SOURCE: Jiménez-Fajardo, Salvador. “Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn: The Gaze Within.” In Luis Cernuda, pp. 70-95. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

[In the following essay, Jiménez-Fajardo examines Cernuda's themes of the relationship between the poet and his work, the opposition of desire and time, and notions of death and cosmic unity in Como quien espera el alba.]

I INTRODUCTION

Como quien espera el alba (Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn) was included in the 1958 edition of Reality and Desire, but it had been published independently in 1947 by Losada in Buenos Aires. Of its title Cernuda says in “History of a Book”: “The conclusion of the war reached me in Cambridge, and the title, Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn, alludes to those years, since at that time it seemed possible only to wait, to wait for the end of that retrocession to a primitive world of obscurity and terror” (PL [Poetry and Literature], 204). Certainly hope and death are elements of considerable importance in a large number of the poems in this sequence. In the face of such terrifying evidences of chaos as those just witnessed in the Spanish Civil War and those in the midst of which much of the civilized world still floundered, Cernuda's poetry in this period is a labor of retrieval. He is determined to ransom out of his own past, his present, and the nature of his art, a system of values, ethical and aesthetic, from which he can contemplate disaster with some hope.

Cernuda will now turn to an examination of his art with greater insistence in the spirit of “The Nightingale on the Stone” rather than that of “To a Dead Poet” or “To L. with a Few Violets”; for, although he continues to see poetry debased and ignored by the vulgus, he considers it a necessary, intensely personal undertaking, not because the poet must be defined in terms of society around him, but because he must define himself apart from society. His judgment of poetry is then a much more basic one; it is a judgment that reaches to the source of his very awareness of himself. Poetry is, for Cernuda, an ultimately ethical endeavor, in the traditional sense in which ethics is a part of metaphysics and not in the pragmatic understanding of the term. His values are transcendent, not derived from social learning in the world at large or in the child's environment. His poem “La familia” (“The Family”) attests to this very idea. The absolutes of nature, like myths, are expressions of a higher necessary order. They are the memories left by ancient gods whose search and invocation are ethically motivated as Cernuda understood them to be for Hölderlin. Furthermore, the poetic task is compelling not only because it is an affirmation of the unity of the self, but also because it is born of that inner drive, the “daimon” breathing with the poet, undeniable and ever-present in its questioning anguish.

The present man is but a product of his past, a trite though inescapable fact which Cernuda chooses to note in the last lines of “History of a Book”: “… it was said already many centuries ago by someone infinitely wise: ‘character is destiny’”¹ (PL, 216). The evidence of this consideration deprives it neither of force nor of actuality for the poet; he will frequently investigate his personal history because it contains the sources of his decision for poetry and because language can renew the past, can fixate the fleeting images of memory. Few poets have been as aware as Cernuda of the consequent relationship between our memory of ourselves and our sense of selfhood, of the increasing threat that time poses to our very identity, not merely in our future death but in our forgetting. That is why oblivion itself must become for him a species of memory and must be integrated into the present, to expand the minute point in time that this present is: the more we salvage, the more we are.

The present—reality around us—must be restructured and made part of our expanding self. Such is the sense of Cernuda's intense application of desire upon the world, upon time, as it arises from the poems of Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn. His relationship with matter and idea around him is an erotic one; it oscillates with the inescapable rhythms of passion, but like the forms it traces, it rises anew always. Ultimately, the impulse acquires greater importance than its object. For the poet sees desire as the form of his spirit, and its creations are then mere copies of this form. In such light the consideration of surrounding reality becomes increasingly abstract. Death itself is accidental to the essence of love, whose fulfillment is possible only in the throes of cosmic union. As we have seen, this search for the unity of inner and outer realities has remained a central element in Cernuda's poetry since First Poems. In Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn it finds expression and partial existential success with “Vereda del cuco” (“The Cuckoo's Path”) at the end of the collection and is adumbrated in “Jardín” (“Garden”) and “Río Vespertino” (“Vespertine River”).

We enter then with this collection a period of more philosophical poetry than we have seen heretofore. This does not mean, however, that we are plunged entirely into a disembodied realm of ideas. Cernuda remains true to that early tenet of always retaining an “asidero plástico” (“plastic hold”); essence, in any case, is always for him discoverable in circumstance. In this chapter we examine first of all the poems of Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn that relate to poetry itself and generally to art; in our next section we shall emphasize the conflict—constant in Cernuda as we know and present also therefore in other works which we may stress differently—of desire and time. We shall concern ourselves thereafter with the poet's meditations upon death and conclude with those compositions where he attempts to express his intimations of cosmic unity.

II POETRY

Let us return once more as we look at those poems of this collection involving the poet and his craft to that almost inevitable point of departure for any consideration of Cernuda's main themes, his statements on that “other reality,” the true form of this reality and the one that poetry seeks. Ocnos opens with a reflection on poetry centering on this revalued reality: “I glimpsed then the existence of a different reality from that perceived daily, and obscurely I felt already how it was not sufficient for that other reality to be different, but that something winged and divine must accompany it and halo it as the tremulous nimbus that surrounds a luminous point.”² Cernuda remembers this childhood impression as an anticipating intuition of his later understanding of what poetry does to life, that is, to our dealing with this reality: “Thus … already appeared the magical power that consoles life.”³ The magic of the poem should reveal that divine nimbus, redeem in us the grossness of our daily contact with this side of matter. It is not surprising that the poet should have quoted in “History of a Book” from Massignon's book on Al-Hallaj. For the Moslem saint's interpretation of reality and of our relationship to it is Cernuda's, too. The French scholar characterizes Al-Hallaj as “a man of desire, eager to taste what subsists of things that pass.”⁴ For Al-Hallaj this involves “a moral introspection of one's self.”⁵ His mystical theology intuits the divine power as “an … activity radically different from the sensible traces … that it leaves engraved in our memory.”⁶ Finally, Massignon states: “If he directs through effusions of love all his desires toward God, it is to attest that the divine spirit alone can ‘realize’ these desires.”⁷ If we substitute “poetry” for “mystical theology” and refrain from personalizing the divinity, Cernuda's poetic vision is parallel to Al-Hallaj's theological one, even to the idea of “moral introspection” which, as we saw, is central to it. The search for the agreement of his inner moral self and the “divine” harmony, its union in fact, underpins much of Cernuda's work; this possibility sustains his life, directs his “desire”; and this realization maintains the poet in a constant adversary's position with respect to social man.

