SOURCE: "Rosalía de Castro's En las orillas del Sar: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation," in Symposium, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, Winter, 1972, pp. 363-75.

[In the following essay, Schwartz explores the destructive, libidinal, and neurotic themes and imagery of En las orillas del Sar.]

Poets have always been concerned with death, the world's greatest mystery. With its own special function in an ordered universe, death has been viewed as something of infinite horror yet at the same time as something desired, the final answer to incomprehensible truths, as a new experience, and as a peaceful end to pain. In En las orillas del Sar (1884), written over a period of years,¹ Rosalía de Castro elevated death (for her not a conventional metaphor) to a poetic as well as external reality. It represents her most exalted concentration on and contemplation of death. Whether as the result of traumatic events or because of the infinite sadness of everyday life, death and depression are constant notes in her work.² Azorín saw in her "sentido difuso de la muerte"(O. C., p. 156), and she approached death "resignada primera, amistosa después, y llamándola con tono desgarrador en su ayuda más tarde."³ Through her overriding obsession, the poet sees in nature and the world objects which take on a subjective connotation beyond their objective limits, as "la razón se acomoda sobre cimientos de desengaño."⁴

In an attempt to relate biographical material to Rosalía de Castro's poetry, it may well be argued that anyone can see almost anything one wishes through emphasis on certain imagery. Literary psychoanalysis is speculative without specific documents, but in this case it seems obvious that the poet was driven to sum up the emotions boiling within her through subconscious projections. Relieved by occasional patches of hope and love, the poems on the whole reveal, even in their brighter moments, a lining of helpless despair and an over-all pattern of incipient deterioration, a dark sobriety into which psychoanalytical interpretations may give some insight. Superficially, Rosalía de Castro's inferiority feelings, sensitivity, and need for love, easily account for her anxiety attacks and emotional response. Her desperate songs of unsatisfied love, tempered by deep physical pain, also seem to reflect a number of unconscious fantasies. Her revealed conflicts and anxieties may indeed conceal others unexpressed. The difficulty lies in finding the early matrices which foreshadow later more developed states.

Much of the biographical information about the poet is open to question.⁵ Her father, possibly a priest or seminarian, could not marry Rosalia's mother.⁶ The poet was raised by an aunt, but at about nine years of age joined her mother. Around the age of fourteen or fifteen Rosalia apparently suffered a serious personality change and an attack of melancholia, intensified by her mother's own depression. Perhaps she learned at that time about her illegitimate birth; perhaps she suffered from the lack of a father surrogate.⁷ Coming into the world "endeble y con escasa vitalidad,"⁸ Rosalia suffered in her youth from respiratory ailments which included colds and tuberculosis. She almost died from a bad case of the measles. Physical ills, which plagued her all her life, intensified her nervousness and psychic feelings of insecurity.⁹ Biographers, in general, do not accept the popular image of the poet as sweet and religious. They talk of her "carácter difícil," her rebellious and passionate nature, and her ambivalent relationship with her husband whom she apparently loved deeply but felt compelled to wound constantly.¹⁰ Her confession of tortured love affairs, apparently known to her husband," reinforces this ambivalence. The death of her mother, a terrible blow, "le causó una larga y grave enfermedad" (O. C., pp. 75-76). Rosalia's husband saw her death of cancer of the uterus at the age of forty-eight as a final rest for a "pobre alma atormentada, tú que has sufrido tanto en este mundo" (O. C., p. 120), although one of her daughters insists "que mi madre [ … ] era alegre, muy alegre, y extremadamente acogedora y simpática [ … ] " (O. C., p. 139).

