SOURCE: Introduction to Poems by Rosalía de Castro, State University of New York Press, 1991, pp. 1-24.

Her Life

At the time of her death in 1885, Rosalía de Castro was little known outside of her native Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain. Yet this woman poet who wrote more than half of her poems in a regional language and did not follow the poetic conventions of her time is now considered one of the outstanding figures of Spanish literature.

Rosalía was born on February 24, 1837, in the historic city of Santiago de Compostela, now the capital of Galicia.¹ Though her birth certificate calls Rosalía "hija de padres incógnitos [daughter of unknown parentage]," she was actually the illegitimate child of a once-wealthy noblewoman, María Teresa de la Cruz de Castro y Abadía and José Martínez Viojo, a priest.²

The maternal grandfather, José de Castro Salgado, did not want his daughter to raise a child born out of wedlock; therefore, Rosalía spent her early years in the country, though it is not certain whether she lived with her godmother or a paternal aunt.³ From the age of nine to fifteen, Rosalía lived at the Castro family manor of Arretén in Padrón, as well as with her maternal uncle at Torres de Hermida in Lestrove. It is probable that mother and daughter spent time together during those years. However, the official date of their reunion is often given as 1852, when Rosalía joined her mother in Santiago. The deep bond which developed between them continued even after Rosalía moved away. When her mother died in 1862, Rosalía expressed her grief in a privately printed collection of elegaic poems titled A mi madre [To my Mother].

Although Rosalía's formal education may not have been extensive, she was overly modest when in one of her two autobiographical prologues she described herself as "no habendo deprendido en máis escola que a dos nosos probes aldeáns [having no other education than that of our poor village schools]." In fact, she began writing poetry when she was about twelve, studied French, and enjoyed drawing, singing, and acting, as well as playing guitar and piano. She was familiar with the classic Spanish authors and read the works in translation of such Romantics as Heinrich Heine, Edgar Allen Poe, Lord Byron and E. T. A. Hoffman, all of whom seem to have influenced her own writing.

In 1856 Rosalía moved to Madrid where she published her first volume of poems at age nineteen. This youthful work entitled La flor [The Flower] was enthusiastically reviewed a year later by a young Galician critic called Manuel Murguía. Even though Murguía pretended not to know Rosalía, referring to her politely and distantly as "Señorita de Castro," it is probable that they knew each other from the Liceo de la Juventud in Santiago where Rosalía had also met her fellow Galician poets Eduardo Pondal and Aurelio Aguirre. While Rosalía was in Madrid, Aguirre died tragically at the age of twenty-four of an accidental drowning, and some critics, especially Alberto Machado da Rosa, suggest that he was the lost love that Rosalía often recalls in her poetry.⁴ Machado's theory is not shared by everyone, though it is generally agreed that Aguirre might have been the model for Flavio, the protagonist of Rosalía's novel by that name.

In October of 1858, a year after the review appeared, Rosalía de Castro and Manuel Murguía were married and moved back to Galicia. Manuel Martinez Murguía (1833-1923), a writer and historian, is applauded by some biographers for promoting his wife's work, but accused by others of being jealous of her talent and trying to influence her writing. Yet during the thirty-eight years that he survived her, Murguía wrote numerous articles in his wife's praise. His other important contribution was that, as a champion of the Galician literary Renaissance, he encouraged Rosalía to write in her native language, "o galego."

Galicia's language, which resembles Portuguese, has an illustrious history dating back to the Middle Ages. Medieval lyrics, among them those of Alfonso el Sabio, were written in Galician-Portuguese, probably the earliest literary language of the Iberian Peninsula. By the fifteenth century, however, Castilian had become the dominant literary language of Spain, and Galician was relegated to everyday usage, surviving in purely oral form.

In 1863, when Rosalía was twenty-six years old, her first collection of poems written in Galician, Cantares gallegos [Galician Songs], appeared. The publisher was reluctant to undertake such a risk, and Rosalía apparently had reservations herself since she used a Spanish title. As the first book-length work in Galician after several centuries, the collection greatly advanced the pause of the "Rexurdimento [Restoration]," an attempt by Murguía and a group of Galician intellectuals to reinstate their language for literary purposes and restore it to its former splendor.