“Aplauso humano” (“Human Applause”) does not deal with poetry alone, but rather with it as one of two main aspects of the poet's “difference,” and with his pride in this difference. That the poet considers his separation from the mainstream of society a matter both poetic and sexual is made plain from the very first stanza:

Now all those gray creatures,
Whose meager love thirst is nightly satisfied
By the conjugal milk and water, upon hearing
          your verses
May mock you because of the truth they expose.

“The truth” in this context is an erotic and simultaneously poetic truth quite unlike that of the “gray creatures.” It is both of a different order and of a different intensity, for this desire is, by implication, altogether more demanding than their “meager love thirst.” The following stanza reverses the emphasis:

How many fashionable pedants and journalists
          for sale
Will then consider themselves the perfect
          flower of humanity
Next to you, as will the coarse churl
Rooting ad nauseam in the dross of desire.

Now the distance between the poet and the others is born of the latter's vulgarity, and it is also a consequence of their limited intellectual perception of true desire. The next two stanzas link the truth of poetry and the truth of love—also, of course, his homosexuality—as necessary expressions of the speaker's self-understanding, that is, as they are now defined in terms of his own being rather than in contrast with that of others. After considering whether this truth may not have been debased by the mere fact of expression, the poet concludes that his course was as inevitable and essential to his life as his very breath so that he feels: “And if you hear a gibe, sudden as a stone / Let your pride decipher in it the bitter form of praise” (RD [Reality and Desire], 216-17).

It is well to keep this piece and particularly its final lines in mind when examining “Góngora.” For some of the modern poet's traits are equally those of his predecessor, and the poem appears then clearly not only as an admiring remembrance of Góngora the man and the poet but also as a projection by Cernuda of his situation into that of the great ancestor—Don Luis de Góngora y Argote, Andalusian and poet. Other parallelisms strengthen this assumption, for instance, the specific decision to set Góngora in his self-imposed exile—although it consisted in a return to his home in Córdoba and his merely leaving the court, the fact of exile remains—within the more general view of poets as outcasts in society or its victims (Lorca and Larra were earlier instances in The Clouds). Too, similarities of expression link both poems as reflections on a comparable plight, such as in “Góngora” the lines, “… still reach him / The others' stones, sad splashes / Of that slipslop dear for the people / Who compose the community, and as public are arbiters of glory.”

The poem develops in five movements expressing Góngora's greatness in contrast to his past and present evaluations by the “community.” The initial stanza situates the poet—“The Andalusian grown old who has much reason for his pride / The poet whose lucid word is like a diamond”—at the limits of his endurance of (1) pervading indifference: “Weary of exhausting his hopes at the court”; (2) poverty: “Weary of his noble poverty”; (3) humiliation: “Weary of soliciting favors from magnates”; (4) the failure of his fortunes away from home: “Weary of the years so long misspent / In pursuing fortune far from level Córdoba and its lofty wall.” Stanza two shows his decision to return to Córdoba arising from abandoned hope, “Now he restores his soul to solitude, relying upon no one,” and resignation to his lot, “Now he resigns himself to see life passing as an inconsistent dream.” After this relation of Góngora's circumstances mostly from the standpoint of his social aspirations, his character and position as a man, the third stanza ponders the highest expression of his greatness, that of his work. Góngora's strength was in his poetry, and it elevates him above all other, ultimately petty, difficulties: “But in poetry he always found not so much beauty but courage, / The strength to live freer and more proud.” Yet even through this he was destined to suffer, for “It is finally decreed that Góngora never was a poet / That he loved the obscure, and only vanity dictated his verses.” But this too redounds to his credit, for it raises him even higher above pedestrian evaluations past and present: “… thus may / The very descendants of those who insulted him / Bow to his name, give prizes to the scholar, / Successor to the worm, gnawing at his memory.” Such opportunistic reverence for the poet's genius merely reflects once more the insufficiency of his eulogizers now, as it did that of his detractors then, and he remains out of reach: “And he secured his irreducible soul / As an untractable demon laughing in the blackness.”

The litanylike tone⁸ and cadence of the poem with its repeated phrases and frequent recourse to longer lines give the poem unusual lyrical strength and a sustained thrust of irony. The recurring “Weary of …” in the first stanza intensifies Góngora's long-lasting but finally intolerable disgust at the futility of his endeavors, while, by implication, surrounding pettiness appears equally odious. In the fifth stanza the irony reaches its peak and the repetitions also accumulate in a final crescendo that borders on sarcasm: “Let us thank God for the peace of Góngora defeated; / Let us thank God for the peace of Góngora exalted; / Let us thank God, who knew to return him (as he will us), / Annulled at last, finally tranquil, in the midst of his nothingness” (RD, 192-94).

The impulse to pursue the poetic task, thankless though it may seem at times, is as irresistible as the need for self-affirmation and can no more be negated than can life itself. In “Noche del hombre y su demonio” (“A Man's Night with his Demon”), Cernuda explores that need to speak when everything seems to prove speech fruitless, when the temptation to cease is greatest. The poem is a dialogue between “the man” and his “demon” on the relative values of life and poetry, the “demon” intimating that in his devotion to language, “the man” has let life pass him by. We note first of all, as did Silver,⁹ although he did not pursue the point, that “the man” and not the poet converses with his devil. Cernuda has gone here to the very heart of his being where the poetic impulse is separable from the self, since he sees precisely his devil as the source of this impulse—“Who else but you set that madness in me?” Cernuda comments on this demonic power in “Words before a Reading”: “Confused with the lyrical gift that dwelled in certain poets, it seems as if their physical strength could not resist it [the demonic power], and they see themselves dragged to destruction, to find at last, beyond death, an enigmatic freedom.”¹⁰ This fate, which he attributes to Hölderlin, is the same one contemplated in this poem. To the demon's accusation of having devoted too much of his being to “the word,” the man replies:

Today you chide me for my creed of words.
Who but you set that madness in me?
The bitter pleasure of turning action
Into sound, replacing deed with word,
Has been the constant struggle of my life.
And my unheeded, or barely heeded
Voice, shall sound even when I am dead,
Alone, like the wind among the rushes.

Words allow actions to subsist when their speaker has died. They are the poet's strength and hope. But even this the demon denies:

No one heeds a voice, as well you know.
Whoever listened to another's voice,
When pure and alone? The glib buffoon
And vapid hierophant see their lies greeted
By crowds' acclaim. They live, they prosper;
You languish alone. Who cares for tomorrow?
When fate forgets them and remembers you
As just a name, a sound, a breath of air.

