[In the following essay, Craig discusses Silva as a member of the group of Spanish-American writers associated with the early Modernist movement.]

José Asunción Silva was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1865, and died there in 1896. He is properly regarded as one of the precursors of the Modernist movement, and is so grouped along with Julián del Casal, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, and José Martí by Arturo Torres-Ríoseco in his volume, Precursores del modernismo (Madrid, 1925). Blanco Fombona has asserted that Rubén Darío drew some of his inspiration from Asunción Silva;¹ but this is unlikely. The poems of Silva did not appear in book form till 1908, twelve years after the author's death. During his lifetime they circulated among his friends or appeared in local periodicals, but the likelihood that any of these local Colombian papers reached Buenos Aires, where Darío was then living, is remote. Moreover, there is no trace of the influence of Silva in Darío's Prosas profanas (1896), where, if anywhere, we might expect to find it. The further fact that Darío denied that Silva's work had influenced him in any way, should be conclusive. It is equally unlikely that Silva was influenced by Darío, for, although Darío's first important work, Azul, was published in 1888, it was little known till Juan Valera's appreciation (published by La Nación, Buenos Aires) gave it a wide publicity. By this time, however, all that part of Silva's work which is now extant had already been written. “Nocturno III” probably belongs to the year 1892 or 1893. Of Silva's last works nothing is known, the manuscript having been lost in the wreck of the “America” (1895).

The important fact is that the enthusiastic study of the more recent French writers was going on over the whole Spanish-speaking area from Chile and the Argentine Republic to Colombia and Mexico; and Darío came to be recognized as the leader of the movement because he arrived at the opportune moment to concentrate and condense, and to express with power and precision, the thoughts and feelings of a whole generation.

The complete edition of the Poesías of José Asunción Silva (Barcelona, 1908) is a comparatively small volume. The earlier poems, dealing with memories of childhood, are simple, natural, and sympathetic; but even in these there is an occasional touch of melancholy:

          La abuela se sonríe con maternal cariño,
mas cruza por su espíritu como un temor extraño
por lo que en lo futuro de angustia y desengaño
los días ignorados del nieto guardarán.

This same way of looking at things is noticeable in his patriotic poem, Al pie de la estatua. His admiration and love for Bolívar are deep and sincere, yet it is not of Bolívar's great deeds as Liberator that the poet sings, but of the pettiness, selfishness, and ingratitude of his own generation. Even the children playing innocently in the garden around the statue give him a feeling of foreboding which he is unable to dispel with Gray's reflection in a similar situation:

Yet, ah! why should they know their fate
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more;—where ignorance is bliss,
                              'Tis folly to be wise.

This note of bitterness is seldom absent from Silva's work. In his Día de difuntos (in which we catch echoes of The Bells of Edgar Allan Poe) it is not the mournful notes of the great bells that move the poet with their

acentos dejativos
y tristísimos y inciertos …
que les hablan a los vivos
                    de los muertos,

but the ironic clang of the bell that tells the hours, and notes how easily the weeping widower finds another mate.

Ella [the bell] ha marcado la hora en que el viudo
habló del suicidio y pidió el arsénico,
cuando aún en la alcoba recién perfumada
flotaba el aroma del ácido fénico;
          y ha marcado luego la hora en que mudo
por las emociones con que el gozo agobia,
          para que lo uniera con el sagrado nudo
a la misma iglesia fué con otra novia.

The somber coloring of these poems is the reflection of the tragedy of the poet's life, and this may be best understood in the light of his aspirations as he reveals them in his prose work, De sobremesa:

You know very well what it is: just as poetry attracts me, so everything draws and fascinates me irresistibly: all the arts, all the sciences, politics, speculation, luxury, pleasure, mysticism, love, war, all forms of human activity, all forms of life … all those sensations which through the urgency of my senses I require to have from day to day more intense and more delicate.²

And again:

Ah! to live one's life! that is what I desire; to feel all that can be felt; to know all that can be known, to be able to accomplish all that can be accomplished!

