Chapter 4
Cernuda and Eliot
So far, we have argued that Cernuda had begun to adapt to his own language, and for his own purposes, certain conceptions of poetry and methods of composition which he had discovered in a number of English poets, chiefly Browning and Yeats. This influence, we have found, extended to the new way in which he handled certain themes, and even to his use of particular images. We have said that his idea of the poet and of poetry was, at least, modified by his reading of these two poets, and that these influences were cumulative, insofar as Yeats had been influenced, in his turn, by Browning. This pattern is continued, and, in a sense, completed, by the paramount influence of T. S. Eliot: continued, because Eliot sought the aid of both Yeats and Browning, in addition to his fruitful collaboration with the middle link in the chain, Pound, in his great effort to renovate English poetry; and completed, because the Eliot “tone” that creeps into Cernuda's later poetry affects the most crucial area of all: the language.
Whether or not it is true, as Williams said, that Eliot's very excellence “set American poetry back twenty years”, it seems abundantly clear that here, in Eliot's new and intensely exciting poetic idiom, Cernuda found what he had been looking for. And yet, we may do him the credit of accepting his statement when he says that he knew what he was looking for[1]. To take one example, the poem “Nocturno yanqui” would not have been possible in its present form without Cernuda's reading of Browning, but it could not even hace been conceived if he had never read Eliot. Equally obviously, he could never have been in a position to appreciate what Eliot was doing if he had not digested the lesson of Manrique.
Some explanation of these remarks is clearly in order, and I shall endeavour to be precise. The absence of critical support notwithstanding, others besides myself have surely noticed the oddity, not of the content, but of the title, of Cernuda's brilliant critical essay, “Tres poetas metafísicos”[2]. This essay was written in 1946, significantly close to the publication of Four Quartets, and it reveals some debt to T. S. Eliot's critical scheme, in particular to his call for a re-estimate of the work of Donne, Herbert, Marvell, etc. Moreover, outside Cernuda's own criticism, there is no recognised “metaphysical” tradition in Spanish poetry, and, but for Eliot, it is doubtful whether the English tradition that goes by that name, reconstructed out of Johnson's none too favourable comments, would have possessed anything like its present prestige. A bold stroke, therefore, of Cernuda's. But it is when one examines the critical remarks in the essay that one begins to see most clearly the parallels with Cernuda's reading of one English critical tradition, which he greatly admired, and by which he is judging Spanish poetic practice. This is dangerous, but it is also fascinating when it leads to this sort of judgement:
Manrique ( ... ) representa una forma estilística para la cual la palabra es sobre todo revelación directa de un pensamiento, sin complacerse, como ya se complace Garcilaso, en las asociaciones que la imaginación puede efectuar con la palabra, prescindiendo de su significación inmediata.[3]
Cernuda sees in Manrique both a stark identification of object and concept and a direct sensuous apprehension of this reality in language, which is thus free of the conscious cunning it acquires with the more complex world view that characterises the Renaissance. One consequence of this, in Manrique, and, one may add, in a large number of other late medieval poets, is the arresting, indeed the petrifying immediacy to them of the idea of death. “Idea” is, in fact, the wrong word: the thought of death to them is a devastating, virtually physical experience, and it is this impact that Cernuda is striving to grasp in the following observations, rather than the quietist acceptance of death that they might seem to advocate when read out of context:
La muerte no es algo distinto de la vida, es parte integrante de ella, cuya perfección misma se logra en la muerte, sin la cual la vida no tendría más sentido que un ocioso juego de luces y sombras. De la intención que el hombre ponga en sus actos, al referir intenciones y actos a la muerte, nace su inmortalidad ante la fama, su resurrección impersonal en el pensarniento de las generaciones. Esto no supone una negación de la vida, a la que inevitablernente llevaría la concepción cristiana exclusiva de nuestra existencia; es sólo una serena afirmación de ella, no disuadiendo, sino estimulando a la acción temporal humana.[4]
However, Cernuda is evidently tailoring his account of the three Spanish poets concerned to suit his own idea of what they might have been about, and the lessons that might be learned from them. He is inventing a Spanish metaphysical line of which he proposes to be the latest exponent. In contrast to Eliot's position, Cernuda's tradition has been spawned without any clear proof of pedigree. Johnson, in his famous essay, held that the school was characterised by its tendency to “yoke by violence together” ideas that ought to be held apart; Eliot in his more indirect way, felt that the metaphysicals were like Donne, to whom “a thought was an experience: it modified his sensibility.”[5] Cernuda, with a marked tendency to read much newer ideas into older poetry, seems to conceive Metaphysical poetry as a species of post-Hegelian, or post-Heideggerian[6] state of grace, in which word and concept meet and marry, in a harmony that is also a revelation, or what Heidegger called an “uncovering”:
La poesía pretende infundir relativa permanencia en lo efímero; pero hay cierta forma de lirismo, no bien reconocida ni apreciada entre nosotros, que atiende con preferencia lo que en la vida humana, por dignidad y excelencia, parece imagen de una inmutable realidad superior. Dicho lirismo, al que en rigor puede llamársele metafísico, no requieree expresión abstracta, ni supone necesariamente en el poeta algún sistema filosófico previo, sino que basta con que deje presentir, dentro de una obra poética, esa correlación entre las dos realidades, visible e invisible del mundo.[7]
These ideas are a modification of the account of poetry given in “Palabras antes de una lectura”[8], incorporating the metaphysical idea, but leaving the scheme largely intact. It is, therefore, difficult to escape the conclusion that he read the notion of “Metaphysical poetry”, probably suggested by reading Eliot on the subject, into the work of Aldana, Manrique and the anonymous author of the “Epístola moral a Fabio”, and, at the same time, coloured this notion with his own thoughts of what poetry does, or ought to do. The three poets
por caminos distintos llegan a esta equivalente solución: la fantasmagoría que nos cierne, conforme al testimonio de los sentidos, sólo adquiere significación al ser referida a una vislumbre interior del mundo suprasensible.[9]
“Nocturno yanqui”, which Luis Maristany numbers among Cernuda's best poems “dentro de esta línea moral o meditativa”[10], reveals a mastery of the interior monologue in the second person –an awkward description, granted; but this is not self-address– which has been very conveniently clarified by Jaime Gil de Biedma. In his terms, the voice of the poet addressing his private self is the means by which the gap between “hijo de Dios” and “hijo de vecino” is bridged[11], and, though we know from the details and private circumstances of the life that is revealed that the “tú” addressed is Luis Cernuda, we cannot avoid the sensation that it is also somehow each one of us, “hypocrite lecteur”, “hermano mío”:
“Lo mejor que has sido, diste,
Lo mejor de tu existencia,
A una sombra:
Al afán de hacerte digno,
Al deseo de excederte,
Esperando
Siempre mañana otro día
Que, aunque tarde, justifique
Tu pretexto.”[12]
The relevant term here is Eliot's “impersonality”, and one's conviction that Cernuda learned something of the technique from Eliot is strengthened both by a comparison with Cernuda's earlier erratic use of the “tú” (resulting in an intrusion of the poet's personality) and by the readiness with which he quotes Eliot's formula:
the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind that creates.[13]
Interestingly, Helen Gardner has discussed Eliot's similar use in Four Quartets of what we might call this impersonal second person, as well as the peculiar use of the personal pronouns generally. Indeed, if we feel that Cernuda's “tú” is occasionally somewhat confusing (e.g. in passages of “Poemas para un cuerpo”, or the elegy on Gide) we might well exercise charity, reminding ourselves with Helen Gardner that such awkwardness arises not from faulty technique but from the difficulty of the enterprise. As she puts it:
“The difficulty of communication is reflected in the uncertain use of the personal pronouns.”[14]
It is also noteworthy that “Nocturno yanqui”, as can be seen from the stanza we have quoted, is written in the form of “coplas de pie quebrado”: this meditation on time and death has clear affinities with Manrique's “Coplas”, and Cernuda encourages the reader to make the comparison by reviving the famous form. Thus, if we are correct in our assumption that Cernuda associated Metaphysical poetry with both Eliot and Manrique, then here is further ground for seeing “Nocturno yanqui” as, at least partly, an Eliot-inspired poem.