And yet the demon owes his existence to the man's very anguish: “… and you would not exist / Were I another, perhaps happier man.” The poem ends on a mutual realization of interdependence between man and demon, the latter concluding: “… stand up, look about you / In hope, though you can expect nothing here.” For ultimately eventual recognition is not a sufficient reason for the poet's work, as he admits: “My pretense was guileless and hurt no one / But myself, although this I knew at times”; nor is it enough “[To assume] for others the conscience / Made supine in them, and their remorse, / [To accept] the sins which they reject.” Beyond all this, poetry is essential because through it the poet finds “It is better to live amid anguish / Than to dwell in ignorance” (PC [The Poetry of Luis Cernuda], 106-13).

Not merely is it through poetry that for Cernuda life becomes justified; through it one also finds knowledge in the sense given by the ancients to the Greek term “gnosis.” Thus, poetry becomes a communication from the elements, so that the poet is a receptacle of such knowledge and must seek it within himself, within his poetic impulse. Such are the connotations of “El arpa” (“The Harp”), an affirmative consideration by Cernuda of his art that speaks of the work's existential significance. As Silver¹¹ has shown, the harp is here a metaphor for the poet, the “invisible bird” is his inspiration:

Cage of an invisible bird
Brother of the water and the air
Whose voice is solicited
By the soft deliberate hand.
.....What fruits of paradise
What heavenly cisterns
Nurture your voice? Tell me, sing
Bird of the harp, oh lyre.

(RD, 203)

While the poet's inspiration—“bird,” “lyre”—is presented as descending upon him from the spheres, his role is not merely receptive. The “bird” will sing only when a “soft, deliberate hand” solicits it; “deliberate” for restraint and control, “soft” for delicacy. The communications from “the water” and “the air” must be formed as water is to become a fountain of life, as air is to become life or song. Inspiration may be an external force, but it is only the force; it needs to be shaped. What is available through poetry is more an awareness, a receptivity, which, when informed with the body of knowledge and art of the poet, may produce heightened moments of “gnosis,” such as that intimated in the following lines from “Mañanas de verano” (“Summer Mornings”) in Ocnos: “It seemed as if his senses, and through them his body, were a tense and propitious instrument for the world to render its rarely perceived melody. But the child did not consider strange that precious gift of feeling in harmony with life and that life should brim over in him, transporting and transmuting him.”¹²

III DESIRE VERSUS TIME

Such plenitude may be invoked, but only rarely is it achieved; time stands as ever in the way, making experience inescapably ephemeral. There remains, as we have seen, glimpsed and struggled for, the possibility of going beyond duration and the intuition of a latent reality, both being essential elements of the desired consonance. This preoccupation, constant in Cernuda's poetry, was dealt with in the last chapter. Our intent here is to emphasize the change of mood that has taken place in Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn, wherein a more confident tone prevails and eventual fulfillment is even thought possible.

“Las ruinas” (“The Ruins”), second poem of the collection, is a meditation on the paradox of man's mortality and his ability to create lasting beauty. As Coleman has indicated,¹³ there is a clear reminiscence in the poem's opening of Rodrigo Caro's “A las ruinas de Itálica,” but, whereas Caro's work remains within the limits of a reflection of man's passing, Cernuda pursues his thought toward affirming both the necessity and sufficiency of beauty to sustain man's and particularly the poet's self-assertion. Here, as elsewhere, God is denied any significance except as an invention of man to placate his fear of the unknown.

The early stanzas of the poem situate the ruins alongside perennial events of nature. The ruins, too, continue, an expression of man's dreams and of his thirst for the eternal, resisting time, holding it through their beauty: “The marble ruins / Are a beautiful, musical edifice / Made whole by a dream.” These thoughts are followed by a contrast between the durable remains of man's ancient greatness and his own total disappearance. To all his endeavors there remains a monument:

The stones that living feet trod
Centuries ago, remain still motionless
In their place, and the columns in the square
That witnessed the politicians' struggles,
And the altars where they sacrificed and hoped,
And the walls that veiled the pleasures of
          the flesh.

The ruins, an external concretization of time, are but the tangible form of the enemy man bears within: “They in whose mind eternity is conceived, / Have within them, like a fruit's pit, death.” The ruins have captured time, and as man's frail bodies dissolve around their core of death so have they left them behind. The reflection now turns to God as the source of death and time as well as that of man's notion of the eternal and more specifically the poet's:

Oh God. You who have made us to die,
Why did you fill us with the thirst
For eternity that creates the poet?
Can you allow the sons of light to fall,
Century after century, into the greedy shadow
Like thistledown blown away on the wind?

The last three lines of this stanza clearly set this putative deity's power in doubt, since, as opposed to the remaining constructions of man—“That titanic aqueduct's dry broken arches / Stride across the untilled valley”—he lets his own creatures disappear, frail “thistledown.” The next stanza draws the inevitable conclusion: “But you do not exist. You are only the name / Man gives to his fear and impotence.” Even though the beauty he creates may not last forever in its concreteness, the poet's vision of its eternal qualities is a sufficient bulwark against death. The poet has learned in his meditation that ephemeral beauty is beauty still, and more worthy of his desire than “Deaf, eternal gods.” “Such is man” in strophe three referred to the ruins that remained as the sum of man's existence, monuments to his death. “Such is man” in the penultimate strophe refers to his awareness of the importance of life, the need to create and to enjoy beauty, because it passes as we do but continues to be more essential than the gods. The poem ends in a mood of calm acceptance as the poet surrenders to the propitiousness of the hour and of the setting: “… I now lie back / To gaze in peace at the landscape and the ruins” (PC, 88-93).

The powers of desire over our past are limited, however, in that there is bound to remain an unresolvable, undeniable core of experience which may be liable to reinterpretation, but not of total regeneration. We are thrown into the world of flux and subjected to it irrevocably, as are all things when they pass from the potential to the actual. The more individualized objects, beings, and events are, the more they are vulnerable to time. Potentiality is therefore preferable to actuality as youth is to maturity. Such is the assertion of “Juventud” (“Youth”):

Rather than the spoken word,
The silence that cradles it.
Not passion—the dream
Wherein it is latent.

(PC, 94-95)

Here we approach such total solipsism that the poetic impulse seems endangered. But this potential lies within desire in the form of poetic imagination—in a sense reminiscent of Coleridge—and in the struggle between containment and expression, desire, to exist, must choose the latter. Yet is must choose such expression as will come closest to its very essence which partakes of the eternal harmony, the love that lasts. It needs but the barest of elements; thus “Ofrenda” (“Oblation”) concludes:

Such poverty is pleasing to heaven:
Leave to the gods in oblation,
As the living seed that is sown,
The nakedness of your desire.

