SOURCE: “The Early Works,” in Vicente Aleixandre, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970, pp. 65-80.

I AMBITO

Ambito (Ambit), Aleixandre's first volume of poetry, was composed between 1924 and 1927. It went to press in the summer of 1927, appearing the following year in Litoral, the poetry review of Emilio Prados and Manuel Altolaguirre in Málaga. Ambit, supposedly a marginal work in the author's production, is somewhat related to Shadow of Paradise, to be published years later. Composed of seven sections plus eight “Nights,” including an initial and final “Night” and one “Sea,” it contains classical and gongoristic forms, not unexpected at the time, since it was partly composed during the tercentenary of Góngora when baroque formalism ruled the day. One can find a minor delicate reminiscence of the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez. Nature is everywhere, but although there is a faint reflection of the cosmic force, the poet is largely descriptive and objective in a somewhat traditional way. He contemplates nature as in later works he will seek to possess her and be one with her. Written during his illness, the book sensually examines the fleeting aspects of time. Within his own boundary, the limits of his sickroom where he lived a solitary existence, he waxed both tender and uncontrollably passionate. Yet Ambit's formal beauty, pleasure in the contemplation of nature, desire for perfection, and joy in life reflect both Juan Ramón Jiménez and Jorge Guillén more than the later Aleixandre. The poet himself claims: “Ambit, the first book, is born within a climate in a certain way traditional, although in its interior there strained, with expressiveness, the forces which later will reveal themselves.”¹ Ricardo Gullón finds that it is “a complex of hidden nostalgias, an adolescent little book, clear in language and in sentiment, without anything revolutionary, nor even too daring.”² Ventura Doreste feels the germ of all Aleixandre's later poetry is contained in these “delicious, moving, crystalline poems.”³ The poetry deals with the world of the senses, classic and cold at times, but also warm and romantic. The elusive imagery, the nature of shadows and clouds convey a meaning like the reverberations of a musical instrument. The poet employs traditional ballad form instead of the free verse he will later use almost exclusively, and his ten-and six-syllable lines and other experimentation reveal his great sense of rhythm.

“Cerrada” (“Closed”), a portion of the “Noche inicial” (“Initial Night”), is a descriptive humanization of night which he views as: “Oh flesh or light of flesh,”⁴ as he makes us experience the loneliness of a cold, windy night in a naked field. “Idea,” a somewhat baroque conception, apparently concerns the poetic process. Thoughts, like flocks of white birds, flutter in the waters of the forehead, while true thought emerges like a boat to project the threads of its sail left by the wind, outward to its farthest extremity, that is, to become words on the tongue which,

knife which exempts it
from its marine entrails
and from the total landscape, profound and retarded,
rends it.

(p. 56)

(cuchilla que la exime
de su marina entraña,
y del total paisaje, profundo y retrasado,
la desgarra.)

“El viento” (“The Wind”) and “La fuente” (“The Fountain”) convey placid, almost nostalgic nature symbols, but “Cinemática” (“Cinematic”) shows a shadowy night again humanized:

… Passion of night,
lights up, lantern of the breast,
the heart, and thou subduest
thirst of blackness and silences.

(p. 62)

(… Pasión de noche
enciende, farol del pecho,
el corazón, y derribas
sed de negror y silencios.)

“Niñez” (“Childhood”) recalls happiness on the beach; “Retrato” (“Portrait”), portraying Ramón Sijé, intimate friend of Miguel Hernández who died, his promise unfulfilled, pictures a lad who held the essence of things in his hands while painting the living landscape. “Forma” (“Form”) reflects on temporality, for as he imprints his foot on the sand, the rising wind blows it away. “Riña” (“Quarrel”) evokes a theme to recur throughout his poetry, that of the cruel moon which, as it struggles with the shadow, opens a bloody wound in gushes of light. The moon kills the night, but the poet hopes for dawn which will steal upon the moon by night and destroy it. “Adolescencia” (“Adolescence”) laments the passing of youth. “Retrato” (“Portrait”), a common poetic title, here used in section three, is filled with tender emotion and vague sadness, as the poet watches a figure-skating friend who may dare both in life and in the rink. “Amante” (“Lover”) enumerates the qualities of the loved one, the grace and hollow of her pillow, the warmth of her eyes, the light of her secret breast. Filled with subtle grace, the poem's imagery of light and hope are reminiscent of the lyrical ideal in Renaissance poetry. “Agosto” (“August”) combines the standard elements of stars, wind, sea, and night, a limitless one which gives itself to open eyes.