C. P. Otero has made the parallel with Hugh Kenner's description of Eliot as “the invisible poet” in his pugnacious, and occasionally virulent, essay on Cernuda, “Poeta de Europa”. He makes the telling point that Cernuda's mature style achieves that balance of speech rhythm and verse cadence which is so fundamental to modern poetry, and which, by controlling the flow of the thought, allows the poet to speak naturally and. at the same time, to get the maximum intensity, compactness and accuracy into the words he selects:
EI tono cernudiano sabe adecuarse a la ocasión, sin estridencias ni engolamientos. Y no por eso la voz deja de ser la más distinta y timbrada de la poesía española moderna, ni su dicción la más personal, depurada y mesurada. Al menos yo no sé de poeta español moderno que versifique con más gracia, de ninguno que tenga más registros o procure más sutil halago verbal, más afortunado en sacar chispas metafísicas a la expresión más llana; de ninguno con más desnudez y reticencia, más ajeno a toda barata bisutería metafórica. Nadie, en fin, que haya sin copado más sutilmente la confluencia rítmica del verso y de la frase, técnica tan necesaria en el monólogo dramático.[15]
Otero's closing phrase points back to Browning, but in the context it is clear that he is thinking more of Yeats and Eliot as precursors of Cernuda in this regard. Indeed, Eliot is the name most commonly mentioned by those commentators of Cernuda's poetry who consider the question of English influences at all. This seems to be fair in a general sense: there are more echoes of Eliot than of any other single English poet in Cernuda's work, both in poetry and criticism. There is even an intermittent tendency in his critical writings to adopt a certain disdainful smartness of tone, or to fly in the face of common sense and common experience in his judgements, as occasionally happens in Eliot.
To take an example, when all allowances have been made for the importance of Campoamor as a crucial poet of transition, Cernuda's high regard for him is surely excessive. His opinion of Jiménez, too, must be held partly responsible for the testy and ill-considered remark of Gil de Biedma:
“Y si a uno no le gustan sus poemas (de J. R. J.) será por cualquier otra razón. A mí, por ejemplo, porque la mayoría de ellos me parecen bobos.”[16] The tendency to conduct and excite polemics is one of the less endearing aspects of Cernuda's public personality, and the readiness of what we may call his school (Gil de Biedma, Otero, Juan Goytisolo, etc.) to take up the cudgels ojhis behalf, or their own, occasionally mars the effect of their penetrating and enlightening studies. One is reminded of Paz's intelligent and perceptive remark that Cernuda was influenced by Eliot's tone and style in his critical writings on Spanish poetry, and that Cernuda writes
“con esa precisión y objetividad, no exenta de capricho, que es uno de los encantos y peligros del estilo crítico de Eliot.”[17]
Before we turn to the particular form of Eliot's influence on Cernuda, it will be helpful, as we have done in the cases of Browning and Yeats, to examine Cernuda's own opinions of the work of the Anglo-American poet in order to get a perspective on the features of this work which Cernuda thought to be most original. In this way, it is hoped, the notion of “influence” will become less diffuse, and the traces left on Cernuda's work by Eliot's will be highlighted and thus more readily detectable.
The first thing that must be said, in this regard, is that, despite Cernuda's admiration for Eliot, and the frequency with which he quotes him or refers to him, he wrote only one article of any length on the subject, and it is a negative one. We shall return to this article shortly. But before we do so, we shall attempt a brief summary of Cernuda's other remarks on Eliot, remarks chiefly made in passing.
There is no doubt whatsoever that Cernuda was fully convinced of the immense stature of Eliot. He claims to have been struck by him when he read “The Waste Land”, as a young man[18]. Though it is quite possible that he might have seen a translation in the twenties or early thirties, there is no evidence that I can find in his own poetry to suggest the impact this reading is supposed to have made on him. Hence, the experience, unless Cernuda is confusing dates and places, or extending the usual idea of a “young man” to include a person well into his thirties, must have lain dormant in him until exile took him to Britain, and a deep and careful reading of the English poets. By the mid fifties[19], Cernuda could write of his deep admiration for Eliot and the other English poet/critics (Dryden, Johnson, Arnold, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.) adding a typical complaint about the want of such a tradition in Spain[20].
In an interview with the journalist, Jaime Tello, in Cambridge in 1945, Cernuda made the following somewhat general and conventional statement:
Creo que Eliot es sin duda el más grande de todos (los poetas ingleses actuales) y uno de los grandes poetas del mundo. Especialmente su última obra, Cuatro Cuartetos (“Four Quartets”) es de una trascendencia extraordinaria y es en ella donde Eliot se ha logrado mejor desde el punto de vista del lenguaje. ¡Qué lenguaje más rico! ¡Qué exactitud y qué precisión en el concepto![21]
At the very end of his life, and in much the same vein, he describes Eliot as “Un artista consciente en extremo de las posibilidades de su arte y sus límites”, adding once again that Spanish artists are temperamentally not selfconscious[22]. For more precise detail of the reasons for his admiration of Eliot, we must look to two critical essays in which Cernuda relies on critical perceptions of Eliot's. One of these essays deals with Salinas and Gui11én, and the other is on Matthew Arnold.