Rosalia de Castro's thanatophobia, brought on by intrafamilial stress and a very real parental loss, also reveals an unconscious fantasy life. Her anxiety, implemented by her mourning, is a "reliving of the early depressive anxieties."¹² Her ambivalent poetry involves love and hate, hope and despair, polarities which reflect her attempts to compensate through creativity for an inability to lead a satisfying personal life. She disguises and distorts her fantasy world to avoid confronting strong repressions and transmutes unconscious conflicts into a more socially acceptable symbolic form.¹³ Her poetry, in part, seems to relate specifically to the psychoanalytical concept of the dream screen. The original blankness of the dreaming infant is considered to be a dreaming of the breast onto which later events and situations seem projected as if it were a cinematic screen. The dream screen involves visually perceived actions in ordinary manifest dream content as taking place on or before it. It also represents the wish to sleep, a bliss obtained after oral satisfaction. Aside from various overwhelming masses and the loss of ego boundaries, images involve dreams of pure white (milky substance), clouds, receding waves, vaporous mists, roses or pinkish color (the aureola of the breast), white and blue contrasts (the breast and veins), and constant implications of thirst related at the same time to concepts of dry, sandy, desert wastes.¹⁴

One aspect of the invisible and formless but yet directly apprehended breast involves nebulous and ill-defined perceptions, feelings of formless elements, ineffable experiences, not localizable or even nameable. This lost paradise of contentment at the breast is never to be attained again. Though original memories are vague, the need to return to that period and nostalgic attractions to infancy appear to relate specifically to Rosalia de Castro's "negra sombra." Her feeling of never achieving happiness (whatever the concrete pains and sorrows of her life) which she felt she could never have, is constantly and both consciously and unconsciously associated in her own words with "fantasia juvenil [ … ] de contentamiento que casi pudiera decirse infantil." She associates her feelings with the room in which her mother slept and recalls "aquella alegría y aquel éxtasis," which she could never again recapture (O. C., p. 108). This unattainable longing and spiritual intranquility, associated with a sad, indefinable and vague shadow, accompanies her everywhere (O. C., pp. 579, 598, 613, 625). It is a lost happiness, "un eco perdido [ … ] de dorados sueños y santas alegrías"(O. C., p. 569), "fantasma del bien soñado" (O. C., p. 616), and an inexpressable (O. C., p. 618) and veiled mystery (O. C., pp. 647, 651). The poet exclaims:

Yo no sé lo que busco eternamente
en la tierra, en el aire y en el cielo;
yo no sé lo que busco, pero es algo
que perdí no sé cuando y que no encuentro,
aun cuando sueñe que invisible habita
en todo cuanto toco y cuanto veo.
(O. C., p. 627)

This sense of loss is intimately associated in Rosalia de Castro's poetry with oral aspects of negation and rejection: "La venturosa copa del placer, para siempre rota a mis pies está" (O. C., p. 611); "me destierran del cielo, donde las fuentes brotan/ eternas de la vida" (O. C., p. 580); "siento la sed devoradpra/ y jamás apagada que ahoga el sentimiento" (O. C., p. 580); "secóse la fuente [ … ] y a un río profundo de nombre ignorado/ pidióle aguas puras su labio sediento [ … ]/ la sed que atormenta y el hambre que mata" (O. C., p. 593); "ya no mana la fuente, se agoto el manantial" (O. C., p 605). Lack of satisfaction in the poetic context almost always involves sensations of thirst and a frustration based on sand of beach or desert. Thus the transparent waves of the blue sea on the sandy beach tempt her, kiss her and search her out with their snow-white foam:

lánzanme, airosas, su nevada espuma,
y pienso que me llaman, que me atraen
hacia sus alas húmedas.
Mas cuando ansiosa, quiero
seguirlas por la liquida llanura,
se hunde mi pie en la linfa transparente
y ellas de mí se burlan.
Y huyen, abandonándome en la playa
a la terrena, inacabable lucha,
como en las tristes playas de la vida
me abandonó, inconstante, la fortuna.
(O. C., p. 634)

