SOURCE: “Dialogue of Poets and Poetry: Intertextual Patterns in the Sonnets of Jorge Guillén,” in Anales de la Literatura Espanola Contemporanea, Vol. 16, No. 1-2, 1991, pp. 73-89.

The persistence of the sonnet as a vital poetic form from the Renaissance into the twentieth century—a century characterized by free verse and experimentation—attests to the fascination that the form holds for poets and readers alike. Nearly every major Western poet has cultivated the sonnet and no other form has inspired as many poems dedicated to itself as has the sonnet. Lope de Vega, Borges, Jiménez, Wordsworth, Poe, Keats, Gabriel Rossetti and Guillén are among those who have written sonnets on the sonnet. There are sonnets in praise of the sonnet, satirical sonnets on the sonnet, sonnet parodies and sonnets written by one poet in response to those of another. As a result, the sonnet, like no other poetic form, has a history, tradition and life of its own within the trajectory of poetry as a whole.

Part of the fascination of the sonnet lies in its brevity, in the harmonious relationship of the parts to the whole, and in its rigidly prescribed stanza divisions and rhyme scheme which make a formal pattern of the poem. The pattern—rational, ordered, finite—contains and gives structure to a reality which may be irrational, chaotic and infinite. The structure of the Petrarchan sonnet (four and three line stanzas combining to produce the octave and sestet) and the conventions frequently associated with the form—balance, paradox, the fusion of opposites—conform closely to symbolic traditions in a variety of cultures, suggesting that the original composition of the sonnet was not determined by a random process but in accord with certain archetypal structures. Thus the appeal of the sonnet is deeply rooted in human consciousness. The numerical and geometrical divisions of the sonnet, along with its tendency to channel, condense and direct thought and experience make it quite similar to the mandala in both organization and effect. The mandala, a geometric design generally composed of counterbalanced figures arranged in a quadripartite configuration, is used as a meditative device to concentrate and direct thought toward a symbolic center. Like the mandala, the sonnet structure allows poet and reader to perceive and to participate in a universal pattern in which reality and experience conform to a coherent, rational order—balanced and harmonious—at least momentarily.

Louis J. Martz in The Poetry of Meditation has compared the structure of the sonnet with formal Jesuit meditative exercises based on the threefold composition common to both (49). There are similarities, both structural and metaphorical between the sonnet pattern and the labyrinth too. Both are geometrical, rational, self-contained designs incorporating repetition of structural elements. Both draw us toward a symbolic, unified center—terrifying or awesome perhaps—but attainable to the human mind only through such ordered patterns. In the twentieth century, both Guillén and Borges have explicitly identified the sonnet with the labyrinth (Cántico 265; Obras 155).

Keith Albarn, in The Language of Pattern, describes the need to perceive patterns in Western culture, a need which may also account for the popularity and persistence of the sonnet as a form. “The ability to perceive pattern and make connections, to see parts in relation to the whole, is vital to us in the west where a culture based on dichotomy (art-science, material-spiritual, etc.) has been led by a rapidly developing technology towards excessive analysis at the expense of synthesis.” (7)

But the sonnet is not simply a self-contained form, a single poem in isolation. Each sonnet is part of a long tradition. Evidence of this is, of course, not just the number of sonnets that have been written, but the whole history of sonnets on the sonnet, sonnet satires and sonnets to other sonnets. Every sonnet is both unique and the same. Each is part of the total pattern. One work incorporates, changes and modifies all others before and after, for each is patterned after the same symmetrical geometric construct. Thus, the attraction of the sonnet pattern is not limited to individual poems, but extends to the form as a continuum through time. Each poem is a microcosm of the whole; each poem both repeats and extends the pattern. In linguistic terms, the relationship between form and content (the sonnet form and individual sonnets) can be seen as parallel to Saussure's distinction between language and speech, langue and parole: “the systematized set of conventions necessary to communication [langue/sonnet form] … as opposed to … the purely individual part of language [parole/sonnet content].” (Barthes 13)