In the first, Cernuda takes Salinas to task for his superficiality, his mere verbal ingenuity, and charges that, though Salinas is right to see Baudelaire as a modern poet, he (Salinas) himself fails to be modern precisely because he does not treat his art seriously. Cernuda now quotes, in his translation, from Eliot's essay on Baudelaire, which I give in the original English:
It is not merely in the use of imagery of common fife, not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid fife of a great metropolis, but in the elevation of such imagery to the first intensity
–presenting it as it is, and yet making it represent something much more than itself– that Baudelaire has created a mode of release and expression for other men.[23]
In addition to the importance of this idea for Cernuda's later theory of poetry, the reader of Eliot and Cernuda will perhaps be no less struck by the point at which Cernuda stops his quotation of Eliot; for Eliot goes on to claim that Baudelaire was more than just a stylistic innovator, that in Baudelaire's Romanticism there lurked an element of moral renewal, at least as important for the future of poetry as his courageously individual use of specifically urban, and specifically sordid, imagery:
“Baudelaire”, Eliot tells us, “is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards fife is no less radical and no less important. In his verse, he is now less a model to be imitated or a source to be drained than a reminder of the duty, the consecrated task of sincerity ( ... ) Many of his poems are insufficiently removed from their Romantic origins, from Byronic paternity and Satanic fraternity. The “satanism” of the Black Mass was very much in the air; in exhibiting it Baudelaire is the voice of his time; but I would observe that in Baudelaire, as in no-one else, it is redeemed by meaning something else (...) Huysmans me rely provides a document. Baudelaire would not even provide that, if he had been really absorbed in that ridiculous hocus-pocus. But actually Baudelaire was concerned, not with demons, black masses and romantic blasphemy, but with the real problem of good and evil.[24]
There are two points to be borne in mind here. In the first place, there is a very real possibility of tendentiousness on Eliot's part, in wishing to make Baudelaire –the very type and exemplar of the conscious modern poet– a spokesman for the view that the more extreme forms of Romanticism are trite, or base, and that the real concern is with the sense of sin and the possibility of redemption. Each reader must make up his own mind, but, as we shall see, there are reasons to believe that Cernuda had no wish to follow Eliot, or anyone else, in this direction. Secondly, we have already mentioned Cernuda's own rather facile satanism in Las nubes and earlier. Though this aspect of his poetry has its champions[25], it seems to disappear around the mid-forties, and it is quite possible that he was so mortified by Eliot's explicit condemnation of such manifestations that he preferred to draw a veil over his own participation in them. This would not imply, of course, an acceptance of Eliot's own stiffly Christian views, but a recognition, perhaps. on Cernuda's part, of a past error of taste.
In the second essay which concerns us here, that on Matthew Arnold, Cernuda seems to follow Eliot in classifying Arnold as “Un crítico que escribió poesía” rather than as a poet/critic, and he specifically quotes Eliot as saying that Arnold was not interested in the creative process itself:
Adivinamos que el escribir poesía apenas le produjo esa excitación, esa gozosa pérdida de si en la artesanía del arte, ese alivio intenso y transitorio que ocurre al momento de la compleción (SIC) y que es la recompensa principal del trabajo creador .[26]
We are naturally more interested in the fact that Cernuda judges Arnold by Eliot's yardstick, than in his opinion of the value, or the nature, of Arnold's poetry. The selflessness and buoyancy briefly experienced in the creative process clearly appealed to Cernuda as the positive counterpart of the poet's essential solitude. This ties in with the views of Derek Harris (on selflessness) and Philip Silver (on solitude), but points away from their respective preoccupations with psychological and philosophical speculations, and towards Yeats's central concern with the moment of communication of the artist with the dead and the yet unborn, i.e. towards aesthetic transcendence of the finite.
If one recalls that Yeats was, for Eliot, the greatest living poet, one begins to see the source of Cernuda's interest in Eliot's conception of inspiration. A glance back at Eliot's essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “The Function of Criticism” reminds us that his approach to these issues is much more cautious and pragmatic than Yeats's. In these two seminal essays, Eliot attempts to anchor the notion of tradition in the mind of an exceptionally talented individual poet, and to rationalise (i.e. demystify) the creative process in the famous formula of the objective correlative, a notion Cernuda once or twice avails himself of in his criticism, though generally without acknowledging his source.[27]
Eliot's famous definition of the objective correlative has become a catch-phrase by this time, and there is probably little point in attempting to rescue it from the morass of misuse and overuse in which it is sunk. Nevertheless, if we are no longer, perhaps, quite sure what the phrase originally meant, it is reasonably easy to be sure what it did not mean. Harris's application of it to Cernuda's surrealist phase seems misguided and extraordinarily muddled in an essay which, though sticking obstinately to psychological interpretation, is characteristically moderate and sensible. If we are to have a clear idea of Eliot's influence on Cernuda, it is essential to see that Cernuda's use of Eliot's terms thirty years après coup (as Harris acknowledges[28]) implies nothing whatsoever about Cernuda's understanding of his art at the time he wrote the poems.
Besides, what Eliot actually wrote was this:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative” ; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.[29]
Thus, when Harris writes of “the technique of free association, of the objective correlative, which Cernuda learnt from surrealism”, he seems to be making a number of blunders. In the first place, the objective correlative is not a technique, but a required skill (“the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art”). Secondly, it is just the opposite of free association: Eliot is adamant that it involves a deliberate choice which “(shall be the formula” of the emotion, that the facts must terminate in sensory experience, and that the emotion is “immediately evoked”. No question, then, of freedom. Thirdly, as is already implicit in our first objection, Cernuda can hardly have “learned” this technique from surrealism, since Eliot states that it is a condition of all art. Indeed, Eliot formulated the notion in an effort to explain what, to him, is the failure of Hamlet.
For some reason, Harris links his remarks on the objective correlative with a remark of Eliot's from a very different source:
In some minds, certain memories, both from reading and from life, become charged with emotional significance. All these are used, so that intensity is gained at the expense of clarity.[30]
No doubt, such emotionally charged memories may constitute an objective correlative, but Eliot's emphasis in this case is on the intensity of the emotion. Harris twice (pp. 36 and 40) takes the gaining of intensity at the expense of clarity as an aim, rather than an effect, of compression. This looks like a misunderstanding of the phrase “so thato, which Harris presumably takes to introduce a final clause, rather than an adverbial clause of consequence (“with the result that”), which latter is obviously meant. There can be no point in deliberately sacrificing clarity: Eliot must mean that, in certain circumstances, some clarity has to be sacrificed for the sake of intensity.