A mouth-thirst orientation, a repetitive pattern, in addition to sand, fountain, beach, and desert, is also related to forest and wood imagery;¹⁵ frequently the poet makes a conscious association with the breast. Rosalia recalls the beauty of forests and heights where a nameless pleasure awaits like a sweet caress. In a white and desert setting, where once she had hoped to "beber el néctar sano," she would gladly drink the waters of forgetfullness, death's brother. She recalls the sap:

que extraje de tu seno,
como el sediento niño el dulce jugo extrae
del pecho bianco y lleno,
de mi existencia oscura en el torrente amargo
[ … ] una visión de armiño, une ilusión querida,
un suspiro de amor.
(O. C., pp. 578-80)

Standard associations with dream screen symbols permeate her work and become its sine qua non: "Si en ti secó la fuente del consuelo/ secas todas las fuentes has de hallar" (O. C., p. 597); "ya un pinar, ya una fuente aparece/ que brotando en la peña musgosa [ … ] entre un mar de verdura se pierde/ dividiéndose en limpios arroyos" p. 598); "secóse la fuente el árbol nególe" p. 593); "Ya no mana la fuente, se agotó el manantial [ … ] El sediento viajero [ … ] humedece los labios en la linfa serena/ del arroyo, que el árbol con sus ramas sombrea,/ y dichoso se olvida de la fuente ya seca" p. 605); "su eterna sed es quien le lleva hacia la fuente abrasadora,/ cuanto más bebe, a beber más […]/ la sed del beodo es insaciable, y la del alma lo es aún más" 615); "Del labio amargado […]/ como de fuente abundosa, fluyó la miel a raudales/ vertiéndose en copas de oro que mi mano orló de rosas" (O. C., p. 638).

Sensations of thirst and satiation are intimately intertwined with those of frustration, dryness, desert wastes, and sand. Thus the fountain, "always serene and pure," contrasts with "vía arenosa y desierta" (O. C., p. 579). If the poet dreams that the sea may be strong enough to quench her thirst, she at the same time compares herself to the thirsty sands of the beach:

y no lejos las ondas, siempre frescas
[ … ] Pobres arenas, de mi suerte imagen:
no sé lo que me pasa al contemplaros,
pues como yo suffis, secas y mudas,
el suplicio sin término de Tántalo.
(O. C., p. 590)

She relates her intimate memories of satisfaction to "el áspero desierto" pp. 646-47); sees in the most profound and dry circumstances that "fresca brotó de subito una rosa,/ como brota una fuente en el desierto" (O. C., p. 616); and equates these events not only with a lost happiness but also with death "el cauce arenoso de la seca corriente/le recuerda al sediento el horror de la muerte" (O. C., p. 605).

Pleasurable and unpleasurable screen memories combine a wish to sleep and to join the mother. The poet hopes to fuse like "a white cloud in blue space," to be one with the breast, and to lose individual consciousness (in a sense to die). She also consciously refers to another aspect of her relationship with her mother with concomitant guilt feelings:

Cada vez que recuerdo tanto oprobio,
cada vez, digo, ¡y lo recuerda siempre!
Avergonzada su alma,
quisiera en el no ser desvanecerse,
como la blanca nube
en el espacio azul se desvanece.
(O. C., p. 633)

The adult's unconscious has the same oral needs as that of the child, a pattern which offers the possibility of various fantasies in which the idea of death and dying is related to sleep and indeed a reflection of an anxious transmutation of what was originally pleasurable (satiation at the breast). In her poetry Rosalia de Castro almost always associates death with sleep which in adults repeats an "orally determined infantile situation, and is consciously or unconsciously associated with the idea of being a satiated nursling."¹⁶ The poet's real pain from the cancer which was eating her from within, logically ending in sleep and/ or death and her other losses easily explain her depressive attacks; but they are almost always equated with an oral frustration, hence the omnipresent references to sandy wastes. Although the poet's approaching death must have concentrated her thoughts on her impending demise, her preoccupation with death, from her earliest poetry on, transcends the real sorrows of her life and any Esproncedian romantic longing for lost illusions. In "La flor," written when she was twenty, terrified at the thought of future nothingness, she exclaims: "Padecer y morir: tal era el lema" (O. C., pp. 220-23). In En las orlllas del Sar death represents regret (O. C., p. 606), surcease (O. C., p. 592), doubt and terror p. 662), and the only inevitable truth (O. C., pp. 645, 660).