(RD, 190)

The world of imagination and dream may remain, of course, untouched by time, more compelling for the poet. As we indicated, greater differentiation implies a greater subjection to time so that in fact there is a loss of absolute value. In “El brezal” (“The Heath”) from Ocnos we read: “Time, though it gave color, took away enchantment, and much time had already passed, as you confronted your own intimate reality with the other. So many things was the heath able to say to you then, and now that you had it there, it was inexpressive and mute.”¹⁴ The personal world of the poet is most completely lived in imagination. In childhood, also, desire is closest to its pure constitutive elements. Undoubtedly, that Edenic season exerts considerable attraction for Cernuda throughout his life, as Silver has shown in his excellent study. Yet childhood is not always remembered in a nimbus of innocence or felicity. Already then the poet felt marked by his difference, unable to belong to the very circle of his kin. There is no real bitterness in Cernuda's apparent indictment of his family in “The Family,” merely sadness, for the parents could not have known how unlike their wishes was their son, inured from birth to all traditional injunctions, how their measured affection was to seem parsimonious or even irrelevant.

The poem is a second-person address by the poet to himself, urging the recall of those bygone days. This second-person technique is not infrequent in Cernuda, as seen in Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn, and there are two instances of it in The Clouds: “Evening in the Cathedral” and “Alegría de la soledad” (“Happiness of Solitude”). Alexander Coleman¹⁵ includes this type of dialogue among the many aspects of Cernuda's projected voice, his “dramatic” poetry, while for José Olivio Jiménez, it allows the poet to sing “from the deepest dregs of his solitude.”¹⁶ The use of the “tú” form (literally, “thou,” rendered “you”) implies, of course, that some discoveries are being made with regard to this projected “persona”; as Coleman says, it and the other “voices” of Cernuda's poetry evidence an increasing didacticism. There are other consequences that one may draw from the use of “tú”: this teaching situation is aimed at the self, it is as if one part of Cernuda were lending the ability to speak to another, mute part of himself.¹⁷

This work is then best read as a species of interrogation, and indeed it opens with a question: “Do you remember, remember still that scene / Where you sat patiently day after day / In your childhood, remote now like a dream at dawn?” The repetition of “remember,” meant to awaken the memory of that somewhat recalcitrant “you,” underlines the difficulty of the recall. This initial question is wholly concerned with the effort to penetrate that monotonous—“day after day”—vivid, and yet unreal past—“Like a dream at dawn.” The stage in which the remembrance will be played back is now set:

The heavy silence, the drawn curtains,
The circle of light around the dining table,
As solemn as an altar, where there sat
That family conclave, praised by so many before,
Although you, less tenderhearted, have not yet done so.

An impression of oppressive ceremony arises from this description—“heavy silence,” “drawn curtains,” “solemn as an altar,” and “family conclave”; the last line returns to the unwillingness to remember which must now be overcome. “Less tenderhearted” sets the speaker apart not only within the family circle, but apart also from those others who “praised” such scenes. It also prepares us for the cold backward glance by referring to the former refusal to celebrate. The scene chosen to illustrate the past is the family dinner, accustomed epitome of homely accord and warmth. It is a cold ritual: “Fragile and unyielding, like glass, / Which anyone can break, but none can bend.” The comparison to the mass, to another ritual supper, underlying this family scene, infers in the context of Cernuda's work the same repetition of gestures that have lost their meaning, the same invocation of a unity and love that does not exist because its original intent has been forgotten or has drowned under the weight of solemn tradition. Things are done and responsibilities carried out with meaningless punctiliousness, a defense against the void. The child resists because his instinct for the broad generosity of true love and the vigor to see clearly can submit to no empty obligations:

But there was something else, huddled
Inside you, like a beast in its dark lair,
Which they did not give you, and this is what you are:
Strength of my solitude, I shall live in you,
Finding your truth through your mistakes,
Just as water springs and runs free,
Untrammeled by the need to turn machines,
Unchanging down to the sea, which is its destiny.
That love of theirs held you fast,
Like a garment made for someone else,
And that generosity, which sought
To buy your consent to anything
That did not accord with your nature.
You learnt then to hate that love which does not know
How to burn unknown without reward.

Together with this realization of his past strength, there arises greater indulgence toward the family's shortcomings. In answer to the empty rite at the dinner table, the speaker concludes with his own prayer, born of an understanding he now extends to those who lacked it then:

… may the gates of hell
Not prevail over you nor the products of your flesh,
Silent father, who never came to know your son,
Sad mother, who never understood him.
May those distant shades be not disturbed
In the uttermost limbo of the void
By their memory of you, like a pang of remorse.
May this ghostly gathering that invokes them,
Offering your blood like a libation
To make the departed visible for a moment,
Bring peace and pardon to you and to them.

(PC, 96-101)

The poem has been an iteration of those long-forgotten suppers, the celebration of one mass whose significance has not been lost, where the sacrificed son offers himself to redeem those who bore him and bring them to life once more. From a delving into this cold and adamant past, the poet returns with that clearer understanding which demands the offer of himself as an atonement for the sins of others.

In Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn desire acquires its full significance as both the origin of the poet's anguish in the face of flux and the impulse to overcome it; it is the source of poetry. The son in “The Family” rekindles for an instant the life of his kin through his poem by filling with his substance the emptiness behind their gestures, creating out of his all-embracing desire, out of the “difference” that their regimented loves ignored, the justification they had not found.

IV SERENITY BEFORE DEATH

In his essay on Jorge Manrique, Cernuda says: “Death is not something different from life, it is an integral part of it, whose very perfection is achieved in death, without which life would have no more sense than an idle play of lights and shadows.”¹⁸ This attitude toward his own extinction has now replaced the despairing confrontation therewith which sounded through The Clouds as a persistent knell. The increased objectivity of tone in the later collection affects also the poet's view of death and leads him to structure the poems where it plays a major role as speculations on its significance, rather than emotive reactions to it. There is a gain in intellectual acquaintance with death's complexion accompanied frequently by a marked simplicity of language and anticipating the spare vigor of Living Without Being Alive and With Time Running Out.