In a passage in Historial, Cernuda takes up Eliot's idea much more in the latter's spirit:
Quería yo hallar en poesía el “equivalente correlativo” para lo que experimentaba, por ejemplo, al ver a una criatura hermosa ( ... ) o al oír un aire de jazz. Ambas experiencias, de la vista y del oído, se elevaban en mí misteriosamente a fuerza de intensidad, y ya comenzaba a entrever que una manera de satisfacerlas, exorcizándolas, sería la de darles expresión ( ... ) Al lector que considere inadecuado a mi experiencia su resultado emotivo, y frívolo éste además al tratarse solo ( ... ) de una experiencia consistente en oír un aire de jazz, le recordaré aquellas palabras de Rimbaud, cuyo sentido creo posible comparar al de mi experiencia: “Un título de vaudeville erguía espantos ante mí”.[31]
He might have reminded us instead of the words of Eliot, a few lines after the definition of the objective correlative:
The artistic inevitability lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem.[32]
There are, therefore, two emotions, or rather two states of the same emotion: an emotion experienced by the poet (a beautiful child, a haunting melody) and this emotion transmuted into the form of art. Eliot's point, which Cernuda perhaps grasps only imperfectly, is that there are emotions which cannot be expressed, though they can be experienced. Since this has a direct bearing on Eliot's doctrine of impersonality, I shall risk trying the reader's patience by returning to some remarks of Eliot's in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality ( ... ) it is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life ( ... ) The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but un escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.[33]
It is, of course, extremely difficult to say how far this brilliant exposition could be carried out in practice. Though it is clear that Eliot was more faithful to his principles in The Waste Land than in Four Quartets, one cannot be so sure that The Waste Land is not, in places, “a turning loose of emotion”, occasionally of a perverse or unpleasant kind (e.g., the pub scene in “A Game of Chess” or the seduction of the secretary in “The Fire Sermon”). And Pound's deletions got rid not only of clutter, but of some incidental detail which revealed the unhealthy state of Eliot's mind at the time of composing. The brilliance of Eliot's theoretical statements may very well have dazzled Cernuda; he was certainly impressed enough, as we have seen, to recall the main lines, even some of the expressions, when he was writing Historial. But it is doubtful whether he made any alteration in his method of composition as a direct result of Eliot's theories. Eliot was much more important to him as a practitioner than as a theoretician, as we shall see in due course.
The American critic, Alexander Coleman, holds that Cernuda's poetry after 1936 is strongly influenced by Hölderlin, and he stresses the intensification of Cernuda's “elegiac... trait” and the recurrent vision of harmony –between man and nature, man and the gods– as being central to the middle and later period, and learnt from Hölderlin. At the same time, Coleman detects, quite rightly, a “more objectified expression” and “more disciplined mastery over the resources of language, a calm and impassive poetic voice, a new dramatisation of situations.”[34] Later, he discusses the technique of self-address, to which we referred earlier, and he quotes, in support, from Eliot's essay, “The Three Voices of Poetry”. The suggestion seems to be either that Cernuda followed Eliot's theory in his own later practice, or that he came at the technique himself, in an attempt, like Eliot, to escape from the tyranny of personality, by projecting the self on to objects or creating new selves.
The problem, however, is that it is very difficult to see how Hölderlin would have been of help in such an endeavour. Nobody would deny the importance of Hölderlin's influence, but one may question the total view of Cernuda's later poetry as an amalgam of subjective Romantic longing, in the manner of Hölderlin, and impersonal Modernist ironic or dramatic lyrics, in the manner of Eliot. One would seem to exclude the other. Perhaps a more satisfactory way of putting it would be to say that Hölderlin provided the mythology and the ideology, while the Modernist influences tended to help polish the already considerable technique.
That the tecnique was polished there is no doubt. Coleman holds that Cernuda's “dramatic projections” of himself create “a dramatic monologue which is almost theatrical in its intensity”[35]. Whatever this last phrase may mean, one would certainly agree that the dramatic effect is considerable. As we have tried to show, this occurs most notably under the influence of Browning or Yeats. But then one realises that Coleman is speaking, not of the poems of Como quien espera el alba or Con las horas contadas, but of Invocaciones. This is very interesting, as Jaime Gil de Biedma has said the very same thing:
en Invocaciones, bastante antes de que Cernuda hubiera leído a Browning, encontramos dos espléndidos monólogos dramáticos: “Soliloquio del farero” y “La gloria del poeta”.[36]
This critic goes on to say that, for Robert Langbaum[37], the dramatic monologue is merely a specific variant of the poetry of experience, and has been, since the time of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the most genuine and characteristic form of modem poetry. That Cernuda should have adopted it early in his career is, therefore, quite consistent, and even natural.
In theory, this sounds perfectly reasonable. The trouble is that neither of the poems Gil de Biedma mentions is a dramatic monologue in any very obvious sense: there is no development of the character, and, except for the convention of the first person form, nothing to distinguish the voice of the speaker from the poet's own voice. Nor is there any drama implicit in the situation: the lighthousekeeper explains, often in a heavy, bombastic way, why he prefers solitude to company. The speaker of “La gloria del poeta” hurls insults at the community of men, at their sordid lives, loveless marriages, greed, hypocrisy and cowardly morality:
“Oye sus marmóreos preceptos
Sobre lo útil, lo normal y lo hermoso;
Óyeles dictar la ley al mundo, acotar el amor, dar canon a
[la belleza inexpresable.
As the example perhaps shows, the tone of this poem is closer to rant than to the pitch of excitement often reached in the genuine dramatic monologue.
The point surely is that Cernuda was not setting out to write dramatic monologues: the class of poetry to which they are to be assigned is the ode, the poetry of contemplation (and experience, of course) which we find in Wordsworth and Hö1derlin. The fact that the words are put into the mouths of personae is accidental, or, al least, incidental. And –though this is less relevant– they are nowhere near Cernuda's best: Gil de Biedma's “espléndidos” is an obvious exaggeration, no doubt revealing his enthusiastic support for the attitude and the content, rather than the accuracy of his critical judgement.
He is much nearer the mark in seeing that the “poetry of experience” is a relevant category for the poetry written by Pound and Eliot, who reacted against Romanticism, as well as for the Romantics. As he explains:
Un poema moderno no consiste en una imitación de la realidad o de un sistema de ideas acerca de la realidad –lo que los clásicos llamaban una imitación de la naturaleza– sino en un simulacro de una experiencia real ( ... ) Se trata de dar al poema una validez objetiva que no está en función de lo que en él se dice, sino de lo que en él está ocurriendo.[38]
In “Soliloquio del farero”, the lighthouse-keeper's experience is not investigated, but stated or explicated. The importance of the figure is symbolic, not dramatic: he represents the poet, the seer, the solitary who observes what happens around him, but does not participate:
“Acodado al balcón miro insaciable el oleaje,
Oigo sus oscuras imprecaciones,
Contemplo sus blancas acaricias;
Y erguido desde cuna vigilante,
Soy en la noche un diamante que gira advirtiendo a los
hombres.”[39]
(emphasis added).
