SOURCE: "Rosalía de Castro: Two Mourning Dreams," in Hispanofila, Vol. 82, September, 1984, pp. 21-27.

The encounter with a departed beloved person in dream, in the subconscious or pre-conscious mind, in an under - or other-world which resembles both, is a major motif of literature that goes back to Ulysses' meeting with his mother in Book XI of the Odyssey: "As my mother spoke, there came to me … the one desire, to embrace her spirit, dead though she was. Thrice, in my eagerness to clasp her to me, I started forward with my hands outstretched. Thrice, like a shadow or a dream, she slipped through my arms and left me harrowed by an even sharper pain."¹ Achilles' dream of Patroclus (in book XXIII of the Iliad) describes a poignant meeting with the hero's dead friend and companion: "He spake, and reached forth with his hands, but clasped him not; for like a vapour the spirit was gone beneath the earth with a faint shriek."² George Devereux defines these dreams as "mourning dreams in which one tries vainly to clasp the dream image of the departed."³ Devereux devotes a long and complex study to Menelaus' dream of an erotic encounter with the flown (but still alive) Helen.⁴ The dream is narrated by the Chorus (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 410-426). One of the best-known mourning dreams in English poetry is Milton's superb sonnet, "Methought I saw my late espoused Saint," his wife who

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was vail'd, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin'd,
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

There are few mourning-dream poems in Spanish literature; the reader may recall Antonio Machado's "Soñé que tú me llevabas" which evokes his departed wife Leonor's image in dream.⁵ I would like to discuss two such poems by Rosalía de Castro; they are both written in Castilian, although neither is included in her En las orillas del Sar. The first occurs as part of her long poem "A mi madre";⁶ the second, which begins "En sueños te di un beso, vida mía," is found among the "Poesías varias" collected by García Martí.

Rosalía was not obsessed with dreams, as was her contemporary Bécquer. Things dream occasionally, in the manner of Heine's northern spruce (Fichtenbaum), which dreams of a southern palm. Flowers, for example, dream:

De la noche en el vago silencio
cuando duermen sueñan las flores
(Obras completas, p. 618)

The general romantic tendency to see human emotion reflected in nature is reinforced by the pervading pantheism of Galician thought and art.⁷ At times the subject is not certain whether he/she has thought, dreamt or otherwise experienced a sensation or idea:

Mas aun sin alas cree o sueña que cruza el aire,
los espacios,
y entre el lodo se ve limpio, cual de la nieve
el copo bianco.
(p. 609)

This is the romantic dream of flight or ascension, characteristic of Bécquer and the Germans.⁸ The third-person subject is probably Rosalía, since she often creates a distance in this manner, by objectifying herself. Elsewhere the verb soñar seems to refer to a waking fantasy or momentary hallucination:

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.
(p. 621)

Why does Rosalía objectify herself in the third person, and even more so, as a masculine subject (as in the poem previously cited)? Or is she really speaking of someone else, perhaps of Aurelio Aguirre, whom she loved passionately before she married Murguía?⁹ Criticism has not really come to grips with the problem of the personae and subjects of Rosalía's lyrics, especially in the complex and often enigmatic dialogues of En las orillas del Sar.

Rosalía was born out of wedlock and possibly did not know her father, who evidently entered the priesthood in Padrón.¹⁰ She spent her early childhood with her aunt and godmother, Teresa Martínez Viojo, and went to live with her mother at about age ten. On the latter's death in 1863, Rosalía, then 26, and only beginning to write her lasting Galician and Castilian lyrics, published privately a long poem of devotion and veneration. "A mi madre" has thirteen sections; the final one is a description of a meeting with her parent in dream.

The relations between a child and its parents are always complex, and more so in the case of Rosalía.¹¹ It is likely that she felt a repressed resentment toward her mother, who did not recognize her during the first ten years of her life, certainly the crucial period of a child's development. A child's love or anger toward its parents are normally diffused between mother and father, moving from one to the other. The fact that Rosalía had no recognized father may explain the passionate attachments she felt toward, and her dependence upon, her husband and other men, substitutes for the lost father. It also complicated her role vis-à-vis her mother, who had to play both parental roles. A girl's ties to her mother are more lasting and deeply rooted than those of a boy to his father, since the mother, who gave physical birth to her, is also rival and model; and she feels herself, for better or worse, becoming like her mother. A male child cannot know all of the complexities of this special attachment. The mixture of love and hate which sometimes characterizes this bond between mother and daughter is portrayed with agonizing clarity in the dream encounter of "A mi madre."

Ayer en sueños te vi …
¡Qué triste cosa es soñar,
y qué triste es despertar
de un triste sueño … ¡ay de mí!

Te vi … La triste mirada
lánguida hacia mí volvías,
bañada en lágrimas frías,
hijas de la tumba helada.