In her prologue, Rosalía apologizes for her Galician pointing out that, "sin gramática, sin regras de ningunha clase, lector topará moitas veces faltas de ortografia, xiros que disoarán ós oídos dun purista [since I had no grammar or rules of any kind, the reader will find many spelling errors or expressions which will offend a purist's ear]." Even though there are certain grammatical inconsistencies and orthographic idiosyncracies, these short-comings are insignificant in comparison to her unique contributions to Galician identity and culture.

Both the prologue and the poems in Cantares gallegos reveal Rosalía's love for her region and her interest in its folklore, customs, and songs. The title of Cantares gallegos echoes that of Rosalía's avowed model, El libro de cantares [The Book of Songs], by Antonio Trueba, whom she praises in her essay. Her other source, though not mentioned by name, is La Choina, a family servant who taught her "aqueles cantares, aquelas palabras cariñosas e aqueles xiros nunca olvidados que tan docemente resoaron nos meus oídos desde a cuna [those songs, those affectionate words, and those unforgettable phrases that have echoed so sweetly in my ears since I was a child]."

Rosalía's characteristic technique of taking a popular stanza and elaborating it into a ballad is well illustrated by one of the poems in Cantares, "Adiós rios, adiós fontes" ["Farewell to rivers, farewell to streams"]. This poem, the first she wrote in Galician, exemplifies one of the recurrent motifs in the collection: the plight of the emigrant who is forced to leave his "patria chica [native region]." In her gloss on a popular refrain, Rosalía assumes the persona of a young man who, before having to leave his familiar surroundings, enumerates everything that he will miss. At the time of writing this poem, Rosalía herself lived in dry Castile, and the poem's prevalent water imagery evokes the misty beauties of Galicia with its abundant rivers, fountains, and brooks.

During the years that her husband's job as government historian took them to Simancas (in Valladolid) and to Madrid, Rosalía, who was very attached to her native region, felt uprooted. The nostalgia caused by this internal exile underlies many of her poems. Mingled with her recurrent theme of vague yearning is the more specific grief over the death in infancy of two of her seven children. Furthermore, Rosalía's frequent bouts with illness may explain the numerous references to suffering which pervade her work.

Seventeen years after Cantares, which was well received and assured Rosalía de Castro's fame as a regional poet, she published her only other work written in Galician, Follas novas [New Leaves]. In her prologue to Follas, Rosalía explains the reasons for the notable difference between the present work and the earlier one. She calls Cantares a youthful work which exuded a sense of freshness, innocence, and hope in contrast to the present collection whose poems she calls '"probes enxendros da mina tristura' ['poor children of my sadness']" and "fillos cativos das horas de enfermedades e de ausencias [captive children of my hours of sickness and nostalgia]." She also apologizes for the fact that many of the poems in this book

refrexan, quisáis con demasiada sinceridade, O estado do meu esprito unhas veces; outras, a miña natural dispositión (que no en balde son muller) a sentir como propias as penas alleas.

[reflect, perhaps with too much candor the state of my soul and my natural disposition as a woman to feel other people's sorrow as my own].

As Rosalía points out, the mood in these poems is indeed very different. In addition to her feelings of solidarity with her compatriots, especially the widows, orphans, and beggars, she also explores her own feelings of exile, separation, solitude, and yearning, all expressed by "soidá" (or "soidade"), a word which has no precise English equivalent.

Rosalía continues to illuminate "soidá" in her last set of poems, En las orillas del Sar [Beside the River Sar], published in 1884, a year before her premature death. Many of the Spanish poems contained in this collection were undoubtedly written at the same time as some of the Galician one in Follas, which explains their thematic similarities.

It is in these last two books that Rosalía seems to realize that, for her, "dolor [grief, suffering, anguish, pain, anxiety]" is inevitable. In several poems she tries to define the nature of this affliction which she variously compares to an illness or a "negra sombra [black shadow]," but to which she often refers simply as "something." Actually Rosalía prefers not to resolve the ambiguity, leaving "dolor" as an open-ended symbol.

