–catching sight of his own face in a mirror– becomes the focus of a lyric on the passing of time and the meaning of personality. Like Eliot's travellers in “The Dry Salvages”, who
“are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus.”[81]
the image in the mirror in Cernuda's poem
hosca, abstraída, te interrumpe
Tal la presencia ajena”[82]
This leads to the idea of the ageing process as a series of usurpations, realistically recognised:
“Hoy este intruso eres tú mismo,
Tú, como el otro antes ...”
But the poem, rather oddly, ends on a note of Buddhist resignation, when Cernuda departs from the naturalistic interpretation to assume a conception of altering personality quite different in kind, since the fundamental identity of the various manifestations is, apparently, taken for granted. There is, therefore, real drama in the final stanza, when the switch is effected from personal to suprapersonal or metaphysical lyric:
“Para llegar al que no eres,
Quien no eres te guía,
Cuando el amigo es el extraño
Y la rosa es la espina.”
A later poem, “El amante divaga” (Poemas para un cuerpo[83]) takes up the same theme:
“El camino que sube
Y el camino que baja
Uno y el mismo son ...”
This is, of course, a rarified Cernuda, and not at all the poet Gil de Biedma took, in his perhaps Procrustean way, as a model for his new poetry of the early sixties, with the claim:
Ese interés por la realidad de la experiencia común de cada uno, en cuanto materia poética, ha sido un factor importante en mi apreciación de Cernuda.[84]
This is quite correct, of course, and one sees how refreshingly direct Cernuda must have seemed to a younger generation, brought up on a diet of “Modernismo” and surrealism. But it does not do justice to the penetration of much of Cernuda's mature poetry, or to what we earlier called the quality of its thought. If one of the pleasures of the reader of Cernuda is this sense of fidelity to individual truth, another is surely the consciousness which we always have of being in the presence of a thinking mind.
In the cases which here concern us, Cernuda is trying to come to grips with what J. Olivio Jiménez calls the “transcendence of time” , and Eliot, once again, holds the key:
“In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through a way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”[85]
Krishna, named by Eliot, seems inadequate to this outburst, and it is only by setting his rôle here beside that of San Juan and Heraclitus that one comes near a satis factory understanding of the thought of this poem. Cernuda's intentions, clarified in Poemas para un cuerpo (N.° XI), would indicate more specifically “The Dry Salvages” as the source of the lines quoted, especially:
“And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.”
together with the Greek motto from the titlepage.
Eliot's influence continues dominant in Cernuda's poetry of this period, though there are poems like “El éxtasis”, where other poets seem to have a heavier stake. This poem almost certainly borrows its title and part of its theme from Donne's “The Extasie” , but there is little doubt that Cernuda is remembering two poems of Eliot's, which his diction inisistently recalls. The opening,
“Tras el dolor, la angustia, el miedo”
pays distant tribute to the opening of “What the Thunder Said” (Part V of The Waste Land), but it is Four Quartets that provides Cernuda with the most important details of phrasing, and even imagery, for his own poem.
It is a little difficult to say what the ecstasy is, though the poem obviously deals with a projection of consciousness into a timeless state beyond death. Here the anguish of self-awareness will have vanished, and the subjective and objective realms will merge. The narcissistic experience apparently at the origin of the thought is gradually displaced, and with the disappearance of the troubling sense of selfhood, a wordless joy is postulated as a sort of substitute beatific vision:
“E iremos por el prado a las aguas, donde olvido,
Sin gesto el gozo, muda la palabra,
Vendrá, desde tu labio a mi labio,
Fundirá en una sombra nuestras sombras.”[86]
The fusion of opposites is characteristic of Four Quartets, though the narcissistic element in “El éxtasis” is peculiar to Cernuda, and is a feature of his personality from his earliest poetry. The detail we referred to seems to be drawn from “Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding”. For example, in Cernuda's second stanza, the lines
“Sonreirán tus ojos
Desconocido y conocido, con encanto
De una rosa que es ella y recuerdo de otra rosa”
probably combine the “moment in the rose-garden” in “Burnt Norton” and the meeting with the “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding”
“for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at”[87]
“The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.”[88]
Though Cernuda has almost inverted Eliot's main theme –the painful loss of self for the higher aim of salvation becomes a joyful selflessness in a pagan hereafter– he has made use of the same sensuous imagery and an identical obliqueness of thought. The clearest echoes of Eliot, however, come in Cernuda's penultimate stanza:
“La hermosura que el haber vivido
Pudo ser, unirá al alma
La muerte así, en un presente inmóvil,
Como el fauno en su mármol extasiado
Es uno con la música.”