Death in a Spanish Catholic framework would have been easier for her had she been able to resolve her doubts about the possibility of a final place in heaven: "No, no puede acabar lo que es eter (O. C., p. 583); "¿Qué es la muerte?" (O. C., p. 584). She begs God not to let her wander alone in the wasteland of life to contemplate the plains of nothingness. Her thoughts focus on the black abyss which will end all hope, for perhaps no life exists after death (O. C., p. 628). Some critics see in her doubts, not Christianity, but metaphysical preoccupations with existence, "la existencia realizándose a sí misma—que es la zozobra y angustia ante la posible amenazadora nada."¹⁷ In her ambivalence the poet constantly contrasts happiness and sadness, life and death, love and hate (O. C., pp. 621, 605, 657). She realizes that to live is to be alone, consoled only by illusive hope in the face of death (O. C., pp. 611, 655). The poet compulsively repeats her theme of hope as though through reiteration she might alleviate the fear that man's destiny ends in the tomb: "Siempre el ansia incesante y el mismo anhelo siempre/ que no ha de tener término sino cuando cerrados/ ya duermen nuestros ojos el sueño de la muerte" (O. C., p. 611); "de polvo y fango nacidos, fango y polvo nos tornamos/ ¿por qué, pues, tanto luchamos/ si hemos de caer vencidos?" (O. C., p. 619). In spite of death's certainty she is consoled by the hope that love can happen more than once (O. C., pp. 620 ff), that one can die in peace, "si no dichosa" (O. C., p. 620), and that even in death one may hope for "en los terrones removidos/ verde y pujante crecerá la hierba" (O. C., p. 582). Unable to document her belief in life's harshness, she escapes into dreams and a fantasy world pp. 632-33, 640), for "infeliz el que vive sin soñar" (O. C., p. 585).

Since her belief in immortality was less than secure Rosalia de Castro reflects on the temporal to which she gives a kind of spatial quality, re-emphasizing that if death is linked to life it is also linked to a postmortem future.¹⁸ In preparing for the possibility the impulse which drives life forward "aspires to destroy yesterday in order to make way for to-morrow: the autumn leaves must rot on the ground before spring can turn it green with grass. Life cannot encumber itself with the graves of past days."¹⁹ But it is equally true that life maintains its vanished forms, clinging to anything that was once a reality. Thus in Santiago, a "cementerio de vivos" (O. C., p. 628), she recalls the spectres of the past. Individual life seeks constant self-affirmation, longing never to cease to be, but since one must die "the individual clings desperately to anything which may provide him with the illusion of survival."²⁰

In En las orillas del Sar the poet's emotional recall of both interior and exterior realities favors shade and twilight. Everything reminds her of death and a past life. The sun seems to be dying; leaves wither; with autumn light comes night, pain, and death. Recalling her sad infancy, the death of her son, and her general desolation, she turns to Galicia, its mountains and the sea, as death and nature fuse (O. C., p. 598). She remembers a forest where she once found shade, and nature reminds her constantly of her mortality pp. (O. C., pp. 639-40). The setting sun, the leafless trees, and the very melancholy of afternoons and changing nature make her aware of death (O. C., p. 653), as do church bells which accompany one to the grave (O. C., pp. 578, 624).