Rosalía de Castro challenged 19th-century literary standards by writing in both Spanish and Galician. As Claude Poullain has shown, her bilingualism also implies a greater complexity of styles. In a comparison of her Spanish and Galician verse, the critic finds that it varies according to the linguistic audience the poet addresses: the language of her Galician poetry is more specific and popular, while her Spanish poems tend to be more general and abstract. The critic concludes his study with the assertion that, "Todo esto muestra que el bilingüismo, en la obra de Rosalía, es una extraodinaria fuente de riqueza y de variedad…. [All this shows that in Rosalía's work, bilingualism is an extraordinary source of richness and variety….]"⁵

Yet it is also probable that this bilingualism, coupled with her being a woman, contributed to the delay in her acceptance. In the words of Gerald Brenan, echoed later by John Frederick Nims, "Had she written in Castilian rather than in her native Galician dialect, she would, I feel sure, be recognized as the greatest woman poet of modern times."⁶

Rosalía de Castro in the Context of Spanish Literature

Contemporary critics regard Follas novas and En las orillas del Sar as Rosalía's best work, but during her lifetime her fame, which was primarily regional, rested more on Cantares gallegos. It is symptomatic that her compatriot and contemporary, the regional novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán, preferred Cantares, praising it for skillfully capturing the essence of the Galician spirit and representing, in her words, "lo más sincero de nuestra poesía, lo que mejor refleja la fisionomía tradicional y pintoresca de nuestro país [our sincerest poetry and that which best reflects the traditional and picturesque traits of our country.]"⁷

Perhaps the public reception of Follas was less enthusiastic because of the poetry's political dimensions. Here Rosalía depicts not only Galicia's quaint and charming folk customs, but also its oppressive poverty.

Though Rosalía achieved some degree of recognition in Galicia by the time of her death, it is not until the turn of the century that she was rediscovered in the rest of Spain. Today she is thought to be the equal of Gustavo Aldolfo Bécquer who had previously been regarded as the only Spanish post-romantic poet of merit.

It is generally assumed that Rosalía de Castro and Bécquer (1836-70) knew each other, though there is no documentation of their personal acquaintance. In her poetry, as well as in that of Bécquer, there is a personal, intimate, and suggestive lyricism which is imbued with melancholy and yearning.

I. L. McClelland suggests that Rubén Dario was influenced by both Bécquer and Rosalía in his experimentation with unusual line lengths and combinations, and his preference for an unconvoluted and direct style.⁸ This same view was voiced much earlier by Manuel Murguía, one of the first to recognize Rosalía's innovative role. Murguía, who even during her lifetime referred to his wife as a "precursora [forerunner]," attributed her experimentations with unusual metric combinations to her innate musical talent. In an essay written after Rosalía's death, Murguía quotes another young writer who praised Rosalía for daring to break the metric rules prevalent during her time:

Se necesitó que un joven escritor de nuestros días, dolido de la mjusticia, se adelantase a quejarse del hecho, proclamándola como precursora de la reforma ella iniciada sencilla, instintivamente, sin ánimo de constituir escuela y sólo porque, como tan gran música, le estaba permitido romper con los viejos moldes, ensanchando los dominios de la métrica castellana.⁹

[It needed a young writer of our times who, hurt by the injustice, stepped forward to complain about it and to proclaim her as the forerunner of the movement which she began simply and instinctively, without any intention of starting a school, simply because, as a great musician, she was allowed to break with the old forms and to enlarge the domain of Spanish metrics.]

This view was also held by another young writer, Azorín, who knew Murguía and this essay. In an essay about Juan Ramón Jímenez, Azorín admonishes his readers not to forget that "antes que Rubén, en 1884, Rosalía de Castro había sido la precursora de la revolución poética realizada en la métrica y en la ideología [before Rubén, in 1884, Rosalía de Castro was a forerunner of the poetic revolution in metrics and ideology]."¹⁰ In "Rosalía de Castro," one of his several essays devoted to her, Azorín complains about the exclusion of her poetry from anthologies and the unmerited critical neglect of her work.¹¹

It is largely thanks to Azorín and other members of the Generation of '98 that Rosalía de Castro was rediscovered in Spain. Miguel de Unamuno, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Antonio Machado all showed their appreciation for Rosalía in their own fashion. Unamuno praised her in his essays on Galicia¹²; Juan Ramón translated some of her Galician poems into Spanish, and he knew much of her poetry by heart; and Machado's poetry offers evidence of his affinity with Rosalía's poems and the influence they exerted upon him. In general, these poets came to regard Rosalía as one of their own, because they found a foreshadowing of their own sense of spiritual dislocation and existential anxiety in Rosalía's poetry.