The fourth section contains some of the themes which will preoccupy him in later works, the idea of limits, of time, of the need for light and joy, the naked body, as nature and youthful love link him to the security of childhood. In “Juventud” (“Youth”),

One day there will fall,
the limits. What a divine
nakedness! Pilgrim
light. Joy, Joy!

(p. 87)

(Se le caerán un día
límites. ¡Qué divina
desnudez! Peregrina
luz. ¡Alegría, alegría!)

“Voces” (“Voices”) conjectures that in the resounding valleys there still remain the voices of the day, refreshing themselves in the fresh lymph of the hours. The lyrical freshness and human and nature identification continue in “Cabeza, en el recuerdo” (“Head, in My Memory”), as in the play of light and shadows the poet identifies with light and growth.

Sprouts grow from thy eyes, night
rears tall its foliage, and thou sharest,
pure sap, vegetable and human.

(p. 91)

(Tallos te crecen de tus ojos, yergue
alta la noche su ramaje, y savia
pura compartes, vegetal y humana.)

As in many of his poems of this volume, it concerns an expanding ámbito, ambit, contour, limit, or boundary; “it broadens the boundary in my memory, and remains” (p. 91).

In a continuing “Night” section, “Pájaro de la noche” (“Bird of Night”), the bird is enslaved in the night, a mute block of ebony and a mold which keeps it motionless until it can be freed with the coming of dawn. The following section, “Mar” (“Sea”), contains “Mar y aurora” (“Sea and Dawn”), the first of many poems on the sea, which, as we have seen, has such symbolic value for Aleixandre. He evokes a pre-dawn sea with the faint sparks of day in the east. The still cold waters emerge from the night, running through the entire “ambit” as the streaks of light replace the sterile shadows of the night. The light disarms the dark skeleton of the air, exacting its daily worship as it drinks of the waves. “Mar y noche” (“Sea and Night”) is the counterpart, the sea at night, seeking to swallow the heavens in a ravenous throat; the moon, round and pure, sinks and rises again from the waves, as the sea, crucified on its black bed, struggles towards heaven.

The fifth section continues the already familiar imagery, the interplay of day and night, the effect of light and its reflection on the earth, the birth of light in a new day. The “Night” section following, and Part VI, bring out the human element more strongly. In “Integra” (“Whole”) the poet is alone at the hour of the setting sun as the harsh touch of night brushes him; in “Final,” he sits in the cool breeze during the last twilight hour, after a walk. “En el alba” (“At Dawn”) evokes the morning light “between the shores of night” (p. 119). Morning light continues to fascinate the poet, ecstatic in following poems over the beauty and light of day, the rays of the sun, and the yielding of night to the sweet hour of dawn. This interplay of light and darkness continues in his section “Reloj” (“Clock”), with its four hour poems, exemplifying in turn, warm light, afternoon shadows, and the power of night. Each landscape that inspires him reflects an emotion for him to experience, an ecstasy or exhilaration.

Section Seven, especially in “Alba” (“Dawn”), insists on the qualities of light which cleans the sleeping mountains, awakens colors and reflections, and finally consumes the shadows. The following poems, “Materia” (“Material”) and “Memoria” (“Memory”), turn from feeling for the countryside to aspects of concrete and remembered, fulfilled and unsatisfied love.

The final poem in Ambit, “Posesión” (“Possession”), sums up Aleixandre's identification with nature. His love object is the night which he seeks to possess, a loving solidarity which converts the poet into an elemental fragment of nature, night itself, which with the moon, dew, dawn, and tactile senses, conveys allegorical symbols. The moon impatiently tries to build its bridges on the shadows as the poet, aware of the mature night on the spun snow, finds his mouth full of love and current fire.

Drunk with lights, with night,
of lustre, my body extends
its members, treading stars?

(p. 144)

(Ebrio de luces, de noche,
de brillos, mi cuerpo extiende
sus miembros, ¿pisando estrellas?)

The poet then finally becomes the night, but on his tongue is “a taste of a growing dawn” (p. 144).