In “Elegía anticipada” (“Anticipated Elegy”), an approximation of love to death elicits serene resignation. As the evocation of a cemetery, the piece is in sharp contrast to earlier treatments of the same theme; where death stood alone, stark and unforgiving, it now beckons, should the body return to earth in that same place where it met with love: “That is why memory returns today / To that cemetery, to the sea, the rock / In the southern coast; man wants / To fall where love was his one day” (RD, 215-16). Because death joins love in an affirmation of the apex of life, its contemplation no longer brings despair: “Of the intention that many may put into his actions, by referring intentions and actions to death, is born his immortality. … This does not surmise a negation of life, to which would inevitably lead the exclusive Christian conception of our existence; it is merely its serene affirmation.”¹⁹ Thus in “Hacia la tierra” (“Toward the Earth”), as in “Anticipated Elegy,” through the interchangeable characteristics discovered in love and death, the latter is elevated to a new plane, becoming desirable; it is an object of love or the finality where oblivion may turn to love once more:

But the soul must return
As a bird in autumn,
And that past sorrow
Visit, and that joy
.....Tired of sad dreams
And deliriums,
To return to its own
Ancient dwelling. …

(RD, 217-18)

More frequently, however, the anticipation of death retains all its painful connotations, albeit now somewhat less harsh. In “Otros tulipanes amarillos” (“Other Yellow Tulips”), a reflection on the fragile transitoriness of existence, death is merely oblivion:

Our life seems to be here: with leaves
Secure in their branch, until the cold is born;
With flowers in its stem, until the wind grows;
With light there in its sky, until clouds surge.
Perhaps for a moment you believed yourself certain
In the world of man, were it not
For that other world of the shadows
Consuming the body as a waning moon.

(RD, 219-20)

Death appears here muted because it is not a cessation, but a transition. That is to say, death occurs because something begins to “grow” instead of life. In a striking correlative arrangement we have:

	(leaves	The cold is born)
ending	(flowers	The wind grows)	beginning
	(light	clouds surge)

From “leaves” to “light” there is an increase in the brightness that ends; from “is born” to “surge” there is an intensification in the action that begins. In the opposite direction “light,” although brighter, is more ethereal than “leaves”; “clouds,” although of greater mass, are less sharp than “cold.” The final image of the stanza presents the approach of death likewise as the growth of other elements, in this case the “world of the shadows,” that is, for Cernuda, oblivion. Thus is death changed from an ending to a beginning, from a decrease to an increase and back again, transformed also into interplays of light and shadow, form and indefiniteness, and so diluted that its impact disappears, absorbed by the mobility of metaphors.

The narrative poem, “Quetzalcóatl” (the name of a Mexican deity), allows Cernuda to examine the approach of death from a completely objective point of view, in that he has chosen as speaker an old soldier, a man of both a different age and a temperament generally unlike his own. Although the piece seems not to involve the theme of death to any particular extent, hidden as it is under the epic matter that accounts for the body of the tale, the examination of that theme reveals an infrastructure not otherwise readily perceivable. The title itself refers not only to the story of the God-king whose prophetic arrival was fulfilled by Cortés but also to its mythical significance as plumed serpent. According to Erich Neumann: “Wherever the night sea voyage in pursuit of the sun is undertaken, by the gods or the human soul, it signifies the development toward the relative independence of an ego endowed with such attributes as free will. This tendency … achieves its highest form in the myth of Quetzalcóatl, the Mexican hero figure. … In his dual nature, he combines the western, deathly aspect and the eastern aspect of life: he is the evening star and the morning star. As morning star, he is the positive symbol of the ascending power belonging to the male-spiritual aspect of heaven and the sun.”²⁰ There are two visions that meet in the poem, although they are presented from the sole point of view of the old soldier. The first one is that of the Aztecs, who believed that Cortés was the God-king, come from the east, the morning star, bringer of life and new civilization. The other is that of the soldier's, who looked upon the appearance of Montezuma—evening star—as a miracle and on the Spaniards' victory also as a miracle. The poem unites both aspects of Quetzalcóatl as life bringer and death dealer; but seen from the threshold of death and in terms of blood and conquest, the morning star, bringer of life, becomes in the poem a bringer of death.

This conjunction is intimated from the start as the soldier begins his tale: “I was there, but do not ask me / Whence or how it came, know only / That I was there too, the time of the miracle.” He looks back on that double prodigy, both the appearance and destruction of the king Montezuma. Old world miracles are replaced by those of the new world, old legends by new ones: “… as thirsty, sandy ground drinks water, / Thus did my mind imbibe the legends / Of those who moved to the Indies.” A transfer of allegiance takes place as soon as the coast of the ancient homeland begins to fade: “… I felt yielding the invisible knot / That ties us to our land.” Immediately as he lands on the new continent, the speaker meets with the first embodiment of the myth: “Treading new land, destiny led me plainly / By the hand to the man intended / For the feat: that Cortés, demon or angel.” Like Quetzalcóatl, Cortés unites within him life and death; he is first described in images of light, in terms of Quetzalcóatl's configuration as a star: “Temper of diamond, which is congealed fire / That blinds the sight of those who look upon it.” Now there enters again the idea of predestination, the planned convergence of events toward a fated goal held by myth: “The city, contemplated from the mountain, / Unveils the secret intention of its streets. / Thought an aimless confusion when stepping upon it; / Thus did time unveil those our years / Preliminary, though they had seemed wasted.” The final expedition by sea is now undertaken, the one leading to the central encounter and which, as Neumann indicates, is part of the myth of the hero king: “And so came the moment when we went, / A handful of men, across the sea.” The tale of conquest previous to the meeting with the Aztec king follows. The stanza preceding this moment presents death at its most pervasive: “I assaulted bodies, tearing out their souls / Hardly tired of life, / … / I cut the flower of destinies in bloom.” Under the onslaught of death, art itself gives way: “Was there ever some Garcilaso sunk / To the bottom of death by my stone? / Neither is of this world, the kingdom of the poet.”

The appearance of that other aspect of the god contains a reference to the plumed serpent and is likewise presented in terms of revelation and light. This is the moment anticipated in the opening strophe:

When of a morning, through the arches and doors
That the conquered capital opened before us,
Undulated as a serpent of bronze and diamond
The procession with a litter carrying the Aztec king,
The very veil of the last heavens seemed
To tear, glory now was bared.
Yes, I was there, and I saw it; envy me, you others.

Here is the miracle of the new king replacing the old one, Quetzalcóatl replacing another god-king, Christ, and like him, sacrificed. The final irony is in the triumph of death: “Now friends and enemies are dead / And the dust of both lies in peace.” The civilization that has been introduced is a dead one: “Nothing remains to be done today: bound is the land, / Which the trafficker claims as his / Trading with bodies and souls.” The myth was replayed, and death ultimately won as it always does: “Of the wind the god was born and he returned to the wind, / That made of me a feather in its wings. / Oh land of death, where is thy victory?”