This is hardly to be compared with the technique of Cernuda's later poems, of “Nocturno yanqui” or “Tiempo de vivir, tiempo de dormir”, for example, or the title poem of Desolación de la quimera. In this poem, it is not only the title that is borrowed from Eliot[40]. The ironic contrast between the chimera's desperation and the indifferent moon recalls Eliot's semi-dramatic use of the “lunar synthesis” and the “lunar incantations” which “dissolve the floors of memory” in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”:
“Su reflejo la luna deslizando
Sobre la arena sorda del desierto
Entre sombras a la Quimera deja.”[41]
Cernuda's longest essay on Eliot is entitled “Goethe y Mr Eliot”[42] and is concerned with Eliot's lifelong resistance to classifying Goethe among the great writers, as Cernuda would have had him do. It would therefore be peripheral to our main purpose, if it were not for Cernuda's insight into the reasons for Eliot's discomfort with Goethe. Cernuda is surely right in guessing that Eliot's aversion to the German has a religious explanation. The reader of Eliot's essay on Dante is aware that his admiration for the Italian poet is partly conditioned by his admiration of Dante's religion. As Arnold did –though not to Eliot's satisfaction– Eliot took to writing occasional essays on religious subjects. His concern with Christianity became central to his thought from the early twenties, and it is not at all difficult to imagine that he would have been pained and shocked by Goethe's careless atheism, his cheerful godlessness, and that this would have affected Eliot's critical judgements. The mind that could canonise Baudelaire was certainly not above anathematising Goethe.
Though it is also probably true that the same qualities in Goethe which offended Eliot would have delighted the rabid pagan there was in Cernuda, he is quite justified in attacking Eliot's narrow-mindedness. And crucially, Cernuda's superior broad-mindedness is borne out by his stated preference, among Eliot's works, for Four Quartets. So many non-Christians, or lapsed Christians, have shown contempt or indifference for this major poem that it is heartening to find someone who is prepared to admire it without necessarily accepting the religious system on which it is based, and which it largely attempts to vindicate.
There is another reason why this marked preference[43] of Cernuda's should concern us here. For all its immense subtlety and magnificent technique, Four Quartets is a much more personal poem than any that Eliot had written before. We are conscious in reading it of a mind attempting to make sense of its experience, of what it feels like to want to believe and not find the words to express what one has to say. Paz, Otero, Gil de Biedma and others have argued that Cernuda was and remained a Romantic; whether or not one agrees with them –and we have attempted to define more strictly the limits of his Romanticism– it is certainly true that he was, like the Romantics, most comfortable when speaking, approximately, in his own voice. He was quite possibly troubled by the dispersion and fragmentation that are such essential features of The Waste Land, though he greatly admired it. Now, in Four Quartets, he found the same marvellous skill with words and images, but accompanied by a unity of tone and sensibility which, though definitely not Romantic, was much closer to his own practice.
The danger, as we suggested earlier, is that the poem may sink into prosiness; this does happen intermittently in Four Quartets, and we contend that it very. seriously damages a number of the poems of Desolación. The fact that Gil de Biedma, like Otero, singles out this last volume for special praise perhaps tells us more about his own taste, and his early immersion in the “poesía social” movement, than about Cernuda's poetry. Gil de Biedma points out that Cenuda was always temperamentally a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian, and had to struggle hard to keep his feet on the ground: “deliberado esfuerzo que se percibe en su obra y al que ni el temperamento ni la mentalidad del poeta se plegaban con facilidad”.[44]
However, the likelihood is that Cernuda, in writing of the effort to overcome a tendency towards “ese tipo de poesía personal y subjetiva”, was thinking of the self-regard of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Rubén Darío in their poetry, and of certain aspects of his own early poetry. He clearly feels he has now overcome the tendency, but, as the essay was written in 1958, the probability is that he is reasonably satisfied that his poetry of the forties and fifties is free of this fault. Since Desolación de la quimera was written, after a long period of inactivity, in 1960 and 1961, he cannot be speaking, in Historial, of his last phase.[45]
One of Eliot's best critics, Helen Gardner, has written trenchantly of the return, after The Waste Land, to a more intimate and directly personal tone in his poetry, which has a very direct bearing on the matter we are discussing here. She writes:
The natural world, which is not looked at directly, has a beauty it did not have in his earlier contemplation of it. Instead of looking out upon the world and seeing sharply defined and various manifestations of the same desolation and emptiness, the poet turns away from the outer world of men to ponder over certain intimate personal experiences. He narrows the range of his vision, withdraws into his own mind, and “thus devoted, concentrated in purpose” his verse moves “into another intensity”. The intensity of apprehension in the earlier poetry is replaced by an intensity of meditation.[46]
Whether or not this represented a backward step or an admission of a kind of defeat by Eliot cannot be discussed here. In passing, it is perhaps worth remembering that Yeats saw the moment of poetic truth as a moment of radiance that was also desolation, and that Pound, who persisted, ends with the wry admission, “I cannot make it cohere”. Eliot sought coherence both in a more traditional style of poetry and in acceptance of a difficult and highly traditional religious code. It is this acceptance that justifies José Angel Valente's statement, partly based on Martz's contentions in The Poetry of Meditation[47], that the line of such poetry arises with the devotional meditations prevalent at the time of the Counter-Reformation:
Los supuestos del arte poético siguen siendo esencialmente los mismos en todos los poetas alineados en la gran tradición de la poesía meditativa occidental: Blake, Wordsworth, Hopkins, E. Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Rilke (…)[48]
It would not have been possible to include Eliot's name in this list if he had not written “Ash Wednesday” and Four Quartets. Equally, it would not make much sense to exclude the Metaphysicals, and Valente, though he does not specifically name them here, makes it clear that they are key figures in this scheme of Western poetry. Indeed, lest there should be any doubt that he means “western” and not “northern”, Valente follows Martz in making the Frenchman, Saint François de Sales, and the Spanish devotional writers Loyola and Fray Luis de Granada, the inspirers of the English Metaphysicals.[49]
For Cernuda, then, Eliot was principally an extremely highly gifted exponent of a tradition he came more and more to admire, and it is when Eliot is most traditional that Cernuda most admires him. One begins to see why, for Cernuda, Pound lay slightly off the main track: his methods must have seemed ultimately incoherent to a Spaniard nudged towards the great English tradition by the example of Unamuno. It is as a stylist, a master of phrase and rhythm, that Cernuda sees Eliot. As we have seen at several points of our discussion, Cernuda was given to repeating or adapting other poets' verses or tricks of style in his own poetry, but he does so chiefly as a reinforcement of his own words. There is nothing of the allusive technique so dear to Eliot and Pound. Martínez Nadal's explanation of this phenomenon in Cernuda is, to say the least, dubious. Writing of Donde habite el olvido, this critic notes that
el poemario está salpicado de claras alusiones cultas, de evocaciones clásicas y románticas; en ciertos quiebros del verso nos parece descubrir a veces intencionados recuerdos-homenaje a algunos de sus poetas amigos.[50]
The same critic refers several times in the same chapter to Cernuda's conscious borrowings and brief acts of homage to predecessors, in a way that sounds a trifle naive. When Eliot and Pound do this sort of thing, it is a way of alerting the reader: we are given a clue as to how the experience in question is to be interpreted, and the allusions, if they are not too obscure, orient us in our reading of the new poem. In Cernuda, the case is different. One is often conscious of the fascination words held for him, and there was clearly something of the collector of quotes, even the name-dropper, in him. At other times, the echoes may even be unconscious (some of the Shakespearean adaptations strike one in this way, and there is a faint echo of the tone of Donne in a number of the poems in the sequence “Poemas para un cuerpo”).[51]
However, the echoes of Eliot are so numerous that one cannot be satisfied with an explanation of this sort. They are neither elegant compliments, nor unconscious or half-conscious recollections of admired lines read once and committed to the limbo of memory. We are dealing almost certainly with deliberate adaptations of ideas and expressions which had made a vivid impression on Cernuda. Most such expressions reveal that felicitous blend of sharp image and natural speech which were central to Eliot's conception of poetry, and which constituted for Cermida the greatest virtue of the English tradition. It is noteworthy that the greatest concentration of these adaptations occurs in the middle and late volumes, Como quien espera el alba (1941-44), Vivir sin estar viviendo (1944-47) and Con las horas contadas (1950-53), i.e. immediately before, and during and after the writing of Four Quartets, when Eliot's prestige was at its height.