In this volume of youthful love, Aleixandre skillfully manipulates nature's elements and human love. He describes delicately, in gentle movements, his love affair with nature, a love of mental abstraction at times, whose equations resist completely logical interpretations.

II PASIóN DE LA TIERRA

Aleixandre's second work, composed in 1928-1929 but not published until 1935 in Mexico, was originally announced under the title La evasión hacia el fondo (Evasion toward the Deep) and later as Hombre de tierra (Man of Earth), but the publishing company became bankrupt before it could publish the volume. Thus Aleixandre published Swords Like Lips first. Gerardo Diego, who arranged the appearance of the first edition of only 150 copies, originally called for twenty-one poems. Many of the poems beyond that number were eliminated.⁵

In the prologue to Passion of the Earth, Aleixandre claims that the poet is an “illuminator, the razor strop of light of a sesame which is, to a certain extent, the word of his destiny.” Seeking the authentic elemental life in these prose poems, with the minimum of elaboration, the poet considered them “poetry in a nascent state,”⁶ written under the influence of Freud and Surrealism, poetry in which he could recognize himself. This passion for light and life must be seen as one of the keys to the work. The poems cannot be understood intellectually as individual entities without attributing to them arbitrary symbols. Ricardo Gullón says: “But—at least for me—certain fragments of Pasión de la tierra are so hermetic that their meaning has not yet been accessible to me.”⁷ In spite of the difficult dream symbols where tears become the head, the back, a celestial heaven, and the material of the visible world not distinguishable from an imagined one, the reader can sense the striving for emotional release and the search for identity for both the body and the soul. These prose poems possess a spiritual richness, interior flame, and the human aspects of pain and sorrow, which they convey in a rhythm all their own which has led critics to declare “the prose in its intention and result, pure, or impure, poetry.”⁸ Indeed, in Aleixandre's aesthetic word play combined with human passion, in his struggle to find himself as a creature of the earth and the world, there is already “implicit all his later poetry, while … the substantive poetry of the book consists, precisely in being implicit poetry.”⁹

Ambit had a traditional coherence which Passion of the Earth, based on emotions and the subconscious drives of the poet, destroyed. It represents a fairly violent rupture with his first work, and according to the author, “with the crystallized world of a part of the poetry of the period.”¹⁰ Others have viewed this poetry in the same way. “But it is not Ambit but Passion of the Earth which is the beginning of a new poetry. … Here the whole purely real zone disappears, so that an interminable succession of enchained visions … form the nucleus of the work.”¹¹

“The poet is found on the eve of a profound human and aesthetic crisis. … But these poems in prose describe him, they discover the secrets of his passionate and fighting soul. Nothing more revealing than the contrast, the apparent contradiction between his sonnets … and these poems of Passion of the Earth, so overflowing, so without limits, so delivered voluntarily to the dark instincts.”¹²

Passion of the Earth contains twenty-four poems, grouped in five sections, which have a vague connection with each other. The title, of course, conveys the unifying force which is both “passion,” in its human existential force, and “earth,” the total reality for the poet and mankind. Whereas in following volumes the material of the universe is to predominate, in this early collection, the passion, spontaneous, instinctive, cries out. One sees Aleixandre's anguish in his relationship to the material universe which for him lacks order and, more important perhaps, which in its chaotic confusion offers no clear-cut destiny for man, a victim of the world and civilization, much as Aleixandre, sick and solitary, was a victim.

Ricardo Gullón called Passion of the Earth a “book of dazzling obscurity. … The poet has felt life like a stingy place, a sordid waiting room in which we wait for death to signal our turn. …”¹³ Germán Bleiberg, himself a poet of considerable stature in the so-called Generation of 1936, finds it the “most anguished of the books of V. A.,”¹⁴ a terribly sincere book, in sentiments and words, but one which the poet has not wanted understood in spite of his overwhelming uncontrollable compulsion to write it. It is therefore, says Bleiberg, “a long poem which ends in its very origin: in the poet.”¹⁵