A visual model which helps to clarify further the distinctions between form and content, langue and parole in this sense can be found in the correlation between the continuum of the sonnet tradition and the patterned progression of Islamic decorative tiles. The design and effect of Islamic decoration depends on the gradual transformation and metamorphosis of geometrical elements contained within a constant shape and static dimensions. Albarn, et. al. define that transformation as “the process by which we transpose a pattern creatively from one context to another, making use of changes of scale, dimension and view point to trigger off fresh perceptions. … In order to be successful it has to be read as a pattern, leading the observer to a deeper understanding of the whole as a continuum.” (11) Again with reference to Moorish design Albarn, et. al. say that “certain configurations fascinate us holding our attention. To unlock the shape's potential we need the knowledge of dimensional development (that is, development through time and space).” (108) This paper represents an attempt to help “unlock the shape's potential,” to move toward an understanding of the sonnet as a form across time as well as the expression of particular content by looking at the way in which Jorge Guillén has used it. The formal pattern of the sonnet functions as a code or system, allowing the reader to perceive, in Jonathan Culler's terms, individual poems not just as “autonomous entities, organic wholes, but as intertextual constructs: sequences which have meaning in relation to other texts which they take up, cite, parody, refute or generally transform.” (38) By exploring both the intertextual and self-referential, that is, metapoetic dimensions of Guillén's sonnets, it becomes clear that the sonnet form serves as a vehicle for a continuing dialogue with poets and poetry.

Guillén, perhaps more than any other modern poet, has consciously cultivated the sonnet form both as the individual embodiment of order and harmony and as a form in dialogue with itself and with other poems—as the continuation and transformation of a literary tradition. It is not surprising that the poet of Cántico, a book in which harmony and order are central both thematically and structurally, would use the sonnet, and, in fact, the twenty-two sonnets found in the final edition are placed directly at the center of that volume. There are sonnets scattered throughout Clamor, Homenaje and Otros poemas, as well as numerous translations and variations of other poets' sonnets: Shakespeare, Valéry, Antero de Quental, Santayana, and Jean Cassou. But the aspect of Guillén's work which reveals most about the nature of the sonnet form itself are those sonnets which are self-referential and those which constitute a dialogue with other sonnets and other poets—with Mallarmé, Quevedo, Lope de Vega and Shakespeare. It is through these sonnets that the independent life of the form becomes apparent: that we can see each sonnet as both unique and universal. Each is part of a continuum through time. Each is an individual manifestation of a total pattern.

“Hacia el poema” from Cántico provides a good introduction to Guillén's concept of the sonnet form. It is the second sonnet in the twenty-two sonnet series placed at the center of the volume, preceeded only by “Amanece, amanezco”—dawn, the awakening.

Siento que un ritmo se me desenlaza
De este barullo en que sin meta vago,
Y entregándome todo al nuevo halago
Doy con la claridad de una terraza,
Donde es mi guía quien ahora traza
Límpido el orden en que me deshago
Del murmullo y su duende, más aciago
Que el gran silencio bajo la amenaza.
Se me juntan a flor de tanto obseso
Mal soñar las palabras decididas
A iluminarse en vívido volumen.
El son me da un perfil de carne y hueso.
La forma se me vuelve salvavidas.
Hacia una luz mis penas se consumen.

(264)

This poem conveys Guillén's notion of the relationship between the poet and his poem, between content (personal experience) and form (universal order). The order, a rhythmic pattern of harmony, precedes the construction of the individual poem. The poet senses with his whole body a universal harmony which enables him to rise above the chaos of noise: cacophony more terrifying than the void of silence. The three reflexive verbs with indirect object pronouns (“se me desenlaza,” “se me juntan,” “se me vuelve”) are indicative of the inter-relationship between creator and creation. It is not the poet who determines the order. Rather, the poet allows himself to be guided by an archetypal formal pattern which exists independently. It is not the man, but the poet in man who can feel harmony, can separate rhythm from cacophony and can transform sound to sight, chaos into order. Through the poetic process, rhythm (silent, universal harmony) becomes sound; sound, in turn, acquires a visual dimension. The sonnet embodies the process of giving concrete form to the abstract intuition of universal order. The poem takes shape as the speaker, released from sound without form, feels the essential rhythm which links him to the universal order. That silent rhythm becomes the audible rhythm of the sonnet which, in turn, orders natural phenomena into visual patterns with “la claridad de una terraza.” In the sestet, words, which are both auditory and visual, coincide with the sound and shape of reality. The ambiguity surrounding “decididas” again fuses creator and creation in the poetic process, for it is not clear whether the poet or the poem has chosen the words. Thus the poet gives form to the formless, but at the same time that form creates and shapes the poet. It orders his experience and brings him into harmony with the universal order.