Much of this is a skilful restatement of major ideas in “Burnt Norton” , condensed by Cernuda into a species of contemporary pagan mythology. One recalls from Eliot:
“Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end which is always present”[89]
and
“Words move, music moves
Only in time.
…………………………………………………..
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.”[90]
There are numerous other references and borrowings from Eliot scattered here and there throughout Cernuda's later poetry –e.g. in the passage we looked at from “Otras ruinas” , Cernuda's image for the enemy planes (“aves maléficas”) strongly suggests a debt to Eliot's image of the bomber as a negative paraclete, –“the dark dove with the flickering tongue”– but we have perhaps noticed enough to establish the importance of Eliot for the development of Cernuda's diction and imagery. These echoes are only the surface effect of a profound change in Cernuda's phrasing and a universalising of his subject matter that continued unabated throughout his last two major volumes, and which made possible the magnificent achievement of Poemas para un cuerpo, perhaps his most sustained effort in poetry of the highest order. After this, “Desolación de la quimera” is bound to seem a diminution, both in its narrow, even parochial, set of interests and its slack and prosy versification. The parallel with Eliot thus holds to the end, for after Four Quartets he effectively stopped writing poetry. The poetry of Eliot was therefore the last major influence undergone by Cernuda.
[1] “... si yo busqué aquella enseñanza y experiencia de la poesía inglesa fue porque ya la había encontrado, porque para ella estaba predispuesto.” Prosa, p. 921.
[2] Ibid., pp. 761-76.
[3] Ibid., p. 762.
[4] Ibid., p. 766.
[5] Eliot, in “The Metaphysical Poets”, Selected Essays, Faber, London, 1976, p. 287.
[6] Vid. Mª Dolores Arana, “Sobre Luis Cemuda”, in Papeles de Son Armadans, Palma de Mallorca, nº 39, dic. 1965, pp. 312, fr., for the suggestion that Cernuda's poetry shows an assimilation of certain of Heidegger's ideas.
[7] Prosa, p. 761.
[8] See esp. pp. 872-3, Prosa.
[9] Ibid., p. 761.
[10] Luis Maristany, “La poesía de Luis Cernuda”., in Taurus, p. 200.
[11] Jaime Gil de Biedma, “Como en sí mismo al fin”, op. cit., p. 333.
[12] Poesía, p. 417.
[13] Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in op. cit., p. 18.
[14] Helen Gardner, The Art. of. T. S. Eliot, Faber, London, 1979, p. 59. Her discussion runs from pp. 59-61.
[15] C. P. Otero, “Poeta de Europa”, Taurus, p. 132.
[16] Gil de Biedma, “El ejemplo de Luis Cernuda”, in Taurus, p. 125.
[17] Paz, op. cit., p. 145.
[18] Prosa, p. 849.
[19] See Prosa, p. 1.478, for dates.
[20] Ibid., p. 453.
[21] Ibid., p. 1.449.
[22] bid., p. 1. 122.
[23] Eliot, “Baudelaire”, op. cit., p. 426. Emphasis in orig.
[24] Ibid., pp. 426-7.
[25] C.L Villena's “La rebeldía del dandy....”, cited above.
[26] Prosa, p. 660.
[27] Ibid., p. 906. Harris (Study, p. 35) tells us Cernuda confirmed this borrowing to him in a letter.
[28] Harris, Study, p. 35.
[29] Eliot, “Hamlet”, op. cit., p. 145.
[30] Quoted, Harris, Study, p. 36.
[31] Prosa, p. 906.