This hunger of the spirit is one of the preëminent marks of the Modernist. For Silva, all hopes and efforts ended in frustration. The death of his father left him burdened with debt. Being a poet and a dreamer, he was never able to raise his head above business worries. His sensibility was wounded by the sordidness of his surroundings and the lack of sympathy with his ideals. His reading of pessimistic philosophy left him without faith of any kind; while the death of his beloved sister, Elvira, together with the loss of the manuscript of his last and presumably best work, and the fear of insanity, brought him to despair and finally to suicide.

His third “Nocturno,” in which he gives expression to his grief over the loss of his sister, is one of the most deeply moving poems in Spanish-American literature. Its gloom and utter desolation are unrelieved by any ray of hope; yet there is a haunting beauty in the lines to which translation can hardly do justice. The feeling of strangeness and mystery is heightened by the musical reiteration of certain vowel sounds,

una noche toda llena de murmullos, de perfumes y de música de alas,

by an occasional assonance, and by the frequent repetition of phrases—all characteristic of the newer school of poetry. These repeated phrases provoked laughter among the critics; and, read casually, they may seem pointless; but recited by a master reader they might be made very telling. On this point Solar has an interesting note:

Bertha Singerman has recited the “Nocturno,” interpreting it admirably. Her rich, warm voice, on reaching these lines,

¡Y eran una sola sombra larga!
          ¡Y eran una sola sombra larga!
                    ¡Y eran una sola sombra larga!

sank softly, becoming each time thinner and more tremulous—as a phantom might grow, waver, and vanish away;—the syllables lengthened out with light inflections, and the accent became less and less marked until it expired in an imperceptible whisper. No one smiled. The hearers, less schooled but more intuitive than certain critics, had understood that each line, though identical in words with the preceding, had a different signification, evoked a new aspect of the quivering, changing shade, and all remained absorbed, as if the black wings of mystery had touched their spirits.³

Metrically, this poem was regarded as a daring innovation, for not only are the lines of irregular length, but also the meter is built up on a foot of four syllables with the accent on the third syllable (adopted later by José Gabriel y Galán, José Santos Chocano, and Ricardo Jaimes Freyre). The regular recurrence of the accent—more regular than is usual in the best Spanish poetry—serves only to enhance the feeling of melancholy and depression that pervades the whole poem.

In Silva's later poems the bitterness of his spirit finds vent in satire against the religious life, in Don Juan de Covadonga; against the love of women, in Luz de luna; against the futility of all human endeavor, in Filosofías; for

          cuando llegues en postrera hora
a la última morada
sentirás una angustia matadora
de no haber hecho nada;

against the grossness of the materialistic philosophy of the time, in Futura, in which he sees the race gathered, in the twenty-fourth century, around the statue of its patron saint,

Sancho Panza,
ventripotente y bonachón;

and against the Philistine density of the critics, in Un poema. For into one great work of art the poet had poured all the power and beauty of his soul;

Complacido en mis versos, con orgullo de artista,
les dí olor de heliotropos y color de amatista …
Le mostré mi poema a un crítico estupendo …
Lo leyó cuatro veces, y me dijo … ¡No entiendo!

It is in this satirical sense that we must interpret the last poem in the volume, Egalité. In his book of table-talk, De sobremesa, Silva resents the imputation that he is a mere asqueroso pornógrafo, a charge which this poem might be held to justify; but the intention is obviously ironic. Silva was a man of rare culture and sensitive spirit. For him, the mandarin represents the flower of an age-old culture. But take that away and what remains? Nothing but the mere animal; and then

          Juan Lanas, el mozo de esquina,
es absolutamente igual
al Emperador de la China:
los dos son un mismo animal.

Notes

1. Blanco Fombona maintains this opinion; see El modernismo y los poetas modernistas (Madrid, 1929), p. 172.

2. José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa (Bogotá, 1926), pp. 15-16.

3. Eduardo Solar Correa, Poetas de Hispano-América (Santiago de Chile, 1926), p. 261.