflecting, into the major chorus of which it is a part. There is no separating poetry from experience and from objects. The rowers' activity, a conventionalized one with no meaning other than that which is culturally assigned, is in harmony, like Guillén's poem, with the physical world.

The chord that emanates from “toda la creación” in “Más allá” and the echoes of nature and rowers in “Primavera delgada” reappear in a slightly different form in “La nieve” (AN, p. 345), where bright January snow is said to sing:

Lo blanco está sobre lo verde
Y canta.
.....La nieve, la nieve hasta el canto
Se alza.

(p. 345)

In attributing song to the snow, Guillén in effect allies himself, as author of the song that is Cántico, with nature itself, eradicating the distance between himself and nature and between himself and reader that literature presupposes; both he and the snow “sing,” both he and the reader listen. In “Más allá,” “Primavera delgada,” and “La nieve,” then, all poems from Cántico, music signifies the overcoming of the separateness of individual existence through union with a harmonious cosmos.

In other poems, metaphorical use of music expresses the harmony of love between a man and a woman, which for Guillén is the highest form of union we can attain, and thanks to which we “experience in its closest linking the oneness of body and soul” (Cántico: A Selection, p. 10). In “La hermosa y los excéntricos,” a long poem from Clamor, Guillén relates love between a man and a woman to both order and music. “La hermosa”'s status as “Reina de Naciones” wedded to a king, suggests in terms of political order the harmony of their love, a harmony that is also expressed repeatedly in musical terms. The Queen's song to her beloved is introduced as follows:

¿Y cómo decir sino en canción, tácita canción
de aquellos labios, el rumbo perpetuo que sigue
la tan destinada a un hombre?

(p. 672)

The concord of the pair is in tune with celestial harmony and their lovemaking like music: “Hacia su Rey va una Reina. Astros sonantes. / El hombre en su amor es el músico” (p. 679). As is perhaps typical of Clamor, however, Guillén counterposes to their erotic harmony an opposing disorder, that of the various types of sexual indeterminacy which he attributes to the residents of Sodom. What he presents as their sexual disarray is reflected in the sounds they create, described as “voceríos,” “batahola,” “bulla,” and “algazara” (pp. 671, 674, and 677). Such terms echo the epigraphic quotation from Juan Ruiz that opens Maremágnum, the section of Clamor to which the poem belongs: “Non es todo cantar cuanto ruïdo suena” (p. 554).

The music in the above poems is figurative; only the Sodomites are said to emit actual sounds, and even the Queen's song is “tacit.” In general, the musical metaphors and references seen up to now convey an interrelatedness suggestive of both musica mundana and musica humana; and in many cases the poet's efforts become part of the overall concord. In other poems, however, real sounds in forms ranging from the “natural music” of bird songs to the cultivated cadences of the symphony orchestra are depicted, though like purely figurative sounds they are often related to order and disorder and to the harmony of union. In “Advenimiento” (AN, p. 57), natural music emanates from the animal world; the seasonal return of birds restores some sort of lost wholeness to the speaker, who affirms that “Todo lo que perdí / Volverá con las aves.” These birds, he continues, “Pían y pían, pían / Sin designio de gracia.” In several other poems, it is the speaker who creates natural music, which instead of having ordered patterns and harmonious relationships, is spontaneous and without design. In these poems, the speaker lets himself go, losing himself and allowing his inner or natural self to fuse with what surrounds him. Song, immediate primal expression flowing from the soul, overcomes the separateness that logical discourse entails. Unlike in “Más allá,” where accord is achieved through consciousness as “El alma vuelve al cuerpo,” in the poem “El distraído,” the speaker seems to abandon control in a sort of rapturous loss of self in the moment. His spontaneous humming suggests the extent to which his subliminal inner self flows outward:

Embeleso tarareado.
¡Cómo sueña la voz que se tumba en el canto
Perdido,
Tan perdido y fluído hacia ensanches de días
Sin lindes, resbalados!
Lararira,
                    lararira,
                                        lararira …

(p. 203)

Here, instead of nature forming itself into a soundless chorus or chord, the individual loses himself and his limits as his humming flows and slides like the river on whose banks he wanders, in search of parts of his present and his past:

Voy buscando a los dos
Aquí perdidos:
Al pescador atento que, muy joven,
De bruces
En la ribera, nubes
Recoge
De la corriente, distraídas,
Y al músico pródigo que, sin mucha pericia,
Por entre las orillas
Va cantando y dejando las palabras en sílabas

(p. 202)

Music, then, expresses the paradox of losing oneself to find oneself as past and present, inner and outer selves converge. A similar phenomenon occurs in “El aparecido,” where the swimmer's song, floating “sin designio” like his body, marks the marvelous place of contiguity where sea, sky, and song come together:

Asombro de ser: cantar.
Cantar, cantar sin designio.
¡Mármara, mar, maramar!
Confluyan los estribillos.
          Los azules se barajan,
          Cielos comunicativos.

(p. 476)

Music here expresses primordial, non-verbal, physical elation, but as in the earlier poems discussed it also signifies harmony and union.

Music and harmony, then, may be purely metaphorical in Guillén's poetry, unsounded like musica mundana and humana, or they may take the form of spontaneous natural music. At the other end of the spectrum we find, in poems about concerts and other musical events, instances of musica instrumentalis. As might be expected, the significance of this actual music, represented mimetically, varies more than that of the metaphorical music so closely tied in with Guillén's vision of the cosmos. Sometimes it mirrors the figurative harmony conveyed by musical metaphors, as in “Sol en la boda,” where the harmony of a wedding (“Triunfa un querer ya general, difuso, / Que reúne las formas en concierto / De señorío superior al uso …” [p. 158]) and of the bride and groom who “Niegan el caos” is reinforced by the actual music of the ceremony:

Majestuosa en transición risueña,
Hacia un astro y su círculo de sones
La música dirige, siempre dueña
Del gravitar de las constelaciones.