El son me da un perfil de carne y hueso.
La forma se me vuelve salvavidas.
Hacia una luz mis penas se consumen

In La poesía de Jorge Guillén, Andrew Debicki notes that the most outstanding characteristic of the poems included in Cántico is the combination of the concrete-particular with the abstract-universal. He says:

en Cántico, esta unión de lo particular y lo universal se efectúa frecuentemente por medio de varias relaciones entre lo natural y lo humano: personificaciones, otras relaciones entre elementos humanos y naturales, ciertas imágenes de la naturaleza. Estos procedimientos producen en nosotros un doble efecto: una experiencia sensorial específica, por una parte, y una percepción esencial, por otra.

(21)

While there are numerous sonnets which conform to this description, there are others (such as “Hacia el poema”) in which the fusion of abstract and concrete is effected not through personification or natural imagery, but through the construction of the sonnet form itself. These are poems of process in which the creation of the form becomes the concrete manifestation of the idea of order. In “Hacia el poema” it is not the abstraction (sound, rhythm) which is personified. Rather, that rhythmic formal pattern gives concrete reality to the speaker through the creation of the poem. It brings the speaker into focus by making him one with the universal order.

Located precisely in the center of Cántico and at the center of the sonnet series is a poem called “Mundo continuo,” prefaced by a quotation from Shakespeare's sonnet XV: “banderita en esa cúpido de Cántico,” as Guillén has stated (On Guillén 62). Debicki notes that this section of Cántico constitutes “un microcosmo del libro … alude a todos los temas centrales del libro: al amor, a la música, al gozo de la vida, a la poesía, a la muerte; se resuelve en una afirmación del ser, expresada en poemas situados en su centro exacto («Mundo continuo», p. 282, y «En sumo», p. 283).” (193-94) Having established in “Hacia el poema” the power of the sonnet form to order experience and fuse the particular and universal, Guillén goes on to explore the sonnet tradition itself as a source of permanence and creation in a series of sonnets dedicated to other poets.

                                        Mundo continuo
                                        And all in war with Time for love of you

Shakespeare

Si amor es ya mi suma cotidiana,
Mundo continuo que jamás tolera
Veleidad de retorno a la primera
Nada anterior al Ser, que siempre gana,
Si cada aurora se desvive grana,
¿Por qué azares indómitos se altera
La fatalmente a salvo primavera,
Segura de imponer su luz mañana?
De pronto, bajo el pie, cruje un desierto
Con una flor de pétalos punzantes.
Aridez, lejanía, vil vacío.
Y mientras, por un rumbo siempre cierto,
Sin acción de retorno, como antes
Su realidad va dando al mar el río.

(273)

“Mundo continuo” fuses the themes of love and time by affirming the primacy of being over non-being, of creation over nothingness. Within the poem, the certainty of another dawn and spring guarantee the perpetuation of life and love, of a “mundo continuo” in which a return to the void before creation is not possible. What has once been created, what has become manifest cannot be undone. Life goes forever on, perpetually renewing itself in the source of creation rather than becoming lost in annihilation and death.

Sin acción de retorno, como antes
Su realidad va dando al mar el río.

But Guillén's quotation from Shakespeare's sonnet which prefaces the poem adds another dimension to its meaning by fusing the theme of poetic creation with those of love, life and time. Shakespeare's sonnet, a meditation on time as the destroyer of life and love, ends with a reminder of the power of poetic creation to renew what time would undo.

And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

(Campbell 1207)

Shakespeare captures youth, beauty and love at its peak and “engrafts” it new into his sonnet. Guillén re-affirms Shakespeare's creation, not only by re-creating those themes in his sonnet, but by “engrafting anew” Shakespeare's poem into his own. Guillén returns to “el mar,” the source of life and creation, to renew Shakespeare's poetic affirmation of life and love, as well as his own. In this case, the “río” which runs to the sea represents the individual, specific life/love/poem which returns for renewal to the sea, the source from which the re-creation will emerge in a “mundo continuo” on both the thematic and formal levels. The sonnet tradition, like the sea, is a source of perpetual creation. And, while the echo of Jorge Manrique's “Coplas” present in Guillén's last line represents a reversal of the traditional theme, there are few readers of Spanish poetry who will not call to mind Manrique's lines, thus allowing them to serve as a kind of pre-text against which Guillén's reversal appears all the more striking.