As stated above, these poems individually often appear illogical and senseless, but as a whole they form a meaningful pattern. In “Vida” (“Life”) the poet is filled with a “shadow or masticated sadness which in passing, pains” (p. 149). He recalls a one-breasted mermaid, her breast like a mouth, who seeks to kiss him on the surface of the sea. As she floats face up in the purplish water, gasping for breath in what for her is airless air, her eyes, possessed by night, fail to stir life in him. The poet rejects his death, concomitant with that of the mermaid, rebounding to face life. “El amor no es relieve” (“Love Is Not a Relief”) conjectures a loved one's charms which fail to arouse his love and passion as he faces approaching death in loneliness. “La muerte o antesala de consulta” (“Death or the Waiting Room”) reveals the anguish of all mankind at the prospect of death. When death impassively issues her call, blind lovers can ignore her for a time, but they, too, must finally yield. He depicts shipwrecked people with the taste of dry earth on their tongues, the old with their fears, the young with their dreams of love, as their final hour approaches. “Fulguración del as” (“The Flashing of the Ace”) outlines the frustration and empty promises of a future unfulfilled. Life evaporates much as a game of cards is played, the individual cards serving as a kind of horoscope which conveys a hypocritical hope, since one's “palpitating heart does not know that high tide is a horizontal dream under a moon of grass” (p. 157). That death awaits us all continues to be the theme, and in “Ser de esperanza y lluvia” (“Being of Hope and Rain”) his illness and sterile solitude prevail.

The second section starts with “Víspera de mí” (“Imminence of Me”), concerning his fears of chaos and death, and his finding a kind of life through his words. He longs for life, its colors and sounds, trying to be born again as an individual with a name. This creative process or struggle, fixing limits on things as the flux continues, converts hope into desire; sleep and night, symbolized by drowned pianos, an extinguished note or sinking harp, may give way to radiant dawn. The moon, with its cruel yellow light, awakens his desire for love, one he cannot fulfill, but he exclaims “Therefore I am here, now forming myself” (p. 164). Gerardo Diego found this poem especially passionate and lyrical.¹⁶ “Rosa y serpiente” (“Rose and Serpent”), as well as other titles in the section, continues the themes of love, anxiety, and pain. Love turns out to be an empty gesture in the face of the threatening image of night. Death, the great serpent, waits for us all, an illogical mystery we cannot solve. “La forma y no el infinito” (“The Form and Not the Infinite”) realizes that the ultimate truth and reality is death, as the poet identifies with the night, which, while it offers pain, also suggests joy, for love and life are lies. The poet, indeed, becomes night: “I am Night” (p. 169). “La ira cuando no existe” (“Ire When It Exists Not”) stresses his favorite themes of forgetting the limits of forms, the play of light and darkness, the illogical moon, and his identification with the earth. “Thus I shall drag myself like a nard, like a flower which grows in search of the entrails of the earth, because it has forgotten that day is in the heights” (p. 172).

In Part Three, “Del color de la nada” (“Of the Color of Nothingness”) identifies love and night, in a meaningless and hopeless place of scattered mannequins who uselessly offer their nakedness to the surrounding air in a world where death is inevitable; “Fuga a caballo” (“Flight on Horseback”) notes the poet's fear of nothingness as he enters the world of playing cards in which one may identify with another world where the capacity to love and live exists; but, in any event, when he dies he will return to the earth, dissolve into it, “become pure vegetation” (p. 179). “El crimen o imposible” (“The Crime or Impossible”) seeks the earth and death which will give him back the world as an innocent child. “El mar no es una hoja de papel” (“The Sea is Not a Sheet of Paper”) opposes the sea life to the wormy earth. “Sobre tu pecho unas letras” (“On Thy Breast Some Letters”) contrasts the sunlight of the day which for him is love and happiness, with the moonlight of the night.

Part Four views the moon in all its menace. “El solitario” (“Solitaire”) is dedicated to a dangerous moon which seeks to hide its evil passions “while you seek the clear lymph, innocent, final, in which to bathe your ugly body” (pp. 18-19). The poet recalls his night of love and tries his fate at a game of solitaire, but the wind sweeps away his cards and only death remains. “Hacia el amor sin destino” (“Toward Love Without Destiny”) warns his love of the new moon; “Fábula que no duele” (“Fable Which Pains Not”) laments the destruction of the nightingale by the treacherous moon. “Del engaño y renuncia” (“Of Deceit and Renunciation”) invokes in surrealistic imagery the inevitably menacing moon, as Aleixandre seeks to become one with various elements by breaking the limits of form. “Ansiedad para el día” (“Anxiety for the Day”) fuses the poet with nature, the limits breaking. He rows, lost on the ocean of life, seeks to wet his tongue in the subheaven or ecstatic blue, becoming one with the shore and the ocean.