Let us examine some of then in detail.
In the poem “Apologia pro vita sua”, we come upon the following arresting image:
“Si el amor no es un nombre, una experiencia inútil de los
[labios
(Así los dedos clavan un ala transparente
Tras el cristal curioso de algún laboratorio),
Yo creo que te he amado.”[52]
The image of the captured butterfly, or insect, pinned by the wing in the case, expresses both the fragility and the cruelty of the experience of love, the part played in it by calculation, egoism and aggresiveness, but also the fascination the experience holds for the human mind. It also expresses a typical fear of Cernuda's, the fear of surrender to possible manipulation. An identical fear, in a different context, produces this very similar image in Eliot's “Prufrock”:
“And I have known the eyes already, known them all–
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?”[53]
Prufrock's neurosis runs deeper than that given expression in Cernuda's poem. It is not love, but the encroaching daily contact with his fellows that Prufrock fears: the expectation that he should do something, say something or think something. Incidental differences in the composition of the image notwithstanding, Cernuda has borrowed the essential features of Eliot's psychological perception, and used them for his own different ends. In both we note the pinning of the victim, the insect-like struggling and the terror of subjection to the scrutiny of others. Cernuda was obviously struck by Eliot's acuteness of observation, his eye for the telling detail.
Next, in “Otros tulipanes amarillos” there is a passage other critics have noticed, which instantly recalls the famous opening of The Waste Land:
“Es cruel la primavera joven, precipita
Al hombre por el viejo camino de los yerros,
Con ramos de cerezo florido lo enajena,
Con viento del sur tibio lo extravía.”[54]
Though it is scarcely necessary, we shall set Eliot's lines beside these to facilitate the comparison:
“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”[55]
Cernuda's first line is a straight borrowing, but it is interesting to notice a number of other aspects. Both poets end three of their four lines in verbs (participles in Eliot) and Cernuda also follows Eliot in the phrasing, particularly in the first line, where “precipita” is added to an already complete sense period, against the usual run of his practice. The enjambement thus underlines the sense of an external and unwelcome force driving the resisting consciousness –in both poems, consciousness and conscience are implicitly linked– in a direction it would rather ignore. The rhythm is a rhythm of insistence, and the verbs at the line ends serve to stress this sense of being, as it were, pushed about. This is a rare case, in which Cernuda not only picks up an idea of Eliot's, but actually imitates his technique in exploiting it. In fact, though this must be submitted tentatively, one sometimes feels that Cernuda's versification from this period onwards shows a debt to Eliot's, particularly in the move away from endstopped lines, and in the delicacy of the ensuing enjambements.[56]
An interesting borrowing of a different kind occurs in “A un poeta futuro”:
“No comprendo a los ríos. Con prisa errante pasan
Desde la fuente al mar, en ocio atareado,
Llenos de su importancia, bien fábril o agrícola;
La fuente, que es promesa, el mar sólo, la cumple,
El multiforme mar, incierto y sempiterno.”[57]
The obvious reference here is to Eliot's passage in Four Quartets (“The Dry Salvages”, l):
“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god –sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce,
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
…………………………………………………………..
The river is within us, the sea is all about us.”[58]
Both poems set up a contrast between river and sea, which is then exploited for symbolic purposes, since they come to represent, respectively, the individual consciousness of time and the generic notion of historical time. In Eliot, this is the central issue; in Cernuda, it is stated in passing:
“Todo es cuestión de tiempo en esta vida,
Un tiempo cuyo ritmo no se acuerda,
Por largo y vasto, al otro pobre ritmo
De nuestro tiempo humano corto y débil.”
But, returning to the river, we might take note of a complaint voiced by Ricardo Gullón, to wit that a certain unevenness, which he cannot explain, creeps into Cernuda's poetry of this period:
“Surge una tendencia”, writes Gullón, “a razonar dentro del poema, a plantear debates a espaldas de lo propiamente poético.”[59]
He offers “Góngora” as an example of what he means, and despite the inexplicable popularity of this poem among later critics –Goytisolo, for one[60]– I would accept this. Moreover, Gul1ón's criticism chimes with one or two of the remarks we have already made in this essay. But Gullón next charges that the language also exhibits, though only occasionally, “un tinte demasiado demostrativo”, and he gives as an example what he considers the needless specification of “bien fabril o agrícola”, in the lines quoted above.
