[In the following essay, Craig analyzes Prado's best-known poem, "Lázaro, " contrasting it with Robert Browning's treatment of the same subject.]

Between the work of González Martínez and that of Pedro Prado there is very little resemblance. They have in common only their seriousness of purpose. González Martínez, thanks to his early devotion to the study of French and Italian models, was a master of all the arts and artifices of the Parnassian school. The very limpidity of his style is evidently the fruit of much patient labor. With Prado it is different. His writing seems more spontaneous, and it would almost seem as if he deliberately eschewed any form of ornament, and depended for his emotional effect on his subject-matter alone. Yet his comparative plainness of statement may arise from lack of imagination—an inference to some extent borne out by the general vagueness of impression produced by his "Lázaro." In the same way he seeks freedom from the restrictions of the conventional verse-forms by discarding rhyme and writing in free verse, or (as in "Pájaros errantes") in a kind of elevated prose in which he has caught successfully the cadence of the Hebrew Psalms.

Though discarding rhyme, Prado makes free use of assonance, as in "Las manos"; and, as assonance is little favored in the practice of English poets, the translator is faced with an awkward choice: he must either use rhyme, and lose some of the fluidity of the original; or have recourse to blank verse, and lose some of the musical effect that Prado intended to produce. In this poem I have used rhyme, though I feel that the rhymes are rather too obtrusive.

"Lázaro" is generally regarded as Prado's best poem. It describes Lazarus rising or just risen from the tomb, and relating to the bystanders his experience of death and the transformation through which he was passing when recalled to life by the command, "Lazarus, come forth!" This poem, read alongside of Browning's "Epistle, Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician, " supplies a measure by which we may compare a highly reputed Spanish-American poet with an acknowledged master in English poetry. Such a comparison reveals striking differences, not only in the outlook of the two poets on life and death, and on the life beyond death, but also in their powers of presentation, description, and characterization. For Prado, body and soul are one, and death is a change of state in which the elements of the body and the soul alike are transformed, and return to life in the sparkle of the rivers and the perfume of the flowers. There seems to be some inconsistency in the poem; for, though Lazarus declares that an impenetrable wall separates the states of life and death, and that death blots out the memory of life, as life the memory of death (that is, of our existence before birth), yet he is able to give a vivid account of his sensations while lying dead in the grave. In contrast with this materialistic view, Browning lays emphasis not on the purely physical changes, which indeed he hardly mentions, but on the deeper sense of moral and spiritual values attained by one who has passed within the veil.

Equally striking is the difference in descriptive power. There is nothing in Prado to compare with Browning's

A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear,
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls;
  I cried, and threw my staff, and he was gone;

nor with his description of the rocky pass from which the physician looked down on Bethany:

I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills,
Like an old lion's cheek tooth.…

Compared with these, Prado's references to the "ardiente paisaje de Judea," or to the "suaves colinas de Bethania" over which Lazarus rambled as a boy, are pale and ineffective. So also, tiie writer of the epistle in Browning's poem is a vivid personality, with a keen eye for everything that might interest his correspondent. In "Lázaro," the speaker is a vague figure, apparently one of the spectators. He tells us, "Quedamos con la luminosa y húmeda mirada de los vivos"; but toward the end of the poem we read:

Entre las yerbas, Marta y María yacían agotadas;
estremecidos los Apóstoles veían llorar a los
   judíos.…

Evidently, therefore, the speaker was not one of these. Who then was the speaker? This may seem rather niggling criticism, but it points to an important difference between the work of a conscientious artisan and that of a poetical genius, in whose imagination the whole poetic conception rises complete and finished at the touch of a single suggestion from the outside.

We find the same difference between Browning's Lazarus, who is a very human figure, going about his daily work though haunted by the vision of splendor he has seen, and Prado's Lazarus, who is little more than a phantom, a mouthpiece for the materialistic monism of the poet.