The final section stresses similar themes. “El mundo está bien hecho” (“The World Is Well Made”) sings of his love for the forests, the cacti, the hills, all of which clamor for love. People, dragged by forces they cannot control, spend their lives within whitewashed walls which turn to boiling lava. They seek to escape their destiny, the great serpent which awaits them all. “El alma bajo el agua” (“The Soul Beneath the Water”) opposes the beauties of nature to the creations of man. Aleixandre is sustained by an enormous sea, and his soul fuses with the light. He is saved by love as he becomes one with all nature. “Hacia el azul” (“Toward the Blue”) paints the glory of the day, the sun on the water. The poet wants to fuse with the sun which will give flame to what is now ash. In the final poem, “El amor padecido” (“Love Suffered”), he longs for the world which he cannot fully possess, and feels at the mercy of the universe, because he can fuse with but portions of the mother earth.

The concept of mother earth in this collection combines with Aleixandre's Freudian preoccupations, discussed earlier, especially in his interest in breast symbolism. “Vida,” as we have seen, contains a green, moon-colored mermaid who thrusts forth her “wounded breast, parted in two like a mouth” (p. 149). The idea of eating and being eaten by an object is also a way of becoming united with it, and as Otto Rank claims, “mermaids represent the primal mother.”¹⁷ In “Ansiedad para el día” Aleixandre views the potential threat of “the gullets of the humid sirens” (p. 201), as he fuses with the ocean and thus loses his identity to the larger whole. “A shore is my hand. Another my leg” (p. 201). As one psychoanalyst explains, “In anxiety dreams with this content (merging with a larger whole), the dreamer feels that he will … perish as an individual, absorbed by the larger unit.”¹⁸ The sea may represent then the devouring breast, and sinking and merging with it repeats the feeling of sinking, relaxing, and losing the sense of one's individuality, which is characteristic of going to sleep. “El alma bajo el agua” contains again the image of sinking and yet being supported by the immense sea. “If the waves ascend, if you soak in all the sad melancholies which flew by, managing to avoid grazing you with their hollow, fine woods, they will stop exactly in your throat, decapitating you with their light, leaving your head like the flower …” (p. 207).¹⁹ The room in which the poet finds himself moves on the fearful waves, as he is borne up. “An enormous, extensive sea sustains me in the palm of its hand and demands respect of me” (p. 208). The symbols Aleixandre uses vacillate in significance to match the author's mood, often appearing incomprehensible to the reader whose sensibilities, nevertheless, quicken to empathize with the poet, inspired by the same life and challenged by the same sufferings and enigmas which belong to all mankind.

III ESPADAS COMO LABIOS

Begun in the summer of 1929, Espadas como labios (Swords Like Lips) concerns the central themes of life, death, and love, which the poet, in his moment of inspiration and suffering, views in a new relationship. As Dámaso Alonso points out, “… it is useless to search through it for what it does not contain: history, anecdote and rational sequence. This poetry does not have—literally—common sense.”²⁰ Clearly from the initial quotation from Lord Byron at the front of the volume, to the effect that the poet is “a babbler,” no conventional “meaning” was intended. The work as originally presented was filled with poetic transpositions and capriciously arranged punctuation to help Aleixandre release what he considered his “interior fire.” Many critics believe this work to be typically surrealistic, as Aleixandre confessed was his intention. “We find here this confession of the poet. It reveals that, in the years of greatest influence of that manner in modern French poetry, the Spanish poet participated in some form in its experience … tends to be, without achieving it completely, a typical surrealistic work.”²¹ … Aleixandre's intention was not to induce a surrealistic trance, but to create a voluntary pattern of unusual images. Carlos Bousoño has shown that Aleixandre, in his somewhat illogically and incoherently developed poetic structures, does not know exactly what theme he will develop. The diffuse emotion he creates in this confused and disturbed work gives rise to apparent indecisions for the poet which transfer to the reader. “… will impose in his poetry, many times an idiomatic and mental illogicality which … will not entail … a detriment of lyrical value. …”²² Aside from syntactical tricks and an insistence on a great number of relatives and determiners, constantly repeated, the use of “where” with relative value, the constant use of the conjunction “or” in a comparative sense, and the like, Aleixandre in his oneiric representations utilizes visions, visionary images and symbols, as we have seen, characteristics of his highly rhythmical free verse.