Several recent critics have studied the affinities between Rosalía and the Generation of '98. In her article "Rosalía de Castro, anticipación del 98," Pilar G. Suelto de Sáenz has shown that Rosalía anticipates many of the themes found in the poetry of the Generation of '98, among them a lyric and personal treatment of nature and landscape.¹³ Another critic, Eliana Suárez Rivero, expanding on a brief analysis by Rafael Lapesa which compares Bécquer, Rosalía, and Machado, specifies the following similarities between the latter two: a subjective treatment of nature as a reflection of their mood; a predilection for late afternoon and sunset imagery; and a feeling of solitude. She also remarks that Machado sings the beauties of Castile, Rosalía those of Galicia; Machado identifies with the river Duero, Rosalía with the Sar.¹⁴

Suárez Rivero comments on several poems that prefigure the verse of the Generation of '98, particularly, Rosalía's "Unha vez tiven un cravo / cravado no corazón [Once a nail pierced my heart]" and Machado's "En el corazón tenía / la espina de una pasión [In my heart I carried / a passion's thorn]." Most likely, Rosalía's poem found resonances in Machado because he shared her ambivalent love / hate relationship with suffering, unable to live either with or without it.

As for the next generation of poets, known as the Generation of '27, three in particular have paid tribute to Rosalía. Luis Cernuda, though he found fault with what he considered her sentimentality, praised Rosalía for her timelessness.¹⁵ Gerardo Diego invoked her name metaphorically in his poetry, and Federico García Lorca paid homage to her by writing "Seis poemas gallegos," among them an elegy dedicated to her, "Canzón de cuna pra Rosalía Castro, morta [Lullaby for the Late Rosalía de Castro]."

Ever since the beginning of this century, the list of articles and books devoted to Rosalía de Castro's work has increased steadily. In 1985, the centennial of her death was commemorated with numerous congresses and symposia world-wide. The published proceedings from the international congress held in Santiago de Compostela constitute an important addition to the growing body of scholarship on Rosalía.¹⁶

Rosalía de Castro and the English-speaking Reader

Rosalía's work is still largely unknown to non-Spanish audiences. Most of the criticism about her is by Hispanic critics and only available in Spanish publications. As a glance at [a] bibliography shows, little has been written about her in English. Some British critics, such as Aubrey Bell and especially Gerald Brenan, were pioneers in praising her, but in the United States Rosalía has only received critical attention in the last thirty years, mainly as the subject of doctoral dissertations. Two dissertations which have been published in book form are Kathleen Kulp's Manner and Mood in Rosalía de Castro and Shelley Stevens' Rosalía de Castro and the Galician Revival. The only other full-length book in English devoted to Rosalía is Kathleen Kulp-Hill's Rosalía de Castro, which offers an excellent introduction to the poet's life and works. Recently two critics, Antonio Gómez Costa and Martha LaFollette Miller, studied similarities in the poetry of Rosalía de Castro and that of Emily Dickinson. The Spanish critic emphasizes what he calls these poets' "authenticity" and comments on their shared imagery.¹⁷ Miller points out that both poets were very private persons, who, for the most part, omitted titles to their poems because they did not intend to publish them. The critic stresses that a similar note of intimacy and authenticity is discernible in their poetry. Both poets regarded suffering as unavoidable and they tried to come to terms with their pain, realizing that, for them, it is interrelated with pleasure. Further parallels are the occasional use of modest personae and their intimate, almost loving, relationship with death.¹⁸

A Thematic Analysis of Rosalía de Castro's Poetry

Since many of Rosalía's thematic and stylistic characteristics are well illustrated in her early poem, "Adiós ríos, adiós fontes" [Farewell to rivers, farewell to streams], an analysis of this poem will serve as a starting point for a general discussion of her poetry. "Adiós ríos, adiós fontes," untitled like the majority of her poems, is a gloss on a popular verse. The poem is written in "coplas," stanzas of four lines with eight syllables, one of the most accessible and preferred metric forms in popular Spanish poetry. In keeping with her tendency to experiment with established forms, in stanzas 8 through 11, the poet adds an unorthodox fifth line to the usual quatrains.