…..

Y aunque era mi madre aquella
que en sueños a ver tornaba,
ni yo amante la buscaba
ni me acariciaba ella.

Allí estaba sola y triste,
con su enlutado vestido,
diciendo con manso ruido:
"te he perdido y me perdiste."

…..

Aun en sueños, tan sombría
la contemplé en su ternura,
que el alma con saña dura,
la amaba y la repelía.

…..

¡Aquella a quien dio la vida,
tener miedo de su sombra,
es ingratitud que asombra
la que en el hombre se anida!
(pp. 250, 251)

In these verses, together with the romantic platitudes of tomb imagery and rhetorical lament, we find an uncommon confession of resentment and inability to overcome a real, if suppressed, anger. As in Ulysses' meeting with his mother, the image cannot be embraced, and recedes. But here the poetic speaker is surprised to discover that she made no effort to demonstrate affection, nor did the mother-image seek to initiate it: "Ni yo amante la buscaba / ni me acariciaba ella." There is a cold silence between the dreaming subject and the image, broken by the latter's ambiguous statement, "Te he perdido y me perdiste." Another level of meaning appears to exist here, beyond the manifest "I lost you (by dying)." The loss here could refer to previous events in their lives, rather than to the results of death. Perhaps the dream was expressing an anger which Rosalia's conscious mind refused to accept, and which she, on waking and reflecting, finds astonishing: "que el alma, con saña dura, / la amaba y la repelía." In fact, she uses the word "asombra" in the final stanza, referring to the ingratitude the speaker observes in the dream-subject's attitude toward her mother: "Tener miedo a su sombra." Kessel Schwartz speaks of the Freudian dream screen in Rosalía (the images of whiteness, vaporous mists, receding waves), which he believes are a regressive memory of the maternal breast, and also alludes to a repressed hostility directed toward her mother.¹² "A mi madre" certainly affirms this psychoanalytic interpretation. Note also the recurring motif of "sombra … asombra," a paronamasia found in other poems, notably in the Galician sonnet "Negra sombra."

Following is poem II from the "Poesías varias" collected by García Martí in his edition of the Obras completas. The footnote states: "Reproducida en Cuadernos de estudios gallegos, no se registra fecha ni título."

En sueños te di un beso, vida mía,
tan entrañable y largo …
¡Ay!, pero en él de amargo
tanto, mi bien, como de dulce había.
Tu infantil boca cada vez más fría,
dejó mi sangre para siempre helada,
y sobre tu semblante reclinada,
besándote, sentí que me moría.
Más tarde, y ya despierta,
con singular empeño,
pensando proseguí que estaba muerta
y que en tanto a tus restos abrazada
dormía para siempre el postrer sueño
soñaba tristemente que vivía
aun de ti, por la muerte separada.
(p. 1519)

According to Marina Mayoral and other sources,¹³ Rosalía and Manuel Murguía had six children, and a seventh, Valentina, who died in childbirth. The six children were: Alejandra (1859), Aura (1868), Gala and Ovidio (twins) (1871), Amara (1873) and Adriano (1875). Rosalía was 38 at the time of the birth of her sixth child. Mayoral states that " … el segundo hijo varón, Adriano, murió siendo muy pequeño, cuando tenía un año y medio, a consecuencia de una caída."¹⁴ The child alluded to in the poem could only have been Adriano, who died in 1877 or 1878. Evidently, the poem was written between that year and Rosalía's death in 1885. A close examination of this poem reveals that beneath its apparent simplicity lies an extraordinary complexity, syntactic, conceptual and oneiric. The first strophe recalls both the Homeric dream encounters and the poem "A mi madre," with their affective ambiguity; the kiss which the poet relives in dream was a mixture of amargo and dulce. We may speculate that the subject of the dream was Adriano, and the image here summoned was that of her farewell to her dying child. The dream continues in the second strophe. There is introduced the underlying idea on which the poem is based: that after the child's death, she (the poetic speaker) believed or dreamt that she herself was dead. The death of her last male child may, in fact, have weakened her will to live, and contributed to her fatal illness.