In “Mundo continuo,” Guillén returns to the source of creation to find there the same theme and pattern from which Shakespeare created his sonnet. In “Cierro los ojos,” a poem found later in the Cántico sonnet series and prefaced with a quotation from Mallarmé, the poet turns to a natural image—the rose—as the embodiment of formal creation.

The rose in the darkness represents the paradoxical creation of something from nothing, of light from shadow, beauty from horror. The effect of the image is, as Debicki notes, double: “una experiencia sensorial específíca, por una parte, y una percepción esencial, por otra.” (21) There is, however, still another dimension to this rose, for it belongs not only to Guillén's sonnet but to Mallarmé's. Guillén's rose is a kind of reincarnation of Mallarmé's “rose dans les ténèbres”: the rose which is the perfect formal pattern materializing from the void—beauty, the sonnet itself. Guillén's rose is then both the concrete representation of a former parallel paradoxical vision and the physical manifestation of a sonnet within a sonnet, a pattern within a pattern.

“CIERRO LOS OJOS”

                                                                                          Une rose dans les ténèbres

Mallarmé

Cierro los ojos y el negror me advierte
Que no es negror, y alumbra unos destellos
Para darme a entender que sí son ellos
El fondo en algazara de la suerte,
Incógnita nocturna ya tan fuerte
Que consigue ante mí romper sus sellos
Y sacar del abismo los más bellos
Resplandores hostiles a la muerte.
Cierro los ojos. Y persiste un mundo
Grande que me deslumbra así, vacío
De su profundidad tumultuosa.
Mi certidumbre en la tiniebla fundo,
Tenebroso el relámpago es más mío,
En lo negro se yergue hasta una rosa.

(281)

Mallarmé's poem, which follows and on which Guillén's is based, describes an empty glass vase of imprecise character—a vase which contains no flower, no liquid, no love potion. It is an empty form which imposes itself on empty space. The vase is then related to a kind of illusion (chimera) from which neither the speaker's mother nor her lover has drunk, that is, they have not participated in the symbolic act of creation which would produce the dream, the child, the work. Thus the speaker/poet is a mere sylph, a child of the air, without substance, in a cold, empty place. In the sestet, whatever potential the empty, womb-like vessel might have promised, is not fulfilled. The rose (beauty, creation, the ideal, the poem) does not materialize out of the dark, empty space, or does it? The existence of the poem itself belies all the previous negations and stands as an affirmation of the creative act. The sonnet is the rose in and from the darkness: creation from the void. The sonnet form, like Mallarmé's empty vase, is the vessel that captures, shapes and transmits a moment of experience.

Surgi de la croupe et du bond
D'une verrerie éphémère
Sans fleurir la veillée amère
Le col ignoré s'interrompt
Je crois bien que deux bouches n'ont
Bu, ni son amant ni ma mère,
Jamais a la même Chimère,
Moi, sylphe de ce froid plafond:
Le pur vase d'aucun breuvage
Que l'inexhaustible veuvage
Agonise mais ne consent,
Naïf baiser des plus funèbres:
A rien expirer annonçant
Une rose dans les ténèbres.

(Poems 184-86)

Because Guillén's rose is also Mallarmé's, it is not only the concrete embodiment of beauty: it is another manifestation of “that flower absent from all bouquets,” the poetic ideal. (Oeuvres 368) It is the form of nothingness which is the shadow of the All. It is the rose of symbolic tradition—the mandala, the Center. And finally, the rose is the sonnet, the poetic creation. It is the formal pattern of the sonnet itself, the visual equivalent of the silent rhythmic harmony which gave form to “Hacia el poema.”