However, though Gullón is obviously right to draw attention to the prosaic tone of this phrase, we must proceed with caution in analysing the function of this tone in the overall context. I have purposely extended the quotation from “The Dry Salvages” to demonstrate that the same sort of prosaic phrasing is present in Cernuda's source, and in Eliot's poem the prose quality looks deliberate. Helen Gardner has an incisive and characteristically intelligent explanation for it:
The first paragraph (of “The Dry Salvages”) presents, in its diction, a mingling of the romantic and the prosaic, both replaced at the close by another way of speech ( ... ) The different elements in the diction present the contrast between man feeling at the mercy of his environment, which he regards with awe, and man mastering his environment, which he regards with calculation. But at the close of the paragraph the rhythm, which had been relaxed, becomes taut and firm.[61]
Perhaps something of the same interplay between tautness and looseness is present in Cernuda's poem, or at least in this stanza, though the resolution in this case is somewhat different. If Eliot's paragraph achieves tautness as the resolution of romance and prose, Cernuda's would seem to achieve a relaxed wit as the resolution of aestheticism and prose. We have mentioned the prose. The aestheticism emerges in Cernuda's favourite fountain symbolism and in his literary borrowing from Eliot, and is especially apparent in the somewhat precious line “El multiforme mar, incierto y sempiterno”, which half-remembers Shakespeare.
It is particularly interesting that Cernuda's adjective for the sea, “incierto”, should echo Eliot's more specific “untrustworthy”, and the whole series of negative adjectives he applies to the river: “untamed”, “intractable”, “unhonoured”, “unpropitiated”. “Sempiterno” is a favourite of Cernuda's which, oddly for such an unusual adjective, crops up to resounding effect in Eliot's later (“Little Gidding”) “Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown”. Both men, we see, took pleasure in the physical shape and sound of a word.
A word should be said, no doubt, on the expression “relaxed wit” in the foregoing remarks, since “A un poeta futuro” is not what one might term a witty poem. We are here referring to the wordplay evident in Cernuda's poem, though the colloquial vocative, “mi imposible amigo”, closes the stanza on a note of expansive and unusually self-deprecating irony. The phrase oen un sueño sin sueños” removes some of the solemnity from the conscious aestheticism of the preceding lines, especially if one considers the accumulative sense the word “sueño” acquires in Cernuda's poetry; and it is picked up in the closing line, where “sueña tu sueño” cleverly maintains the mood of relaxation without losing sight of the artistic destiny of the future poet. The quasi-pun “seres que serán”, in the immediately preceding line, serves much the same purpose in a poem the essential tone of which is ironic -not sarcastic- resignation. The same tone attaches to Eliot's “Not fare well/But fare forward, travellers.”
Reminiscences of Eliot crop up in poem after poem of Como quien espera el alba, in style, tone and expression, with the result that the English-speaking reader has, to a great degree in this volume, the additional aesthetic pleasure of recognition–“additional”, not only in the sense of superadded, but somewhat in opposition to the perhaps too hastily established consensus of critical opinion that this volume is heavy, neo-classical and dull (a view most obviously put about by Paz, Gullón and Tomás Segovia[62]). However, one is naturally less concerned with this or that reference to another author than with the sort of hint that Cernuda may have picked up in his reading and then applied to his own poetry. He was clearly not to learn, purely and simply, how English poets achieved their effects, but was destined, in his particular circumstances, to effect the contact with a larger European tradition, from which Spanish poetry was, for many reasons, divorced.
Unamuno had shown the way[63], and though events in Spain, and his own individual obsessions, had prevented him from moving as far as he would, perhaps, have liked towards full European identity, his successor, Cernuda, early saw the importance of the Basque poet's example. I do not, of course, wish to be tendentious: it is not that the English experience was necessary either to Cernuda or to Unamuno. In fact, of the poets with whom Cernuda became, as it were, involved, only Browning, of the moderns, was English. The renovation of English poetry was effected by the Irishman Yeats and by the two Americans –insofar as nationality, in their case, is a relevant category– Eliot and Pound. (Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that very little of the outstanding poetry in English this century has been written by Englishmen.) All three of them insisted on the cultivation of a tradition which, though French and English in immediate origin, defied merely French and English models in its ultimate derivations.
As a Spaniard, Cernuda had already ventured fairly far afield in opting for English models in his efforts to renovate a poetry which had for centuries, as he is never tired of repeating, been francophile. One galling experience came when Eliot, acting in his capacity as critic-inresidence at Faber & Faber, turned down the translations of certain poems of his, refusing to publish the English version of “Lázaro”, “Cementerio en la ciudad” and “Impresion de destierro”[64]. For once in his life, Cernuda did not allow personal considerations to stand in the way of impartial admission of the quality and importance of an author. It may be felt that in his essay on Eliot and Goethe, Cernuda got something of his own back on the Anglo-American, but in his purely professional judgements of Eliot's worth, he was strictly fair, and in his own poetry, he took full advantage of his close knowledge of Eliot's work.
We have already mentioned “Río vespertino” as an example of Cernuda's best work. It is hardly an accident that it is also an example of his poetry at its most inclusive. (We refrain, for the stated reasons, from using the term –allusive–, which would imply an orientation when probably no more than a suggestion is intended.) Two separate Eliot references are to be found in this poem.
The first concerns the function of the poet. The discipline necessary to the craft of verse requires concentration and solitude –a received idea in the Spanish tradition, stretching back to Fray Luis de Leon and beyond– but also, in Cernuda's particular conception, a raptness and a vibrancy, here represented emblematically by the sweet song of the blackbird at evening:
“Está todo abstraído en una pausa
De silencio y quietud. Tan solo un mirlo
Estremece con el canto la tarde.”[65]
But, as we saw in “Soliloquio del farero”, the poet, in standing aside from the confusion, hubbub and imprecision of day-to-day events and common experiences, comes closer to the heart of the other reality. He is the conscience and the consciousness of man. The possibly elitist attitude thus implied is specifically condemned in a phrase which, echoing Wordsworth, opposes to the idea of the “pure” poet the more robust conception of a man speaking to men, or, more properly, for men:
“Su destino es más puro que el del hombre
Que para el hombre canta, pretendiendo
Ser voz significante de la grey,
La conciencia insistente en esa huida
De las almas.”[66]
There is no doubt that Cernuda knew the poetry of Mallarme well, and, as we have said, there is evidence to support this view in his earliest work, as Terence McMullan has shown[67]. This is clear in the third line quoted, which is Cernuda's version of Mallarmé's famous statement of the poet's task:
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”.
Equally clearly, Eliot's concern with language, especially in Four Quartets, was one of the features that especially interested Cernuda, who would naturally have recognised the verse from Mallarmé in the words of Eliot's “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding”:
“Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe...”[68]
In passing, it is interesting to note the explicit social function attributed to poetry by all three writers. Yet all three exhibit a fastidiousness bordering on disdain, in the term used to designate their fellow creatures. In Eliot and Mallarmé, the word is tribe, an unflattering reference to the general want of culture. In Cernuda, it is the even more contemptuous “grey” which implies not only a prevalent barbarousness, but a complete lack of personality, attributable to stupidity. Though he reacts against the elitism or egocentricity of Guillén, Salinas, etc., Cernuda cannot overcome an aristocratic attitude of contempt for the “profane vulgar”, even when accepting that his task is to improve them.