The prevalence of diminutives ("casiña," "hortiña," "figueriña," etc.) exemplifies one of Rosalía's characteristics and reflects a common linguistic habit in Spanish which is even more prevalent in Galician. As Amado Alonso has remarked, "el diminutive es una de las más decisivas características de nuestro pueblo [the diminutive is one of the most definitive characteristics of our people]."¹⁹ Another typical trait, her preference for repetition and enumeration of nouns and adjectives, sometimes in incomplete phrases, is apparent in stanzas 3 and 4 which do not include a verb. Rosalía's predilection for anaphora, the repetition of an identical word or group of words, is noticeable in stanzas 6 and 7 "deixo [I leave]," in 12 and 13 "lonxe, máis lonxe [far, far away]" and with the recurrence of "adiós [farewell]" throughout the poem.

The poem also illustrates Rosalía's use of personae, in this case a young man who says good-bye to his homeland and to his beloved. Among the personae she has used in her poetry, one can mention the simple peasant girl in the humorous "San Antonio bendito" [Blessed Saint Anthony] who implores the saint of unmarried girls to give her a husband. In a more serious vein, a young Galician girl whose beloved died in Castile vents her hatred of central Spain and its inhabitants in "Castellanos de Castilla!" [Castillans of Castile]. Probably one of the most unusual personae occurs in the poem "Viéndome perseguido por la alondra" [Chased by a swift skylark] where the speaker is a golden-winged insect that is afraid of being eaten by a bird. In "En balde" [Free of charge], the speaker is a poor person who takes mischievous delight in the fact that, though the clergy charge plenty for burial, they are forced to bury the poor for free.

Rosalía identified with the poor and downtrodden. She laments not only the lot of the emigrant, but also that of the beggars, orphans, and other homeless:

Cuando sopla el Norte duro
y arde en el hogar el fuego,
y ellos pasan por mi puerta
flacos, desnudos y hambrientos,
el frío hiela mi espíritu
como debe helar su cuerpo.

[When the North wind blows cold
and a fire warms our home,
they pass by my door—
thin, naked, and hungry—
and my spirit becomes frozen
like their bodies.]

As Gerald Brenan was the first to remark, in her bitter reaction to poverty Rosalía reintroduces a "note that had not been heard in Spanish poetry since the time of the Archpriest of Hita."²⁰

The plight of the emigrant, who symbolizes Galicia's poverty, recurs frequently in her later poems. Rosalía mourns both the men who must leave and the women who stay behind. It is to these women that she dedicates a section in Follas novas entitled "As viudas dos vivos e as viudas dos mortos" [Widows of the Living and Widows of the Dead]. The mournful dirge "Este vaise i aquel vaise" [One after another departs], translated into Spanish by Juan Ramón Jiménez, is a lament for the widows, as well as for Galicia itself.

Another theme which appears in "Adiós rios" is that of religion. The conventional sentiment represented here by a prayer to the Virgin is rather typical for much of Rosalía's early poetry. However, in her last two books, she is often tormented by doubts about the existence of God and divine justice. Nevertheless, she implores God to restore her faith which she compares, as in other poems, to a blindfold:

¿Es verdad que lo ves? Señor, entonces,
piadoso y compasivo
vuelve a mis ojos la celeste venda
de la fe bienhechora que he perdido….

[Is it true that you see it? Lord, then
with pity and compassion,

give me back my divine blindfold
of soothing faith which I have lost….]

It is not until the end of her life that Rosalía seems to have regained the traditional faith for which she often longed in vain. In the very last poem in En las orillas del Sar, "Tan solo dudas y terrores siento; / divino Cristo si de ti me aparto" [Oh, my Christ, when I forget you, / all I feel is doubt and fear], the speaker compares God to a lighthouse that will guide her to a safe harbor.