[32] Eliot, “Hamlet”, op. cit., p. 145
[33] Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, op. cit., pp. 20-21.
[34] Coleman, op. cit., p. 31.
[35] Ibid., p. 42.
[36] Gil de Biedma, El pie de la letra, p. 341.
[37] Vid. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry oj' Experience, London, Chatto & Windus, 1957
[38] Gil de Biedma, op. cit., p. 342.
[39] Poesía, p. 176. Emphasis added.
[40] As is well known, Cernuda picked it up from Eliot's phrase “the loud lament of the disconsolate chimera”, in “Burnt Norton”, V. p. 194. (All subsequent quotations from Eliot's poetry are from Collected Poems, 1909-1962, Faber, London, 1974; hereafter “Eliot”.)
[41] Poesía, p. 506.
[42] “Goethe y Mr Eliot”, Prosa, pp. 1.048-75.
[43] Paz comments: “Aunque nuestro poeta no aprendió el arte del poema largo en Eliot... las ideas del escritor ing1és aclararon las suyas y modificaron parcialmente sus concepciones. Pero una cosa son las ideas y otras el temperamento de cada uno. La armonía implica el reconocimiento de otras voces y acordes; la melodía es lírica, y Cernuda sólo es, y es bastante, un poeta lírico. Así, la forma más afín a su naturaleza fue el monólogo.” (“La palabra edificante”, Taurus, p. 146)
[44] Gil de Biedma, op. cit., p. 337.
[45] See Poesías, p. 31, for dates.
[46] Helen Gardner, op. cit., pp. 99-100.
[47] Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, Yale Univ. Pr. 1955
[48] J. A. Valente, “Luis Cernuda y la poesía de la meditación”, Taurus, p. 309.
[49] Ibid , p. 308.
[50] Martínez Nadal, op. cit., p. 238.
[51] See E. M. Wilson,”Cernuda's Debts”, in Studies in Modern Spanish Literature Presented to Helen F. Grant, London, Támesis Books Ltd, 1972, for a number of instances.
[52] Poesías, p. 307.
[53] Eliot, p. 15.
[54] Poesía, p. 328.
[55] Eliot, p. 63.
[56] This is especially the case in the poems of Vivir sin estar viviendo.
[57] Poesía, p. 301.
[58] Eliot, p. 205.
[59] R. Gullón, op. cit., p. 64.
[60] Juan Goytisolo, “Homenaje a Luis Cernuda”, Taurus, p. 175.
[61] Helen Gardner, op. cit. pp. 10-12.
[62] The last-mentioned is most forthright: “Pero lo que domina en estos libros es un tipo de poesía que ni siquiera es agresivamente prosaico, sino de una irremediable vulgaridad.” (Tomás Segovia, “La realidad y el deseo”, Taurus, p. 53.)
[63] For the importance of Unamuno in Cernuda's approach to the English poets, see José Ángel Valente, op. cit., Taurus, esp pp. 306-8.
[64] Detailed information of this incident is given by Martínez Nadal, op. cit., pp. 171-2.
[65] Poesía, p. 336.
[66] Ibid.
[67] Vid. T. McMullan, op. cit., Taurus, p. 252.
[68] Eliot, p. 218.
[69] Ibid., p. 203
[70] Prosa, p. 915 & pp. 922-3.
[71] Ibid., p. 370.
[72] Eliot, p. 213.
[73] Poesía, p. 338.
[74] Eliot, p. 192.
[75] J. O. Jiménez, "Emoción y trascendencia...”, p. 66-7
[76] Ibid., p. 67.
[77] Ibid., pp. 70-71.
[78] Ibid., p. 74.
[79] Ibid., p. 75.
[80] Prosa, p. 923.
[81] Eliot, p. 210.
[82] Poesía, p. 356.
[83] Ibid., p. 453.
[84] Gil de Biedma, El pie de la letra, p. 333.
[85] Eliot, p. 201.
[86] Poesía, p. 374.
[87] Eliot, p. 190.
[88] Ibid., p. 217.
[89] Ibid., p. 190.
[90] Ibid., p. 194.