(p. 161)

In other poems, the harmony of musica intrumentalis conflicts with the disorder of human society. Consider “La cumbre” (YOP, p. 34):

Son hombres y no pocos. De repente,
Juntos se ponen a vivir de acuerdo,
Y coinciden con tal exactitud
Que se cuenta en segundos. La concordia
Se mantiene absoluta. No hay conflictos.
Un hombre mueve con el brazo en alto
Una varita de virtudes. ¿Mágica?
¿Alguna especie de milagrería?
¿Suceso que una vez tan sólo ocurre?
Escuchad bien, mirad. Es una orquesta.

Here the concordant precision of a symphony orchestra, which brings so many disparate individuals into perfect harmony, is described as a sort of miracle. Guillén's defamiliarizing technique—the revelation of details out of context, as in a guessing game, followed by the sudden revelation of the identity of the subject in the last line—mirrors the miracle of orchestral order; the reader's confusion is resolved in harmony and recognition as he reaches the final line. Much as the orchestra creates harmony out of the chaos of diverse individualized lives, Guillén's poem embodies discord and its harmonious resolution. Thus music here signifies harmony and order, and as in “Primavera delgada” and “La nieve” poetry is parallel to, not separate from, the process described in the poem. Yet if order is the apparent theme of “La cumbre,” disorder is its hidden motif. Guillén's lofty tone in lines 1 through 9 implies a new dawn of peaceful coexistence among humans that goes much beyond the indeed miraculous but much more limited concord of a symphony concert. But by suggesting that to get men to work together in one small way is a miracle, the poem evokes order's opposite pole of disorder and social chaos; the speaker's surprise and wonder at men in harmony, though genuine, are also ironic, implying that disorder and conflict are norms of human social existence. Or perhaps Guillén only playfully implies that the kind of precise unanimity of a symphony orchestra would be out of place in society at large.

Musica instrumentalis, finally, may be used to convey a human order that is in direct conflict with the universal harmony of musica mundana. It evokes the rigidity of dictatorship in “Las cuatro calles” (AN, pp. 419-23), where an oppressive social order can be felt through the ghost, in the streets, of a military band, a kind of negative counterpart of the unsounded musica mundana:

Orden. ¡En orden! Bandas, rutilantes metales.
Por entre los orgullos callejeros
Se adivinan latentes los redobles marciales.
¡Aceros!
Hay tanta brillantez que es ya siniestra.
Ni la brisa lo ignora.
Ante todos se muestra
La Oquedad, ay, rectora.
.....Este mundo del hombre está mal hecho.

(p. 423)

To this rigidity Guillén opposes a less ordered but more harmonious reality: the city streets, also described in musical terms: “No hay batuta / Que dirija esta orquesta / Desordenada” (p. 419). We are reminded of his appreciation, in “Su persona” from Cántico, of “toda la adorable / Desigualdad imperfecta / De las cosas que así son …” (AN, p. 505).

Although musical metaphors and themes clearly make important contributions to the rendering of patterns of order and disorder in the poetry of Jorge Guillén, their variety and complexity preclude easy categorization. Many of the multiple manifestations of music in Aire nuestro have not even been touched upon here. What stands out in what we have seen, however, is the fact that for Guillén music is like poetry in creating out of the chaos of multiple impressions an order that often reflects the vast interconnectedness of the universe. Its significance comes clear in the final lines of “Contrapunto final” (AN, p. 515), a poem about listening to music:

Y así, con una implacable
Solicitud, el acaso
Tan vencido, queda el orden
Supremo ante Dios alzado.

Notes

1. “Una jugada emocionante,” Hacia “Cántico”: Escritos de los años 20, comp. K. M. Sibbald (Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1980), p. 103.

2. “Aire nuestro” de Jorge Guillén (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1974), p. 119n.

3. See his introduction to Cántico: A Selection (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), pp. 11-12, for examples. Further page references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

4. Aire nuestro: Final (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1981), p. 9.

5. Page numbers for Guillén's poetry will be given parenthetically in the text. AN indicates Aire nuestro (Milan: All'Insegna del Pesce D'Oro, 1968). YOP indicates Y otros poemas (Buenos Aires: Muchnik Editores, 1973).

6. He speaks of “azar” and “desorden” as the “coro” of Cántico; similarly, he refers to the affirmative side of Clamor as “la nota clara” that “suena también entre las más graves de la segunda serie …” (“Prólogo,” Selección de poemas, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1970), pp. 8-9.

7. “La voz del poeta: Aire nuestro,” in Jorge Guillén: Obra poética (Antología) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1972), pp. 7-19.

8. Letter to Jorge Guillén, 9 Sept. 1926, Federico García Lorca, Obras completas, 17th ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1972), p. 1606. Oreste Macrí, in his prologue to La obra poética de Jorge Guillén (Barcelona: Ariel, 1976), p. 8, states that in approaching Aire nuestro, “lo esencial es no abandonar nunca la inherencia en la forma poética, y sobre todo el cuerpo métrico y fonosimbólico, el concierto Guilléniano.”

9. From comments inscribed by Guillén in my copy of Aire nuestro: Final.

10. John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 28. Further page references for this work will be given in the text.

11. James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 40.