However, the wrestle with words and meanings is the paramount issue, and the fact that Cernuda follows Eliot (“Little Gidding” was published separately in 1942; “Río vespertino” was written in 1944), who followed Mallarmé in seeing this, is a demonstration of the justness of the sense of tradition which Cernuda came to share with Eliot, and of the lines in Four Quartets:
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to
[conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
[hope
To emulate –but there is no competition–
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now under
[conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our
[business.[69]
If Cernuda found, in Yeats and Hölderlin, confirmation of certain of his own convictions regarding the high place of the poet in the world of men, and the crucial importance of the creative experience for insight into the nature of reality, it was Eliot more than anyone else who showed him that precision of language was the only way such experience could be communicated. His own tendency to inflation and verbosity, which he admits was perhaps something he never fully eliminated[70], diminishes notably in his best poetry from about 1940 onwards. His criticism of Spanish poetry in “Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea”, written in the early and mid fifties, is almost exclusively concerned with style and language. In his essay on Machado, he quotes a conversation between Mallarmé and Degas. Degas complained that, though he had plenty of ideas, he could not find words to express them in poetry, to which Mallarmé replied that poems are not written with ideas, but with words [71].
The second Eliot reference detectable in “Río vespertino”, comes at the end of the poem, in “ el tiempo sin tiempo”, which is the moment of illumination when expe rience and meaning coincide. That this is identical to what Eliot calls “the moment in and out of time”[72] is confimed by the unmistakable Eliot resonance of the closing lines:
“El viento fantasmal entre los olmos
Las hojas idas mueve y las futuras.
Está dormido el mirlo. Las estrellas
No descienden al agua todavía.”[73]
These lines read like a conflation of passages in “Burnt Norton” concerned with past and future: in particular the third section, the famous scene in the London tube, which opens:
“Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light.”[74]
Later in the same passage occurs the phrase
“Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time.
Allowing for the differences of situation, and for the fact that, while Eliot's poem is presentative, Cernuda's is meditative, the essential idea ís the same, and Cernuda's verbal debt to Eliot seems fairly clear. At the same time, Cernuda seems to gather his paradoxes into the last stage of his poem (“Lo renunciado es poseído ahora”, “En el tiempo sin tiempo”, “La identidad del día y de la noche”, “Las hojas idas mueve y las futuras”) in a way that suggests both the continuing influence of Yeats, whose shadow we have already observed hovering over “Río vespertino”, and a religious or semi-religious tone of quiescence, possibly inspired by Eliot's ultimate design in Four Quartets:
“Del hombre aprende el hombre la palabra,
Mas el silencio sólo en Dios to aprende.”
Though he has been described as the most un-Christian of poets, his religious faith was, one remembers, intermittent, and it is occasionally, as here, reflected in his poetry. The image of Cernuda as a poète maudit, which was fashionable in certain sectors in the sixties, and shows a tendency to persist even now, is not especially accurate and not at all helpful. For good or ill, he was dogged by his Catholic upbringing; and, as we have seen, under stress of perplexity he sometimes sought solace in religious illumination. Incidentally, such an orthodox reading of “Río vespertino” would remove from the lines on fe, contra toda razón” something of their present mystery, which we earlier took to have an aesthetic basis. One need not, of course, prefer this reading: merely see that it is possible.
Another sort of transcendence is suggested by Jose Olivio Jiménez, when he writes:
el propósito del poema no (...) es nunca en Cernuda el de ofrecer en síntesis una teoría ontológica, sino el de brindar, cuando más, los resortes espirituales más íntimos de una situación existencial.[75]
The existentialist movement cannot be left out of account, given the date of Cernuda's mature compositions and his openness to intellectual currents; but the ques tions that are bound to be asked concern specific models and actual opportunities, and it is unfortunate that J. Olivio Jimenez can come up with nothing more convincing than Collingwood, even though it is merely “por vía solo de referencia”[76] Yeats, Pound and Eliot were developing similar ideas lyrically, and it seems perverse to overlook them in explicating Cernuda. Jiménez marshals Rilke, Jaspers Heidegger and Sartre behind his banner, on which is emblazoned:
ese mismo pensamiento de nuestro siglo (...) de que ninguna explicación o interpretación puede levantarse sino desde la intransferible y concreta realidad de la cosa única que se contempla o se juzga (...) Porque no hay objeto concebible que pueda escapar a esa ley, todo lo existente o pensable termina por convertirse, cuando más, en pura persistencia síquica: el recuerdo, la memoria. [77]
The problem is that, of the four writers named, only Rilke is unquestionably a factor in Cernuda's development. With the possible exception of Heidegger, the others are at best tangential, required reading for the cultivated mind of the period and our own, but probably too late on the scene to be of much use to Cernuda. Jiménez is most convincing when least specific, when he gives us passages like this:
Cuando se adquiere la noción de que toda la temporalidad cabe en un instante, de modo automático el espíritu aspira a desentrañar su correlato trascendente, pues aquel instante aparecerá nada mas que como símbolo o cifra de otro momento más profundo, no extratemporal o intemporal –instancias en suma inabarcables por el hombre– sino supratemporal, esto es, eterno y definitivo.[78]
The thought here is somewhat shadowy –what precisely is a “correlato trascendente”? and do the words extratemporal”, “intemporal” and “supratemporal” not leave us with at least one term too many within an avowedly existentialist framework?- but the conclusion is inescapable, and Jimenez clearsightedly states the issue which some of Cernuda's admirers and disciples of the fitties and sixties would not or could not face, viz. That the final direction of his mature poetry was no longer merely contemplative, moralising or meditative, but consciously metaphysical:
Dondequiera sera fácil descubrir en Cernuda esa convicción de que todo auténtico conocimiento conlleva (SIC!) siempre la penetración hacia las zonas suprasensibles del ser.[79]
This is certainly true of Cernuda's poems of the forties, where his guide on such missions is inevitably Eliot, so much so that he actually forsakes his beloved San Juan de la Cruz –whom Eliot follows in parts of Four Quartets– to plunge into eastern mysticism. When one recalls his misgivings regarding Yeats's immersions in the occult, one cannot help wondering why he should have been so little averse to following Eliot in this direction. More than a question of his own greater maturity –it is not especially clear that the English influences were successive; he himself has claimed that they were accumulative[80]– it is likely that a question of authority is involved, and that age also counted. Yeats was almost forty years older than him, and his dabbling in the occult may have struck Cernuda as being both trivial and old-fashioned. On the other hand, Eliot represented the prestige of poetry and a philosophic interest in eastern thought. In any case, there now follows a series of poems in which the influence of Four Quartets is manifest.
“El intruso” is a little regarded poem in which an apparently insignificant personal experience