These life-death relationships conceal an unconscious identification of the state after death with the feeling that at death we pass along an already traveled road. Pre-mortal life is easily equated with post-mortal life, and by extension relates to early infancy and the mother. In death we return to the place which gave us birth, and to be born is to be cast from Paradise to which we wish to return.²¹ Her constant references to sleep (death) appear to relate to the satisfaction at the breast, an ecstasy achieved in the warmth and softness of the mother, memory traces which determine later semi-mystical emotions. Homer saw sleep (hypnos) and death (thanatos) as twins, and Rosalia de Castro also acknowledges their kinship (O. C., p. 611). One pre-logical aspect of the poet's mystical thought reflects the mental state characteristic of early childhood, a kind of reversion to original innocence beyond good and evil. The poet's sense of unity with God, the strong and soothing presence, the occasional fullness and joy, recall the mother-child relationship as the satiated infant falls asleep, sinking into its mother's warmth and softness, the larger absorbing the smaller. This memory, being pre-verbal, cannot be expressed by the adult. Many mystics describe their experiences as a reversion to original innocence and Rosalia de Castro's view of eternity, a unity between a smallness and a vastness, includes the presence of a strong, hovering being. Ill-defined and nebulous perceptions involving the invisible in the breast situation may be brought into "juncture with God, the invisible, so that He may be perceived in this same way, directly."²² Her ecstasy in her search for and union with God intensifies the ineffable experiences which are indefinable.

Fleeing pain and sorrow, Rosalia de Castro looks for refuge in both the past and religion, losing herself in a mystic identification with the universe and the immortal. In her poetry dedicated to her mother she exclaims: "En su regazo amoroso/ soñaba [ … ] sueño quimérico/ dejar esta ingrata vida/ al blando son de sus rezos" (O. C., p. 247). In the same way she associates the idea of birth and death with nature in her last volume of poetry (O. c., pp. 587-88, 653). Just as winter presages a happy spring so in life her pain may presage "eterna primavera de mis sueños" (O. C., p. 606). These dreams relate more to the eternal than to life, as the poet views an "inmensidad que asombra,/ aspiración celeste, revelación callada;/ la comprende el espíritu y el labio no la nombra,/ y en sus hondos abismos la mente se anonada" (O. C., p. 618). Here we see all the elements previously mentioned, the swallowing of the smaller by the larger, a search for immortality, and an inability to articulate her feelings. But dreams of future life also inevitably relate to the transmutation of past sorrows and lost illusions, past emotional realities evoked as a counterpart of her thanatophobia. Her narcissistic desire to go on living in spite of everything causes her current external reality to take on the attributes of illusion, no more real than the evanescent past, to be replaced by the timeless world of dream and fantasy (O. C., pp. 651-52), as though she were in a different time and place, "cual si en suelo extranjero me hallase" (O. C., p. 578). Yet nobody can fully escape the unpleasant realities, "algunos aborrecidos recuerdos que se resistían a abandonarme" (O. C., p. 108), any more than one can escape future terrors. Denying the very thing she longs for, the regressively attractive mother symbol, she refuses to lose a single atom of her being (O. C., p. 641), to be devoured. Unlike nature where plants killed by winter will bloom again, she has visions of bursting arteries and broken bones, lamenting the impossibility of resurrection and that "están tejiéndome la mortaja" (O. C., p. 640).

Inevitably, however, the human spirit is inseparably united with "lo eterno," in a "misterioso arcano," and the poet experiences "otro calor más dulce en mi alma penetrando/ me anima y me sustenta con su secreto halago/ y da luz a mis ojos, por el dolor cegados"(O. C., p. 625-27). Vagueness and the eterna, the presence of an immensity, the union of birth and death, burning thirst assuaged by immortal love, and life beyond death reinforce one another as the principal notes of her poetry: "ni puede tener fin la inmensidad [ … ] en donde nace, vive y al fin muere" (O. C., p. 583); "un amor inmortal los leves átomos/ sin marcharse, en la atmósfera flotaban [ … ] saciará al fin su sed el alma ardiente/ donde beben su amor los serafines!" (O. C., p. 590). "Immortal essence," "immense space," and similar images reinforce the concept of mystic union and life beyond death (O. C., pp. 599, 654, 662). Contemplating this immortality amidst clouds of incense (O. C., p. 578), and feeling herself to be in the presence of a superior being, Rosalia de Castro feels "el sueño del éxtasis," finding her soul stirred by memories of "tiempos más dichosos, reminiscencias largas" (O. C., pp. 631-32). As she reflects on immortality and immortal love, considering herself less than a small atom lost in the universe, she becomes like a child "que reposa [ … ] después de llorar, tranquila" (O. C., pp. 634-35). She can now accept a concept of existence for she is "por el vacío envuelto" (O. C., p. 640).