The final strophe embodies a series of paradoxes, of mirror images of waking and dreaming, that, in bewildering succession, seem to be incapable of a final conceptual resolution. Let us try to paraphrase these verses in prose: "Later, awake … I went on thinking that I was dead, and, while embracing your (dead) body, I slept the final sleep (of death). I was dreaming that I lived, still separated from you by death." The sequence of states of consciousness are as follows: (a) awake (despierta); (b) dead (pensando que estaba muerta); (c) sleeping (el postrer sueño); and (d) dreaming (soñaba). The structure is circular, since it begins with waking existence, and concludes in dream that she is alive. Is she awake or dreaming in this last strophe? If we take this to be a lucid dream (a dream-within-a-dream) the various states of consciousness would all take place within the dream. In lucid dreams, it is common to dream that we are awake, observing our own dream.¹⁵ Thus (according to this interpretation) Rosalía, while dreaming, becomes awake, sees herself die, and dreams, while dead, that she is alive. This bewildering series is within the endless possibilities of our dream state. Another interpretation would place the series of events (described in the final strophe) in daydream, as passing through her mind in a waking state. Death in life, life in death, dreaming and waking reality are involved in a labyrinthine convolution which, in the last analysis, is an attempt at a metaphoric description of her state of mind, her sorrow at the loss of a child. The entire complex of images and concepts is the vehicle, for which the tenor is her anguished and fragmented state of consciousness. We would have to look to some of Quevedo's baroque sonnets to find a similarly paradoxical statement of the equations life-death, life-dream; but even in Quevedo (as in his "Fue sueño ayer, mañana será tierra") the images seem, by comparison, easy to unravel and define.¹⁶

The "shades" of the departed that Rosalía sees in dream, in these examples, are yet another variation of the theme of sombra, at the core of many of her best lyrics; and they may also be related to the Galician legend or tradition of the Santa Compaña,¹⁷ the procession of ghosts that occasionally makes its appearance in the countryside. These two examples therefore belong to a continuum in Rosalía's writings, from the early, romantic "La flor"¹⁸ to what is perhaps one of her last lyrics, the tragic dream-vision of the lost child. They are both explicitly acts of mourning for a dead and beloved person, mother and child. They both have the disturbing quality of nightmare, and both appear to be real dreams, dreamt by the poet. In both cases there is a sense of inadequacy, of affective ambiguity. The dream of the mother belongs to a well-known tradition of Western literature; that of the son explores unsuspected areas of our oneiric experience, areas which we are beginning now to understand through research on the lucid dream. The "mourning" expressed by both poems may be looked upon as paradigmatic of the tonality of most of her finest poetry, especially that of En las orillas del Sar.

Notes

¹The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu (Middlessex: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 176.

²The Iliad, trans. A. Lang, W. Leaf, and E. Myers (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 418.

³Dreams in Greek Tragedy: An Ethno-Psycho-Analytical Study (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), p. xxii.

⁴Ibid. Chap. 3, "Menelaeos' Reactive Depression and Dream," pp. 59-145.

⁵ Manuel y Antonio Machado, Obras completas (Madrid: Editorial Plenitud, 1957), p. 795.

⁶ Rosalía de Castro, Obras completas, ed. V. García Martí, 6th ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968), pp. 250, 251. Subsequent citations of Rosalía de Castro will refer to this edition.

⁷ J. Rof Carballo, "Rosalía, ánima galaica," in Siete ensayos sobre Rosalía, ed. L. Pimentel (Vigo: Galaixa, 1952), pp. 112-49, esp. p. 133.

⁸ See my article, "Bécquer's Disembodied Soul," to appear soon in the Hispanic Review.

⁹ See A. Machado da Rosa, "Rosalía, poeta incompreendido," RHM, 20 (1954), pp. 181-223.

¹⁰ See Marina Mayoral, "Apéndice biográfico" La poesía de Rosalía de Castro (Madrid: Gredos, 1974), pp. 570-85; Ángel Lázaro, Rosalía de Castro (Madrid: Compañía Bibliográfica Española, 1966), passim; and Jesús Alonso Montero, Rosalía de Castro (Madrid: Júcar, 1972), passim.

¹¹ See Rof Carballo, op. cit.

¹² "Rosalíia de Castro's En las orillas del Sar: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation," Symposium 26 (1972), pp. 363-75.

¹³ See note 10.

¹⁴ Mayoral, p. 580.

¹⁵ See Patricia Garfield, Creative Dreaming (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974), Chap. VI; and Celia Green, Lucid Dreams (London: Hamilton, 1968).

¹⁶ Anthropologist William Morgan (quoted in Jackson S. Lincoln, The Dream in Primitive Cultures, [New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970] p. 209) points out that such dreams are thought to be prophetic in Navajo culture. " … when a Navajo dreams that he is dead, he means that in his dream, he was in the next world with the spirits of the dead … To be there and come back is not necessarily a bad dream; but if the dead beckons to the dreamer, or he shakes hands with the dead, it means he is going to die."

¹⁷ On the Santa Compaña see, e.g., Antonio Risco, El demiurgo y su mundo: hacia un nuevo enfoque de la obra de Valle-Inclán (Madrid: Gredos, 1977), p. 192; and Mayoral, op. cit., Chaps. I and V.

¹⁸ Mayoral, pp. 89, 90.

¹⁹ I should like to express my gratitude to Professor John Kronik of Cornell University for certain recommendations that were incorporated into this essay.