There is, in fact, no real exchange of myths, for Quetzalcòatl is but another aspect of the perennial sacrificial hero king, of which Christ also was one. Cortés's fate also is finally the same as that of his victim, Montezuma. The narrator is himself near his end, but he sees it from the vantage point of past glory and accepts it with calm: “And in a corner in the sun of this ground, mine more / Than is that other one abroad in the old world, alone, poor / As I came, I await at last without fear or hurry” (RD, 208-12).

In this many-layered composition, Cernuda has investigated death's most terrible aspect, one to which even art appears vulnerable, but also its most fertile one, for art in fact has integrated and transcended it. The poem uses a relatively recent historical fact, presents it in the guise of legend and pursues it to its mythical origins. Cernuda reaches back to an old-world myth of sacrifice and revitalizes it by uniting it with its new-world counterpart. Death emerges the victor as darkness absorbs the light-bearing god. But the original darkness was in fact the source of this light and only takes back its own. The uroboric mother contains life and death, light and darkness. Cernuda's consideration of death becomes thereby a source of poetry, just as reality, that is temporality, is the source of desire.

V THE SEARCH FOR UNITY

Although the poet's desire is awakened by his own individual encounter with the world and would seem therefore to be born exclusively of himself, it is for him, as we have seen, the expression of a cosmic force. This is not to say that the poet acts merely as the instrument of a higher order of things, the voice of the gods, as it were, in the sense of Plato's Ion. For the specifically poetic manifestation of desire is his own, as is likewise his own the very realization of this relationship between his particular erotic consciousness and the universal love-harmony. The difficulty of attuning the parcel of love that he possesses with the vast body whence it originates is caused by the discord between his duration and that of the world around him. This is why poetry is an essential element in the search for such consonance. It is born of the same impulse, and within the limitations of art it creates lasting moments of harmony. It is also the only possible medium to convey the mystical experience, although it must often be content merely to intimate it.

As we indicated earlier,²¹ the experience of transcendent tranquillity may be either partial or total. It is partial when certain specific circumstances, essential to its occurrence, are felt to be by their very nature limiting and temporary, so that the event itself is but an adumbration of the greater concordance. The early walled garden of First Poems provided such a setting, and we find a similar experience described in the “Garden” of the present collection:

From a corner seated,
Look at the light, the grass,
The trunks, the mossy
Stone that measures time
At the sun in the arbor
And the waterlilies, flakes
Of sleep on the motionless
Water of the fountain.
Up high the translucent
Web of leaves,
The sky with its pale
Blue, the white clouds.
A blackbird sweetly
Sings, as the very voice
Of the garden speaking to you.
In the quiet hour
Look well with your eyes,
As if you caressed
Everything. You owe gratitude
For such pure peacefulness,
Free of joy and sorrow,
In the light, because soon,
As you from here, it leaves.
Afar you listen
To the illusory step
Of time, moving
Toward the winter. Then
Your thought and this
Garden you thus contemplate
Transfixed by light
Will lie with long
Sleep, mute, somber.

(RD, 194-95)

Once more we note the “you” form of address, which suggests from the beginning a somewhat didactic intent in the poem: the speaker enjoins himself to do certain things in order that some knowledge be gained—as can be seen in stanza one. The principal act is one of contemplation; a quiet look from a sedentary position, in a “corner,” so that all is visible without the need of any disturbing movement. The objects of examination are given in a gradation from circumambient “light” to the central solidity of “the mossy stone.” This stone itself is a correlative of the whole poem, a softened hardness whose purpose—a further level of centrality, as it were—is to measure time. At the heart is unyielding time. The second stanza indicates that the stone is in fact in the center of the garden, itself a living, soft environment marking time, containing death at its core. Already this cyclical death is anticipated in “flakes of dream” with its suggestion of the winter's flakes of snow. The immobility is here suspended duration on the verge of movement. After this look level with the ground, the gaze moves upward in stanza three. There are no sharp contours or colors; this is an autumn sky. “The white clouds” against the sky are like the “waterlilies” on the motionless pond: both pass. The immobility of the water has transferred itself upward; the whole is in suspended animation. The fourth strophe introduces life at the middle level. The appearance of the blackbird begins the very gradual transition to the speaker himself, next to appear. This bird has a special significance for Cernuda. He dedicates to it one entire prose poem in Ocnos, where we read: “From the air it brings to earth some divine seed.”²² In “The Consonance,” the last piece of Ocnos, he says “The bat and the blackbird can contend in turn for dominion over your spirit; at times northerly … ; others southerly, merry sunny. …”²³ In this stanza the blackbird too is a reminder of temporality at the center, however, and the total harmony is finally impeded.

Although the first line of stanza five reiterates the advice of the poem's opening, to look, it begins the moment of interpretation. The importance of the senses is amplified; one must look with one's eyes, not merely in imagination; one must accumulate these perceptions, in anticipation of their later disappearance. The gift of the garden to the observer (“the very voice … to you”) is now returned to it (“as if … gratitude”). As the scenery is interiorized, the tempo of its changing is increased to that of the observer's duration in stanza six. Likewise, the flow of the poem has accelerated. The first and second stanzas were linked syntactically as if following the movement of the speaker's gaze and suggesting the initial, almost heedless absorption of the scenery. But calm asserts itself quickly and two full stops curb the opening rush at the end of strophes two and three. With the appearance of greater movement and the anticipation of the speaker's role, stanza four is also linked with five; and from now on they all glide into one another until the end. The syntactical bonds between strophes five and six, and six and seven, are the strongest in the poem, a verb and its object, an adjective and its noun. Temporality in all its mobile decay penetrates stanza seven. The steps of time, though illusory, prove stronger than the real presence of the garden, carrying all with them to the end, forward into the future (stanza seven). Man is pierced through with time as the garden itself is “Transfixed by light.” Man and garden have become one, both bearing within the “mossy stone that measures time.” Light will become darkness, communication will end, all will be “mute, somber.” The separation at the opening of the poem between the garden and the observer has dissolved. But the merging takes place as a realization of mutual temporality, the speaker bearing with him toward the “long sleep” the quietude of the scenery. It is a merging penetrated by time. The speaker is within the garden as the garden comes to be within himself, and both are contained by time.