His liberty of form and his use of varying lengths, greatly changed from Ambit, allow him to cover a variety of subjects in a dream atmosphere which hovers between sensation and thought. Dámaso Alonso finds two kinds of poems in this collection, short compositions of about twelve lines and longer poems, the first group in hendecasyllables and the second in free verse, the first restrained and elegant, the second less logical.²³

Swords Like Lips, in its examination of reality, petrifies it, or, as one critic phrases it, indulges in the “immobilization of the moment.”²⁴ Aleixandre's bitter-sweet perusal involves an imagery of dead roses, coals of silence (because they lack life-giving flame), and a series of other death representations. In the world's changing reality he seeks to remove the charade of life which hides behind the mask of death, endeavoring constantly to establish an equivalence among various orders of reality. Leopoldo de Luis claims that Swords Like Lips, in its ironic and bitter projections, is “the rejection of a corrupt, outmoded society which must be ejected from its artificial and sycophantic shell … from its false and unjust principles.”²⁵ Ricardo Gullón, admitting the bitterness and despair, finds in the poetry a principle of order and a spark of hope in Aleixandre's ascent toward the light.²⁶

Almost all agree that this volume represents a break with Ambit, but critics express differing views as to its place in the development of twentieth-century Spanish poetry. Dámaso Alonso states it is part of the curious phenomenon between 1929 and 1932 of the so-called dehumanized poets to evolve towards a neo-romantic revival, and considers it a “bitter, disordered, harsh, suppurated, veined, livid, roseate, beatific, archangelic … mixture of pain and sarcasm, tenderness and delicacy.”²⁷ Admitting to its passionate, tortured, stormy and grotesque aspects, he finds it “the most literarily revolutionary of all his works.”²⁸ Eugenio de Nora sees Swords Like Lips as a rejection of pure poetry and “neo-juanramonianism” and says that it sweeps away with one blow “the affected world of exquisiteness in which poetry seemed to have been residing captive. …”²⁹

As one examines the individual poems, one encounters the poet's constant longing to be, combined with a fear of not being. “Mi voz” (“My Voice”) relates his birth on a summer night; he senses in his beloved a possibility of hope and happiness; the sea like a warm medal gives promise of a possible light and life. But in “La palabra” (“The Word”), the poet cannot communicate and feels drained of life; in “Partida” (“Departure”) his straining toward life gives way in the following poem, “Muerte” (“Death”), to “Under earth the unexpected kisses, / that silence which is coal, not flame” (p. 223). In “Circuito” (“Circuit”) Aleixandre seeks the love of virginal sirens beneath a harsh cruel moon; and in “Ya es tarde” (“Now It Is Late”) he wants life, “ignoring that the rose has died forever” (p. 225). In following poems he continues to seek love and light as opposed to death and darkness until in his final poem of this first section, “Nacimiento último” (“Final Birth”), he fuses the two concepts and sees death as joy and awakening. He becomes the sun, the happy earth which welcomes the day, shifting in Spanish from masculine to feminine and thus implying a change from the concrete, he visto el mar, la mar, los mares, los no-límites (“I have seen the sea, the sea, the seas, the non-limits”), to the abstract. He wants to break the limits which prevent things from returning to earth:

What clouds or what palms, what kisses or everlasting flowers
seek that forehead, those eyes, that dream,
that growth which will end like a newly born death?

(pp. 230-31)

(¿Que nubes o qué palmas, qué besos o siemprevivas
buscan esa frente, esos ojos, ese sueño,
ese crecimiento que acabará como una muerte reciennacida?)

The second section begins with the poem which has elicited the most critical comment, “El Vals” (“The Waltz”). Dedicated to García Lorca, who in turn dedicated a similarly titled poem to him, the poem reflects Aleixandre's early awareness of humanity and society, to become so great a part of his latest poetry. Aleixandre caricaturizes the end-of-the-century salon as he describes a real or imagined social event in which the poet recognizes himself as a participant. Sarcasm, sympathy, tenderness, repugnance, death, and the macabre alternate. In an elegant ballroom “the ladies await their moment seated on a tear” (p. 235). The dancers swirl about the room. The imagery grows more and more erotic, until at the height of the dance the dresses change to birds, “the windows into shouts, / the lights into Help!” (p. 236) and the innocent kiss between two humans into a thorn which death dispenses as it says: “I love you.” For Carlos Barral, who considers it Aleixandre's best poem, “The rhythmic figure of the poem is like a perfect parody of the narrated vertigo in which a most lively succession of images assaults the imagination like a landscape seen from a progressively more rapid center, and toward which there converge, as they approach, attitudes and things.”³⁰