Her mystic state also involves a kind of adult sexuality and desire, a surrender to a higher power that cannot be resisted, that overwhelms her and compels her. She dwells on her sin which is but the work of an instant but whose terrible expiation will last "mientras dure el Infierno!" She refers to her thirst of love which leaves her "sin honra" and a "pecadora" (O. C., p. 652). If we are to believe some of her biographers, her adult sexuality involved a compulsion which was somehow related to her need for a fatherly love she never had.²³ Beyond this possibility, she exhibits a regression bordering at the very least on neurotic fixation, for her melancholy need for love seems addressed to her own self-punishing ego:

no lograréis cambiar de la criatura,
en su esencia, la misma eternamente,
los instintos innatos.
(O. C., p. 641)

The postulated love interest may have been a dream of falling in love rather than a reality, a screening of her rivalry for her mother's love for her unknown father which enabled her to avoid a conflict by disguising a primitive transference in an effort to allay guilt.

It must be understood that psychological connotations, whether of previous happiness or pain, may be sought in disguised relationships between symbol and meaning at unconscious levels. Love disappointments during infancy, before the Œdipus complex is resolved, and a repetition of that disappointment in later life can easily cause depression. Ignored and abandoned by her mother during her early years, it was natural that Rosalia should have ambivalent feelings toward her, wishing for her death and at the same time fearing it. The projection of this subconsciously remembered death wish against her mother intensified the fear of her own death as punishment. Losing a loved object makes one wish to restore and recreate it. In her case, apparently, a later conscious manifestation repressed into her unconscious. Rosalia's sense of guilt causes her to idealize the loved object which enables her to shield her hostility toward her mother by an insistence on her love for her, the once loved and now lost object. The poet's excessive love helped her hide from herself her inner destructive attitude. Thus she recalls her life with her mother, "era un tiempo tan hermoso" (O. C., p. 245), as if only in happy childhood memory could she feel alleviation, breathe freely (one may recall in this connection her respiratory ailments), and find relief from her fear of separation. Recalling her mother in her coffin, she conveys her terrible sorrow, repeating constantly that she should have died in place of her mother (O. C., p. 253). Rosalia's real separation from her mother caused intense longing and loneliness and even terror. Deprivation of this kind would establish the groundwork for an unexpressed antagonism displaced to unconscious levels. Substituting a conscious memory of her mother for an earlier experience, she displaces the unconscious memory of early years to a later time and identification with her real mother.

Rosalia de Castro's self-reproaches and depressions were applied more directly to her mother and unknown father than to herself, but by interjecting and incorporating the lost object she identifies herself with it and assumes its guilt. Her own conscience visits on her the anger intended for the mother. Thus her melancholia, a despairing cry for love, is not represented by the physical but rather by a purely internal psychic object, the conscience or superego.²⁴ Severely damaged by her disappointment in mother love and later reinforced by the lack of a father, her infantile narcissism needed reinforcement. Because of her mother's special situation in the society of her time, Rosalia, as a teenager, was unable to go out as much as other young ladies. Her dread of society intensified, her feelings of hostility and fear. Anxious and frustrated, she needed reassurance and constant love, which she did not receive. Thus her perpetual vulnerability and need to suffer were intensified.