Guillén has repeated Mallarmé's plunge into the abyss and has discovered there the same paradoxical vision. Guillén's rose is both an affirmation of Mallarmé's creation and a unique manifestation of his own. It is the same poem and a new poem—part of a universal pattern in both content and form. Like the subtle metamorphosis in the patterned progression of Islamic tiles, Guillén's poem re-works the same elements (paradox, oppositions, light and dark, presence and absence) into the same pattern—the rose, the sonnet—to create another link in the chain which is at once different and the same. Mallarmé's sonnet contributes to the shape of Guillén's, but it is also possible to follow the pattern backwards in time and to see that Guillén's poem also affects and alters subsequent readings of Mallarmé. The ambiguous balance between negation and affirmation with which Mallarmé's sonnet ends is disrupted by Guillén's re-creation and the scales are tipped in favor of affirmation when he reproduces the rose from the void.

Guillén's use of the sonnet form as a dialogue with poets and poetry allows us to see the form as a structure that is both spatial and temporal. The fascination for the reader lies in recognizing the harmonic spatial relationships unique to Guillén's poem and, arriving at the last line, in realizing that he/she must also repeat the experience of Mallarmé's sonnet, that the experience of the poem is both unique and universal. We recognize the pattern within the pattern and our understanding of the sonnet expands from the single manifestation of the form to the form as a continuum through time.

“Ars vivendi” from Clamor is another case in which the sonnet pattern extends both backward and forward in time. The poem is Guillén's response to Quevedo's sonnet “¡Ah de la vida! ¿Nadie me responde?”

Presentes sucesiones de difuntos.

Quevedo

Pasa el tiempo y suspiro porque paso,
Aunque yo quede en mí, que sabe y cuenta,
Y no con el reloj, su marcha lenta
—Nunca es la mía—bajo el cielo raso.
Calculo, sé, suspiro—no soy caso
De excepción—y a esta altura, los setenta.
Mi afán del día no se desalienta,
A pesar de ser frágil lo que amaso.
Ay, Dios mío, me sé mortal de veras.
Pero mortalidad no es el instante
Que al fin me privará de mi corriente.
Estas horas no son las postrimeras,
Y mientras haya vida por delante,
Serán mis sucesiones de viviente.

(516)

Guillén's treatment of Mallarmé's sonnet was a repetition of the original experience—a parallel pattern affirming its source. His answer to Quevedo however, is not a parallel response but a revision across time.

¡Ah de la vida! ¿Nadie me responde? …
                    ¡Ah de la vida! ¿Nadie me responde?
Aquí de los antaños que he vivido;
la Fortuna mis tiempos ha mordido,
las Horas mi locura las esconde.
                    ¡Que, sin poder saber cómo ni adónde,
la salud y la edad se hayan huido!
Falta la vida, asiste lo vivido,
y no hay calamidad que no me ronde.
                    Ayer se fue; Mañana no ha llegado;
Hoy se está yendo sin parar un punto:
soy un Fue y un Será y un Es cansado.
                    En el hoy y mañana y ayer, junto
pañales y mortaja, y he quedado
presentes sucesiones de difunto.

(Flores 387)

Guillén's poem responds to Quevedo's by redeeming poet and poem from the passing years. Like Quevedo, Guillén recognizes and laments his own mortality. He re-weaves the same theme of the relentless flight of time into the same sonnet structure. But just as in “Hacia el poema” the abstract harmonious rhythmic pattern preceded the construction of the poem and in “Cierro los ojos” a perfect visual pattern materialized from the void. Quevedo's sonnet, in contradiction to its own theme, stands before Guillén as a concrete manifestation of the timeless—as evidence of the redemptive power of art. His model is proof that a formal pattern has captured and held forever a moment of time, despite the pessimism of its creator. Thus, just as in the sonnets discussed previously, poetry has an independent life of its own which allows Guillén to separate the man from the poet in man.

Pasa el tiempo y suspiro porque paso,
Aunque yo quede en mí, que sabe y cuenta,
Y no con el reloj, su marcha lenta
—Nunca es la mía—bajo el cielo raso.