In “En el fondo del pozo” (“At the Bottom of the Well”) we see death finally as a concrete reality. Subtitled “The Buried One,” the poem views the buried man (surely the poet) living a death which is a prolongation of life. The cadaver feels sensations, for death is the only reality which can keep one in contact with life. There where no wind blows nor sea threatens, perhaps a voice or freed hand reaches toward the moon, recalling other times of warmth and light. Filled with temporal images, the poem stops and prolongs each moment of time, changing it into eternity.

Thus the eternity was the minute
Time only a tremendous hand
on the long detained hair.

(p. 238)

(Así la eternidad era el minuto.
El tiempo sólo una tremenda mano
sobre el cabello large detenida.)

Each moment, as it lasts, thus gives up all of the essence of its love to the poet.³¹

Other poems foreshadow future themes. “Toro” (“Bull”) relates to cosmic fusion and self-eroticism; “Resaca” (“Undertow”) involves an affirmative negation, “The flower in the water is not a moan” (p. 242). The poet thinks of the world in flux in which his hands become two mountains, his body an encompassing foam.

Love may take many forms; some of the Freudian ones we have already examined. The poet seeks truth and beauty in a hypocritical world where dreams are not fulfilled and where one must seek true sexual and erotic expression in the more primitive and even threatening natural forces. In “El más bello amor” (“The Most Beautiful Love”), his possessive anxiety for love is like the voracity of a shark. In other poems he identifies with those seeking love in America, and other world travelers in “Poema de amor” (“Poem of Love”); contrasts love and nature, adult passion and childhood purity in “Muñecas” (“Dolls”); becomes nature as he becomes a wasp, the breeze, a stone, in “Acaba” (“Complete”); and experiences the frustration of an incomplete love and identification with nature and life, “all is coal which hurts and sobs / on the false vegetable which exists” (p. 252), in “Por último” (“Finally”).

The third section, dedicated to the youngest member of his poetic generation, Manuel Altolaguirre (the first two sections were dedicated to Dámaso Alonso and García Lorca respectively), seeks truth in “Verdad siempre” (“Truth Always”); expresses his need for love from the forces of nature in “Siempre” (“Always”); stresses his identification with mother earth in “Madre, Madre” (“Mother, Mother”); acknowledges the brevity of life in “Desierto” (“Desert”), and the inability of his tongue to express the beauty of nature as expressed through a naked girl in “Palabras” (“Words”). Other poems in this section reveal his love of nature, of different seasons and hours, which he sees in human terms, of cold and heat, dreams and light, temporality, and death.

Thus death is floating on a memory not life,
on that final blue made from overheard tears,
from that labyrinth of threads which like dead hands
place a lily as though girding a world.

(p. 270, “Río” [“River”])

(Así la muerte es flotar sobre un recuerdo no vida,
sobre ese azul postrero hecho de lágrimas oídas,
de ese laberinto de hilos que como manos muertas
ponen una azucena como un mundo ciñendo.)

The final section, dedicated to Luis Cernuda, yet another member of his poetic group, continues the already established themes. “Salón” (“Salon”) and its party of fainting ladies recalls “El vals”; “Suicidio” (“Suicide”) expresses the poet's wish to live the eternity of love in singular form, but the world remains deaf to his pleas and his desire for a fresh juxtaposition with nature.

Open the world to me, open to me;
I want to illuminate only one kiss,
lips which irritate,
pitiless trees.

(pp. 275-76)

(Abridme el mundo, abridme;
quiero iluminar sólo un beso,
unos labios que irritan
árboles despiadados.)