Because of her apparent death wish against her mother, deeply repressed, she suffered from guilt and a need to be punished. A fantasy punishment for censured impulses may be detached from immediate causes, and the external world may represent internal feelings.²⁵ By self-recrimination and suffering Rosalia could avoid exterior accusation. Thus consolation is impossible for her, since all fountains will be dry. In heaven stars exist and on the earth flowers, but they are not for her (O. C., p. 597). The poet, in her depression, accuses herself of a mancha, a distortion of her own unconscious hostility toward her mother. She repeats over and over that happiness is not for her since she carries "la traición por guiá," contemplating "tu pecado y tu mancha irredimibles" (O. C., p. 622). In this connection her second person address to herself may be of interest. Each time she recalls "tanto oprobio" she is ashamed and wants to die (O. C., p. 633). Her unconscious rage at her mother's betrayal was never resolved, although she exclaims that no stain can be forever without pardon if one is repentant enough (O. C., p. 639).

Since Rosalia de Castro could not easily express her hostility, she usually associates it with shade and darkness: "el execrable anatema llevando en la frente escrito, refugio busque en la sombra para devorar mi afrenta" (O. C., p. 639); "y en tanto el olvido, la duda y la muerte/agrandan las sombras que en torno le cercan" (O. C., p. 593), "son las sombras que envuelven las almas" (O. C., p. 611). A well-known relationship exists between darkness and the mother symbol²⁶ through whose further association with death we obtain the traumatic key to understanding some of the imagery. Death may be overcome by escape from the relationship between inner emotional reality and the outer world. Destructive and libidinal instincts fuse together, for neurotic dread of death, primarily related to the fear of being devoured,²⁷ is also equated with love. In Rosalia de Castro's poetry, objects and places change into reflections of her mother's death. The wish to sleep may be to be forever with a deceased love object in eternity, a death perhaps unconsciously brought on by guilt because of the need to punish a lover, husband, or father substitute as a kind of reassurance. This would help explain the love-hate ambivalence of her poetry: "En mi pecho ve juntos el odio y el cariño,/mezcla de gloria y pena" (O. C., p. 581); "me odias, porque te amo; te amo, porque me odias" (O. C., p. 611); "¿Por qué le preguntáis que amores siente/ y no qué odios alientan su venganza?" (O. C., p. 603).

The theme of death became a part of the poet, united with a kind of transfer, from the dark depths of her subconscious, of an inner compulsion of love. Both at times reinforce the feeling of unreality in her poetry, rather than reflecting the tenet that poetry is an instrument for the discovery of the invisible. This effect seems to stem from her inability to handle her aggression toward her family, always related to a love she felt she had never received and which time and again returned her to innocent and symbolic reunion with her mother and an intuitive belief in a mystical new beginning. Combining her subconscious drives and defenses, Rosalia sought surcease in her literary and esthetic sublimation, which without completely displacing or disguising, the latter buttressed an exterior literary belief in Celtic sadness. Today, without attempting dogmatic conclusions about love and death, constants of all great poetry, we may read into her personal vision of experience and inner emotions and communication a deeper significance, seeking those moral and psychological imperatives which constitute their human quality.

Notes

¹ Elvira Martín, Tres mujeres gallegas del siglo xix (Barcelona: Editorial Aedos, 1962), p. 140.

² Victoriano Garcia Marti, "Rosalia de Castro el dolor de vivir," in Obras completas by Rosalia de Castro (Madrid: Aguilar, 1960), p. 156, believes that "la raza gallega siente como ninguna raza el dolor de vivir." Citations from Obras completas are taken from this edition hereafter cited as O. C.

³ Elvira Martín, p. 98.

⁴ José Luis Varela, "Rosalia y sus limites," Revista de Literatura, 30 (1966), p. 72.