The man measures time by the clock but the poet in man is attuned to another rhythm—one that is universal and eternal. The double meaning of “cuenta” effects the separation of man and poet into the worlds of the temporal and the timeless. “Ars vivendi,” the art of living, becomes living art in Guillén's reversal of Quevedo's paradox, “he quedado / presentes sucesiones de viviente.” Life is not the process of dying, not a succession of lost moments, but the process of living through creating. The word “sucesiones” in Guillén's poem carries all the meanings of Quevedo's—“hoy, mañana y ayer,” that present which is forever escaping into the past and the future. But the emphasis in Guillén's poem is on living, not dying, because he has fused the themes of life and art with Quevedo as his model. “Sucesiones” then refers not just to the fleeting moments in the life of the man, but to the living creations of the poet—to the formal patterns that will stand the test of time and redeem those moments of experience from oblivion. Henri Foçillon in The Life of Forms in Art comments on the relationship between form and time.

What is the place of form in time, and how does it behave there? To what extent is form time, and to what extent is it not? Now, on the one hand, a work of art is nontemporal: its activity, its struggle occur primarily in space. And on the other hand, it takes its place in a sequence both before and after other works of art. Its formation does not occur on the spur of the moment, but results from a long series of experiments. To speak of the life of forms is inevitably to invoke the idea of succession.

(53)

Guillén is, as a poet, Quevedo's successor; his sonnet is another eternal moment woven from the same paradoxical pattern of being and non-being, creation and destruction. “Ars vivendi” is not only a response to Quevedo. It is a moment of time frozen in a formal pattern which redeems both Guillén and Quevedo from the passing of time through the continuum of the sonnet tradition. As in “Mundo continuo,” Guillén repeats the plunge into the sea, the source of creation. He returns to the sonnet tradition and effects another repetition of Shakespeare's “As he [time] takes from you, I engraft you new”: another example of the power of the sonnet form to fuse permanence and change, eternal and temporal, universal and particular.

In Homenaje Guillén pays homage to Lope de Vega by creating a sonnet on the sonnet in response to Lope's famous “Soneto de repente.” Interestingly, this poem, “Sólo por juego, nunca,” is not addressed to Lope, but to Violante, the Muse, indicative once again of the idea that inspiration for the sonnet form comes not from a particular source but from the same pre-existing harmonic pattern that produced “Hacia el poema” and “Cierro los ojos.”

“SóLO POR JUEGO, NUNCA”

A Violante
Al principio diré. … ¿quizá “montaña”?
Columbro una montaña mientras siento
La conversión del aire en elemento
Que afirma la eminencia como hazaña.
Por eco vuelve un “… aña” casi “braña”,
Y aquel aire me infunde nuevo aliento.
¿No veré así la braña bajo el viento
Removedor de la suprema España?
Libre respiro. ¿Qué propone alarde
Tan soberbio de tanta cumbre? Tarde
Muy pura se me ofrece sin promesa
De misterioso resto acaso en ronda.
¿La captaré si digo “luz redonda”?
Juego tras juego, realidad ilesa.

(514)

Lope's poem, a game-like satire on the writing of a sonnet, remains after more than three hundred years one of his best known and most frequently anthologized works. The sonnet is completely self-referential, having no content beyond the process of its own construction. It is a poetic creation that is purely metapoetic; its appeal lies inthe formal pattern of organizing sounds, rhythms and rhyme and in the way the sonnet seems to unfold effortlessly—a product of its own making.

“SONETO DE REPENTE”

                    Un soneto me manda hacer Violante,
que en mi vida me he visto en tanto aprieto;
catorce versos dicen, que es soneto;
burla burlando van los tres delante.
                    Yo pensé que no hallara consonante,
y estoy a la mitad de otro cuarteto,
mas si me veo en el primer terceto,
no hay cosa en los cuartetos que me espante.
                    Por el primer terceto voy entrando,
y parece que entré con pie derecho,
pues fin con este verso le voy dando.
                    Ya estoy en el segundo, y aun sospecho
que voy los trece versos acabando;
contad si son catorce, y está hecho.