The detailed description of the natural surroundings in "Adiós rios" intimates Rosalía's love of nature. It is quite in keeping with the tradition of post-romantic poetry that most of Rosalía's poems are suffused with nature with which she identifies almost pantheistically. Whether it reflects her state of being or serves as a contrast to her mood, nature is always present as a lovingly and minutely observed backdrop for her emotions. In many poems, Rosalía specifically evokes the Galician landscape with its open fields, valleys, and mountains. She particularly likes the region's lush greenness and is fond of the oaks and pine trees which abound there.

Rosalía is also skillful in depicting the various seasons, though she seems to have an admitted predilection for winter, "Meses do inverno fríos/ que eu amo a todo amar" [Cold months of winter/ that I love so much]. Yet the freshness of spring is captured in "Adivínase el dulce y perfumado/ calor primaveral" [Sweet fragrance foretells/ the warmth of spring]; the scorching summer is apparent in the poem which follows it, "Candente está la atmósfera" [The air is white-hot]; while "Moría el sol, y las marchitas hojas" [The sun was dying, and withered oak leaves] is a paen to autumn. In several poems Rosalía identifies with clouds, birds, or flowers. Of special interest are the lyric poems where the poet has an intimate relationship with a personified moon.

Since nature prevails in her poetry, it may be surprising that at the beginning of Follas novas, in one of several poems which reflect her artistic creed, Rosalía states that she does not sing of doves and flowers. However, Rosalía is trying to differentiate herself from poets who write about nature in a sentimentalized and mawkish fashion. In explaining why she entitled the collection "follas novas" [new leaves], she makes it clear that she identifies her art with nature's untamed and wild imagery when she compares her verses to a wreath of gorse and brambles:

hirtas como as miñas penas
feras, como a miña dor.
Sin olido, nin frescura,
bravas, magoás e ferís …

[unyielding like my sorrow,
wild as my pain.

Without fragrance or freshness,
untamed, crushed, and bruised …]

Her description of her painful creative process is equally unsentimentalized as can be seen in this powerful image from "Silencio! [Silence!]":

mollo na propia sangre a dura pruma
rompendo a vena hinchada,
e escribo… . .

[I dip a sharp pen in my own blood,
break the swollen vein,
and I write….]

The final stanza of "Adiós ríos" contains the word "soidás," suggesting loneliness, homesickness, nostalgia, longing, yearning, and sadness, a key to much of Rosalía's poetry. This same sentiment underlies the poem "Campanas de Bastabales" and, on a more abstract level, it is visible in one of her most often anthologized poems, "En los ecos de los órganos o en el rumor del viento [In the organ's echo or in the murmuring wind]," where her longing is for an unknown bliss.

Since it is an early poem, "Adiós ríos" captures the wistfulness of "soidá" but does not really touch on the more complex "dolor," Rosalía's spiritual anxiety pervading many of the poems in Follas and En las orillas. A good example of her fear of an unknown menace can be found in the short poem "¿ Qué pasa redor de min?" [What is this confusion around me?]. Other times she refers to the vague threat which haunts her as a "negra sombra" [black shadow] which she characterizes as "Una sombra tristísima, indefinible y vaga" [A mournful shadow, undefined and vague]. In her famous poem "Cando penso que te fuches" [Just when I think you have fled], the emotion is more lyrical and less apprehensive, but the ubiquity of her "negra sombra" is still palpable. Her feelings toward her black shadow are the same mixture of hate and love visible in "Unha vez tiven un cravo."

Although her uneasiness is not meant to be analyzed, it can be associated with the closely intertwined elements of time, solitude, memories, and illness. Many of Rosalía's poems deal with the passage of time, most notably "'Tas-tis, tas-tis' na silenciosa noite" ['Tick-tock! Tick-tock!' the pendulum repeats] and "Hora trás hora, día, trás día" [Hour after hour, day after day]. In these and other poems, the poet comes to the painful conclusion that an experience can only be remembered but never relived again.

Yet the remembrance of the past is also a source of her suffering and that is why the poet asks plaintively, "¿ Por qué tan terca/ tan fiel memoria me ha dado el Cielo?" [Why has Heaven / given me a memory so stubborn and so true?]. She would prefer to bury her memories forever, as becomes obvious in several poems, especially in "Cava lixeiro, cava" [Dig swiftly, dig].