The serenity achieved in “Vespertine River” is fuller, though also ephemeral. It is reached through the poet's own willed abstraction from the course of events through invoking his role as their judge and interpreter. Exceptionally in Cernuda, for a work of this length—ninety-four lines—the poem does not fall into a stanzaic pattern; it flows in an unbroken monologue, an image of the flow of the river and of the history it traces. As it opens, the poet walks to the banks of the river:

Leaving behind the cloister, wherein sound
Echoes of new and latent voices
By the old mill path
The river is reached, …
.....All is abstracted in a pause
Of silence and quietude. Only a blackbird
Makes the evening shiver with song.
Its destiny is purer than that of the man
Who sings for man. …

We meet immediately with three types of singers: those in the cloister away from the stream of life; the blackbird favored by the poet, as we have seen, and here envied by him; and the poet himself. At this point the voices in the cloister and the bird's song enjoy a fate superior to that of the poet—he is away from the cloister beneath the bird—for his duty is to be the “signifying voice of the flock” and therefore he remains caught in the river of time. The poem will reflect his gradual ascent to the level of the other two voices until he replaces them and gains temporarily the freedom and solace that is theirs.

The poet sees first his task as a burden: “Condemning the poet and his task / Of seeing dispersed being in unity.” But in consideration of this task, inevitably he begins to separate himself from “the others” for he has remained true to the role that he must play while they have betrayed theirs: “The profound meaning of work / Remains disregarded by the others.” Yet he still feels that some recognition should be given to the poet. Soon, however, he sees that too great an attachment to this world is time misspent: “Existence does not matter, nor the time / Given to justify it, thus one dies / Not of a present but a future death.” All values have been distorted; the poet reaches here his bleakest moment: “… wherever the eyes look / Only memory of death do they find.”²⁴ Hope rises anew, and one must deny the demands of a sterile though evident earth and place one's faith in the unseen:

… The earth demands
Too much, and the air is generous.
.....Faith, against all reason, is a blind thing
A shadow quieting thought.
If the voice of the poet be not heard
Is it not a better fate for the poet?

The poet has raised himself above the turbulence of history and present decline, finding peace in this indefinite moment of dusk:

Man learns language from man,
But he learns silence only in God.
In the vespertine peace, humbler
Than animal jubilation in the morning,
What was renounced is now possessed,
When the light finally laid down its sword
In that time without time, consummating
The identity of day and night.
The ghostly wind among the elms
Moves the leaves gone and those to come.
The blackbird is asleep. The stars
Do not yet descend to the water.

(RD, 225-28)

The poem's end answers its beginning, all other voices are quiet except the poet's in an interval of pure present.

The tacit eloquence of water, now a quiet pool, prompts also the introspection of “Vereda del cuco” (“The Cuckoo's Path”). In his own reflection, the poet remembers, he first glimpsed the form of a greater all-encompassing love. The poem uses again self-address as a maieutic technique to recover the past or rather to integrate past and present selves. We can therefore expect some gain in knowledge or understanding to have taken place at the conclusion of the poem. In this sense, we may discover a basic organizing principle in the reasoning that transforms the situation of the beginning into that of the end. The poem opens with the idea of search and discovery:

How often have you gone in another time
This fountain's way,
Seeking along the dark path
Where the water surges,
To remain immobile at its margin,
Watching with mute amazement
How there, amid the depths
With similar though remote gesture
Appeared another semblance
Of inevitable enchantment,
Propitious and adverse,
And you contemplated it,
As he who contemplates
Destiny unfolding
Upon the sand in mutable signs.

The present remembrance, as that original search “[on] the dark path,” is to come face to face with that image. Its past contemplation, as if it were destiny, is paralleled by the present memory of that contemplation, inferring endless self-reflections wherein lies that destiny. This multiplicity of mirror images is of course continued in the very dédoublement represented by the “you” voice. At that time there was only the appearance of another, reflected in the pool, both similar and remote because his significance was as yet unfathomed. But while the surface meaning of the strophe offers us merely this duality of the self, the implied meaning already suggests a potential multiplicity: we have the present consideration of a past self observing its own image, pondering its destiny, that is to say, its future image, and so on.

If our reading is correct, the actual surface duality should have achieved its hidden, potential multiplicity at the end of the poem. The last strophe reads: “Although your day has passed / It is you, and those gone, / Who seek through these new eyes / In the face of the fountain / The deep reality / Intimate and enduring.” In effect, the youth and his image are now “you, and those gone.” The initial tentative self-love has grown and propagated endlessly while turning into certainty; the quest has found its object, and early indecisive desire has become a powerful affirmative love. At the same time, what began as the physical evidence of an image—“there surged another appearance”—has achieved the intellectual certainty of the real—“the deep reality.” The beginning of this last stanza refers to the speaker's past, relative to his present: “Although your day has passed / It is you and those gone, / Who seek. …” What the poem has done is to spend that past, to relive it as the new truth was being discovered. The speaker's entire life is summarized by those walks to the pond, source of desire and of its realization.

The initial four stanzas, which concern the first stage of love, when still regarded in its physical aspect, begin with the action of going to the site: (1) “How many times you have gone …”; (2) “An atavistic desiring attracted you / Here … / … / And indecisive your pace stopped”; (3) “… the man whom you already were / Went to the spring”; (4) “How many times did you step / On this dark path.” Consequent with this pattern, the imagery in the four strophes is generally physical—with slightly metaphysical suggestions in the last lines, a point we shall return to below. Thus the first stanza makes a general statement about the frequency of the event, the walk to the pond. The second recalls the original occurrence in adolescence. In the third stanza it is the man's turn to go. The fourth stanza, as the one concluding this first part of the poem, is an echo of the opening one and evokes all those past journeys.

The next stage of love's progress, the mystical stage (examined below), has been prepared carefully in that each stanza progresses from the physical act of approaching the actual source to a more intellectual consideration of the source's significance. The indefinite reminiscence of the first stanza becomes at its end a musing on destiny. Similarly, the conclusions of stanzas two and three speculate, respectively, on the contradictions of desire and on the prison of desire. Stanza four ends with an intuition of the nature of love: “For love is eternal, and not what is loved.”