(Flores 385)

Guillén's sonnet is both a re-creation and a refutation of Lope's. The pause in the title, “Sólo por juego, nunca,” indicates from the outset that the sonnet is and is not a game. Both sonnets are poems of process. And both are evidence of the attraction that the sonnet pattern itself holds for poets and for readers. In its adherence to formal rules, invariable symmetrical construction, and inter-play of oppositions a sonnet has much in common with the ritualized patterns of a game. Guillén's poem begins, as does Lope's, with an apparently random choice of the rhyming word—furthering the resemblance to a game which depends on the combination of chance and the pre-determined. The choice of “montaña” seems to lead the poem naturally to the other rhyming words—“hazaña,” “braña” so that language appears to generate itself and the sonnet to take its own shape just as Lope's does. However, while Guillén's sonnet is metapoetic, concerned primarily with the process of constructing a sonnet, there is another dimension which goes beyond the game. There is a hint of Genesis in the first line (“Al principio”) which expands throughout the stanza to indicate the creative power of the word. If “montaña” was chosen at random, the rest is then determined, for the word becomes deed, “montaña” becomes “hazaña”; the poem converts the abstract to the concrete, “aire en elemento.” The word creates the reality. Creation continues in the second stanza. Air—the echo, the word (“aña” to “braña”)—becomes earth, material reality which, in turn, inspires the creator with new breath, new creative power. In the sestet, the poet rests momentarily, as does Lope, pleased with the progress of the poem. What begins as a game quickly exceeds the boundaries of play as the word in combination with the pattern produces its own reality. Once again, just as Lope's sonnet provides a foundation for Guillén's, Guillén's in turn has its effect on Lope's. Reaching back in time, Guillén's insistence on the transforming power of the word calls the reader's attention to the fact that the word also creates the reality in the earlier poem. In Lope's poem, “soneto” is the word that creates the reality. That reality is the sonnet itself, its pattern of sound, harmony and rhythm. Thus Guillén accepts, rejects and transforms Lope's sonnet through his own.

Guillén's sonnet ends however, with the same kind of ambiguity found in that of Mallarmé above. “Juego tras juego, realidad ilesa.” Is it that the game, the sonnet, even the whole tradition can never capture reality? Or, on the other hand, is it that each sonnet, each link in the continuous pattern captures and contains its own reality—a reality that is at once unique and the same, individual content structured into a universal pattern. Like Mallarmé's rose in the darkness, Guillén's sonnet stands as witness to its own creation, as evidence of the power of form to produce its own reality. Just as the presence of Quevedo in a poem of Guillén negates Quevedo's fear of time, the existence of Guillén's sonnet contradicts his linguistic skepticism.

“Juego tras juego, realidad ilesa.” It may be that no one poem can capture the whole of reality, but the fascination with the sonnet form that has led to its having a life of its own—metapoetic in nature—suggests that the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts. The sonnet, after seven hundred years, is a form in dialogue with itself. The original spatial pattern of the form, limited and confining, has expanded into an implicitly infinite interlocking pattern in time. Every sonnet serves as a possible pre-text for every new sonnet. And it is this temporal development which enables us, as Albarn says, “to unlock the shape's potential.” Foçillon, in describing the vitality of Moslem ornamentation, describes that of the sonnet form as well.

The most rigorous rules, apparently intended to impoverish and to standardize formal material, are precisely those which, with an almost fantastic wealth of variations and metamorphoses, best illuminate its superb vitality. What could be more removed from life, from its ease and flexibility, than the geometric combinations of Moslem ornament? These combinations are produced by mathematical reasoning. They are based upon cold calculation; they are reducible to patterns of utmost aridity. But deep within them, a sort of fever seems to goad on and to multiply the shapes; some mysterious genius of complication interlocks, enfolds, disorganizes, and reorganizes the entire labyrinth. Their very immobility sparkles with metamorphoses.

(6)

Jorge Guillén, perhaps more than any other modern poet, has identified and elaborated the spatial and temporal structure of the form. Guillén has used it consciously as a pattern reflecting the order of reality and as the infinitely renewable source of poetic creation: the langue from which the individual creation emerges and to which it returns. In Guillén's hands, the sonnet serves as a medium for the continuing dialogue with poets and poetry. As the successor of Lope, Quevedo and Mallarmé, he takes his place in the tradition of patterns within patterns.

Notes

1. There is a more detailed description of this concept in my article, “The Ordering of Experience: A Study of Juan Ramón Jiménez's Sonetos espirituales,” Hispania 63 (1980): 666-73.

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———. Clamor. Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1977.

———. Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet. Trans. Reginald Gibbons and Anthony L. Geist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

———. Homenaje. Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1978.

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—. Mallarmé: The Poems. New York: Penguin, 1977.

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