At other times Rosalía compares her suffering to an illness, especially a sick heart. Perhaps the most memorable image of her "dolor" appears in one of her best poems, "Mais ve que o meu corazón" [But see my heart] where her heart is likened to a hundred-petalled rose, similar to the poetic rose of mystic tradition, where every petal is a sorrow.

Since Rosalía often felt that life was a burden, it is not surprising that in many of her poems death is depicted as a liberation from pain and as a welcome rest. In one poem the speaker asks why it is a sin to take one's life:

¿ Por qué, Dios piadoso,
por qué chaman crime
ir en busca da morte que tarda, …

[Why, merciful God,
why is it a crime
to look for death if it tarries, …]

In "Soia" [Alone], she describes the suicide by drowning of a lonely woman:

Tomou un día lene
camiño do areal …
como naide a esperaba
ela non tornóu máis.

[One gentle day she walked
towards the sand dunes …
since no one ever waited for her,
she never returned.]

In other poems Rosalía actually imagines her own death:

Hoxe ou mañán, ¿ quén pode decir cándo?,
pero quisáis moi logo,
viránme a despertar, i en vez dun vivo,
atoparán un morto.
[Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, who can say when?
but maybe very soon,
they will come to waken me
and find me dead.]

The theme of death is fused with that of love in a lyrical poem where Rosalía compares the sea to a demon lover who invites her with these words:

"Neste meu leito misterioso e frío
-dime-ven brandamente a descansar."

["Come softly to rest," he says,
"in my cold and secret bed."]

The emotions of peace and tranquility associated with love in this poem are similar to those described in a poem entitled "Bos amores" [Good Loves]. Yet the feelings mentioned in its companion piece, "Amores cativos" [Enslaving Loves], more often accompany love in Rosalía's erotic poetry. For Rosalía, love is often linked to a sense of dishonor, shame, and remorse. An example of guilty love can be found in "Cada vez que recuerda tanto oprobio" [Every time she recalls that shame] or "Ladraban contra min" [They barked at me as I walked].

The sense of persecution expressed in "Ladraban contra min," where gossip-mongers are compared to a pack of dogs who bark at her, is also noticeable in "A xusticia pola man" [Justice by my Own Hand], one of Rosalía's most interesting and unusual poems. In its fierce tone and content, this poem differs somewhat from her other works, but the underlying feeling is similar. In a shout of protest and rebellion, the speaker compares herself to a wounded and enraged she-wolf that kills those who have offended her with their slander.

It is interesting that, in contrast to most of her poetry where nature is seen as a friend, here it is depicted as inhospitable: the open fields with their gorse and brambles are juxtaposed unfavorably to the shelter and comfort of a home.

On a more general level, the poet indicts justice, both human (the judges mock her) and divine (God does not hear her). The poem is one of a handful which are titled, and the title underlines the strong message: one must take justice into one's own hands. The novelty of this shocking conclusion is emphasized by one of Rosalía's critics, Xesús Alonso Montero, who points out that, "hasta entonces nadie había escrito un poema tan implacable y menos un poema sobre la inevitalibidad de la violencia como respuesta [up until then nobody had written such a relentless poem, much less one about the inevitability of violence as an answer]."²¹

The poem is written in quatrains (except for the last two lines), with alexandrines which all rhyme assonantly with the letter "a." If one looks at Rosalía's own Spanish translation of this poem (one of the few Galician poems she translated into Castilian), it becomes clear that she felt that the harsh and aggressive sound of the end rhyme was essential to the poem. In her translation, she preferred to make minor changes in the content in order to be able to preserve the rhyme scheme.

Rosalía de Castro is a key figure in the transition from Romanticism to Symbolism in Spanish poetry. In contrast to the regular symmetric meter of some 19th-century poets, Rosalía boldly varies her line lengths, experimenting with unusual metric combinations and even free verse. She also differs from her contemporaries in her preference for a natural syntax and a simple, even colloquial, diction. Hence, her poetry is not dramatic or declamatory, but rather intimate and conversational.

Her prologues and the two books of poetry written in Galician reflect her intense love for her native region. In these writings Rosalía captures both the gaiety and melancholy of the Galician spirit. However, her greatest appeal to the modern reader lies in the lyric and personal touch with which she imbues her themes, and, above all, her sensitive explorations of her own emotions.