In this section the fusion with nature in flux, where a human arm can weigh more than a star, takes on new dimensions. Aleixandre searches for liberty to dissolve his limits in “Libertad” (“Liberty”) and wants to become a floodtide, appearing on the beach as timid foam in “Playa ignorante” (“Ignorant Beach”). The poet hears the music of distant planets and momentarily becomes the universe, but he is frustrated in his desire to be the fish in the river. It serves him little to sink his arm in the water, for fish are not hands, and thus the poet is reminded of his tangible limits. These themes, occurring in “Con todo respeto” (“In All Respect”), “Blancura” (“Whiteness”), and “Mudo de noche” (“Mute at Night”), reach a peak in “Cada cosa, cada cosa” (“Each Thing, Each Thing”), included in the first edition of Destruction or Love, but later returned to Swords Like Lips, to which it really belongs. Aleixandre somewhat ironically investigates the limits and boundaries imposed upon him. In the remaining poems such as “Donde ni una gota de tristeza es pecado” (“Where Not Even a Drop of Sadness Is a Sin”) and “Formas sobre el mar” (“Forms on the Sea”), he looks at form and matter while continuing to plumb the limits of a world where things are fixed in immobility, but where both love and time pass.

Swords Like Lips represents imaginative fragments grounded in the visionary. Its unity depends on the poetic sensibility and interest which permeate all of Aleixandre's poetry, but unlike his following masterpiece, Destruction or Love, its totality is not greater than the sum of its parts.

Notes

1. Aleixandre, Mis poemas mejores (Madrid, 1956), p. 15.

2. Gullón, “Itinerario poético de Vicente Aleixandre,” pp. 195-96.

3. Doreste, “La unidad poética de Aleixandre,” Insula, V, No. 50 (February, 1950), 6.

4. Aleixandre, Poesías completas (Madrid, 1950), p. 52. Further citations in the text are to this edition.

5. Gerardo Diego, “Pasión de la tierra,” Corcel, Nos. 5-6 (1944), 81. “Today these other poems are perhaps definitely lost with other papers of the poet, and I would regret it because their quality was as great as that of those chosen.”

6. Aleixandre, Mis poemas mejores, p. 31. “It is my work closest to surrealism, although … never felt … surrealistic poet … not believed in the strictly oneiric … nor in the consequent abolition of the artistic conscience.”

7. Gullón, p. 204.

8. José Luis Cano, Poesía española del siglo veinte (Madrid, 1960), p. 299.

9. Luis Felipe Vivanco, Introducción a la poesía española contemporánea (Madrid, 1957), p. 342.

10. Aleixandre, Mis poemas mejores, p. 10.

11. Bousoño, La poesía de Vicente Aleixandre, p. 100.

12. Diego, Corcel, p. 81.

13. Gullón, pp. 198-201.

14. Bleiberg, “Vicente Aleixandre y sus poemas difíciles,” Insula, V, No. 50 (February, 1950), 6.

15. Ibid., p. 6.

16. Diego, Corcel, p. 81.

17. Rank, The Trauma of Birth, p. 149. See also: Geza Roheim, Gates of the Dream (New York, 1952), p. 347. Roheim points out that these water beings devour their victims: “… the possible interpretation of these man-eating beings as the infant's oral aggression in talion form. …”

18. Lewin, “Phobic Symptoms and Dream Interpretation,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XXII, No. 3 (July, 1952), 313.

19. Lewin, “Reconsiderations of the Dream Screen,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XXII, No. 2 (1953), 187. “… the inside of a hollow space or concavity may represent the breast. …” Also Freud, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1938), p. 372. “… ‘wood,’ generally speaking, seems, in accordance with its linguistic relations, to represent feminine matter.”

20. Alonso, “Espadas como labios,” Revista de Occidente, CXIV (December, 1932), 329.

21. Charry Lara, pp. 20, 31.

22. Bousoño, La poesía de Vicente Aleixandre, p. 48.

23. Alonso, Poetas españoles contemporáneos, p. 292.

24. Rodrigo Fernández Carvajal, Corcel, p. 107.

25. Leopoldo de Luis, “El sentido social en la poesía de Vicente Aleixandre,” Papeles de Son Armadans, XI, Nos. 32-33 (1958), 418.

26. Gullón, “Itinerario …,” p. 206.

27. Alonso, Poetas españoles contemporáneos, p. 293.

28. Ibid., p. 327.

29. De Nora, “Aleixandre, renovador,” Corcel, Nos. 5-6 (1944), 95.

30. Barral, “Memoria de un poema,” Papeles de Son Armadans, XI, Nos. 32-33 (1958), p. 394.

31. Rodrigo Fernández Carvajal, p. 105.