⁵ Aside from those previously mentioned, among the many studies, are Ricardo Carballo Calero, Historia da literatura galega contemporánea Vigo: Galaxia, 1962; Kathleen Kulp, Manner and Mood in Rosalia de Castro, Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1968; Marina Mayoral, "Sobre el amor en Rosalia de Castro y sobre la destrucción de ciertas cartas," Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 233 (1969), pp. 486-502; Rosalia de Castro, Beside the River Sar, trans. S. Griswold Morley, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937; Alberto Machado da Rosa, "Rosalia de Castro, poeta incomprendido," Revista Hispánica Moderna, 20 (1954), pp. 181-223; and Sister Mary Pierre Tirrell, La mística de la saudade, Madrid: Ediciones Jura, 1951.

⁶ Carballo Calero, p. 142.

⁷ See Obras completas, p. 40; Elvira Martin, p. 97. Morley, p. 10, feels that the "knowledge of her illegitimacy must have cast a shadow over her sensitive spirit." Juan Rof Carballo, "Rosalia, ánima galaica," in Siete ensayos sobre Rosalia de Castro, Vigo: Galaxia, 1952, pp. 111-49, contends that when her mother first ignored her, through her education by her father's sister she formed an idealized image of him for which she was eternally searching. Mayoral, p. 487, also cites "la falta de un imago paterno." Alberto Machado da Rosa, p. 200, contends that the change revolved around a sexual problem and her relationship to the poet, Aguirre. Deprived of the love of father and mother, she sought for understanding through other channels.

⁸ Martín, p. 94.

⁹ Her own husband, Manuel Murguía, exclaimed: "¿ Qué se podía esperar de una mujer delicada de salud, sensible, que cada emociín la hería hondamente?" (O. C., p. 564). For references to her "heridos pulmones" and delicate health see also Rosalía de Castro, Obra poética, ed. Augusto Cortina (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1963), p. 15.

¹⁰ Mayoral, p. 489. See also Martín, p. 135, who claims that the poet was "pasional por temperamento y por herencia."

¹¹ Machado da Rosa, p. 223.

¹² Hanna Segal, "A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetics," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33 (1952), pp. 197-99.

¹³ Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), XIX, 42; see also Sigmund Freud, "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning," Standard Edition (1958), XII, 224.

¹⁴ For a complete discussion of the dream screen see Bertram D. Lewin, "Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen," The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 15 (1946), pp. 419-34, and "Reconsiderations of the Dream Screen," The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 22 (1953), pp. 174-98.

¹⁵ Freud, The Standard Edition (1959), XX, 67, states that the forest, like the tree, mythologically has been portrayed as a maternal symbol. See also Freud, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. A. A. Brill, New York: The Modern Library, 1938, p. 372, who states that "wood, generally speaking, seems, in accordance with its linguistic relations, to represent feminine matter."

¹⁶ Lewin, "Sleep, the Mouth and the Dream Screen," p. 420.

¹⁷ Julieta Gómez Paz, "Rubén Darío y Rosalía de Castro," Asomante, 23, 2 (1967), p. 47.

¹⁸ Frederick J. Hoffman, "Mortality and Modern Literature," in Herman Feifel, The Meaning of Death (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), p. 134.

¹⁹ Marie Bonaparte, "A Defense of Biography," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20 (1939), pp. 232-33.

²⁰Ibid., p. 236.

²¹ J. C. Flügel, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Family (London: The Hogarth Press, 1935), p. 66; also see Patrick Mullahy, Oedipus, Myth and Complex (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948), p. 163.

²² Bertram D. Lewin, The Psychoanalysis of Elation (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 111.

²³ Alberto Machado da Rosa, pp. 181-223.

²⁴ Sandor Rado, "The Problem of Melancholia," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 9 (1928), pp. 420-38.

²⁵ Milton L. Miller, Nostalgia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 129.

²⁶ Karl Abraham, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: The Hogarth Press, 1948), p. 203, relates darkness to womb fantasies. As the symbol of the mother it signifies both birth and death.

²⁷ Lewin, The Psychoanalysis of Elation, p. 104.