Notes

¹ In works written in Spanish about Rosalía de Castro, she is usually called "Rosalía," and the body of criticism about her is known as "crítica rosaliana." Some of her English critics have been reluctant to follow this Spanish custom because in Anglo-Saxon literary tradition calling a woman writer by her first name has implied patronization (for example, in the case of Emily Dickinson).

Since in Spanish criticism the use of a first name does not carry any sexist bias (the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez is known as Juan Ramón), we feel that there is no reason not to refer to the poet as Rosalía, the name by which she is best known.

Most sources cite Rosalía's birthdate as February 24, though the inscription on a plaque at "La Matanza" gives the date as February 23.

² The godmother's name, mentioned in Rosalía's birth certificate, was María Francisca Martínez. Some biographers also refer to a Teresa Martínez Viojo, who may have been a paternal aunt, but in a recent publication, Avelino Albuín de Tembra wonders whether these two names belong to one and the same person, Rosalía. (Santiago: Edicións do Patronato, 1987) 16.

³ Biographers used to say, as does Benito Varela Jácome in his introduction to Rosalía de Castro (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1980), that José Martínez Viojo "cursaba estudios eclesiásticos y fue más tarde capellán de Iria" ["was a student of theology who would later be chaplain in Iria"]. However, according to more recent sources, Rosalía's father, who was thirty-nine at the time of her birth, was already an ordained priest.

⁴ Alberto Machado da Rosa, "Rosalía de Castro, poeta incompreendido," Revista Hispánica Moderna XX (1954): 181-223.

⁵ Claude Poullain, "Poesía gallega y poesía castellana en Rosalía de Castro," Actas do Congreso internacional de estudios sobre Rosalía de Castro e o seu tempo. vol. 2 (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1985): 413-37.

⁶ Quoted by John Frederick Nims in Stanley Burnshaw, ed. The Poem Itself (Schocken: New York, 1960) 162 and in "Poetry: Lost in Translation?" Delos: A Journal on and of Translation V (1970): 108.

⁷ Emilia Pardo Bazán, "De mi tierra," Obras completas. Vol. 9. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1947).

⁸ McClelland, I. L. "Bécquer, Rubén, Darío and Rosalía Castro," Bulletin of Spanish Studies XVI (1939): 63-83.

⁹ Manuel Murguía, "Rosalía de Castro," Obras completas. 7th edition. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1982) 552. It must be mentioned that many of Rosalía's Galician poems have recently been set to music.

¹⁰ Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz), "Los valores literarios," Obras completas. Vol. 2. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1959) 1077.

¹¹ Azorín, "Clásicos y modernos," Obras completas. Vol. 2. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1959) 771-5.

¹² Miguel de Unamuno, "Santiago de Compostela" and "Junto a las rías bajas de Galicia," Andanzas y visiones españolas. (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1927).

¹³ Pilar G. Suelto de Sóenz, "Rosalía de Castro, Anticipación del '98," Actas do congreso. Vol. 2: 453-60.

¹⁴ Eliana Suárez Rivero, "Machado y Rosalía: dos almas gemelas," Hispania XLIX (1966): 748-54.

¹⁵ Luis Cernuda, "Rosalía de Castro," Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea. (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1957) 59-69.

¹⁶Actas do Congreso internacional de estudios sobre Rosalía de Castro e o seu tempo. 3 vols. (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1985).

¹⁷ Antonio Costa Gómez, "Rosalía de Castro e Emily Dickinson," Grial 18 (1980): 276-85.

¹⁸ Martha Miller LaFollette, "Aspects of Perspective in Rosalía de Castro's En las orillas del Sar," Kentucky Romance Quarterly 29, 3 (1982): 273-82.

¹⁹ Amado Alonso, "Noción, acción, y fantasía en los diminutivos," Estudios lingüíticos (Madrid: Gredos, 1951) 37.

²⁰ Gerald Brenan, "Rosalía de Castro," The Literature of the Spanish People (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1970) 357.

²¹ Xesús Alonso Montera, "Rosalía de Castro: compromiso, denuncia, desamparo y violencia," Realismo y conciencia crítica en la literatura gallega. (Madrid: Ciencia Nueva, 1968) 79.