The transformation of love into mystical communion is achieved in the second part of the poem in four stanzas where the imagery is less concrete. Their design, however, is parallel to that of the preceding group of strophes. The fifth one—corresponding to the first—through general approximations of the essence of love reaches the apex of mystical transport in language reminiscent of that of St. John of the Cross. The sixth strophe returns to more individual references, although of an abstract nature, and sees the body and its personal desire in the context of a greater whole; the seventh views other young bodies as replicas of the speaker's own past self, their passion a twin of his own. The last stanza, in an echo of the fourth and of the first, situates the journey to the fountain in the context of life's search for ultimate satisfaction, endlessly begun. All stanzas have remained analogous in structure, as we see, for instance, in the fifth which we quote at length since it sings the instant of mystical joy:

For it to be lost,
For it to be won
By its passion, a risk
Where he risks more who loves more,
Love is the source of all;
There is jubilation in light because that
          fountain shines,
The wheat spike contains god because that
          fountain flows,
Words are a pure voice because that fountain sounds,
And death is its covetable bed.
Ecstatic on its margin,
Oh divine torment
Oh divine delight,
You drank from your thirst and the fountain at once,
Your thirst and the water tasting of eternity.

(RD, 229-32)

The passion, risk, and love of the beginning become the taste of eternity.

Each stanza has moved within its own realm of imagery from containment to extension. The entire poem develops from a remembrance of past concrete events to a metaphysical deliberation on their significance. The initial fact of narcissistic self-discovery and desire becomes the discovery and desire by the speaker of others, and the discovery and desire by the many of the many; the self multiplies endlessly. In addition, the concrete fact of physical attraction, of passion circumscribed, surpasses its limits and is transformed first into the delight of mystical union and then into the intellectual awareness of its compelling nature.

The meditation points to the possibility of transcendence for the poet and traces back to its origin the rise of his desire; youthful narcissism is but the seed. Self-love grows, multiplies itself, overcomes time and space when it gains this knowledge.²⁵ In this poem, one of Cernuda's greatest, a temporary solution is offered to the main problems faced in Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn: they are the same as always—desire, time, and death. Nor is their solution new. The quasi-mystical awareness was conceived before and actively sought. But so complete an integration of past efforts to this end had not yet been reached. Death itself is now bathed in the aura that emanates from such desire and is desirable when it is a road to unity. The solution is ephemeral in that this state of communion is experienced but rarely; the poet's daily existence and daily passion, the material of his work, while retaining an echo of the cosmic order, are imperfect means of reaching it.

Notes

1. This statement is attributed to Heraclitus.

2. “La poesía” (“Poetry”), in Ocnos, pp. 9-10.

3. Ibid., p. 10.

4. Louis Massignon, La Passion d'Al-Hallaj (Paris, 1914-1921), p. 465.

5. Ibid., p. 467.

6. Ibid., p. 408.

7. Ibid., p. 468.

8. See Harris, p. 110.

9. See Silver, p. 178.

10. “Words Before a Reading,” in Poesía y literatura p. 156.

11. See Silver, pp. 41-42.

12. “Mañanas de verano,” in Ocnos, p. 41.

13. See Coleman, pp. 76-81.

14. “The Heath,” in Ocnos, p. 142.

15. See Coleman, p. 85.

16. José Olivio Jiménez, Cinco poetas del tiempo, p. 120.

17. The Tú voice as a form of self-address is more striking in Spanish than it is in English, where the use of the impersonal “you” makes it less arresting.

18. “Tres poetas metafisicos,” in Poesía y literatura, p. 51.

19. Ibid., p. 51.

20. Neumann, The Great Mother, p. 203.

21. See Chapter 2.

22. “El mirlo,” in Ocnos, p. 140.

23. Ibid, p. 191.

24. Harris (p. 79) points out the echo of Quevedo in these lines.

25. There are several versions of a mystical recital which are reminiscent of this poem (For example, in Avicenna and Ahmad Ghazzali); the closest is in Attar's mystical epic, the Language of the Birds, where we read: “At that moment, in the reflection of their countenance, the Si-murgh [thirty birds] saw the face of the eternal Simurgh. They looked: it was veritably that Simurgh, without any doubt, that Simurgh was veritably these Si-murgh.” See Henri Corbin, Avicenna (New York, 1955), p. 201. Borges' short story, “El Simurg,” is the latest form of the same theme.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Perfil del aire. 4th supplement to “Litoral.” Málaga: Imprenta Sur, 1927.

La invitación a la poesía. Madrid: Ediciones “La tentativa poética,” 1933.

Donde habite el olvido. Madrid: Editorial Signo, 1934.

El joven marino. Madrid: Colección “Héroe,” 1936.

La realidad y el deseo. Madrid: Cruz y Raya, 1936.

Ocnos. London: The Dolphin Press, 1942.

Las nubes. Buenos Aires: Colección “Rama de oro,” 1943.

Come quien espera el alba. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1947.

Tres narraciones. Buenos Aires: Editorial Imán, 1948.

Ocnos. 2nd ed., rev. Madrid: Colección Insula, 1949.

Variaciones sobre tema mexicano. Mexico City: Colección “México y lo mexicano,” Porrúa y Obregón, 1952.

Poemas para un cuerpo. Málaga: Colección “A quien conmigo va,” Imprenta Dardo, 1957.

Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea. Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1957.

La realidad y el deseo. 3rd ed., rev. México City: Colección “Tezontle,” Fondo de cultura económica, 1958.

Pensamiento poético en la lírica inglesa (siglo XIX). México City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1958.

Poesía y literatura. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1960.

Desolación de la quimera. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1962.

Ocnos. 3rd ed. Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1964.

La realidad y el deseo. 4th ed. Mexico City: Colección “Tezontle,” Fondo de cultura económica, 1964.

Critica, ensayos y evocaciones. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970.

Poesía y literatura I y II. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971.

Antología poética. Edited by R. Santos Torroella. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971.

The Poetry of Luis Cernuda. Edited by Derek Harris and Anthony Edkins. New York: New York University Press, 1971.

Perfil del aire. Con otras obras olvidadas e inéditas, documentos y epistolario. Edited by Derek Harris. London: Támesis Books Ltd., 1971.

Secondary Sources

Coleman, Alexander. Other Voices: A Study of the Late Poetry of Luis Cernuda. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. Excellent study of Cernuda's dramatic techniques.

Harris, Derek. Luis Cernuda: A Study of the Poetry. London: Támesis Books Ltd., 1973. Most complete and generally best work on Cernuda to date.

Olivio Jimenez. J. “Emoción y trascendencia del tiempo en la poesía de Luis Cernuda.” In Cinco poetas del tiempo. Madrid: Gredos, 1964, pp. 101-154. Very strong study of time in Cernuda. Stresses Cernuda's idealism.

Silver, P. “Et in Arcadia Ego”: A Study of the Poetry of Luis Cernuda. London: Támesis Books Ltd., 1965. Stresses Cernuda's search for a lost Eden. Important and informative work.