Goby
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE POETRY OF MIGUEL HERNANDEZ
If anything characterizes the poetry of Miguel Hernandez is its vitality. In his poems, life, blood, passion, war, love … are presented to the reader in all its intensity, runaway, the passion of life inevitably leads to the presence of the other side of life: death. Miguel Hernandez’s worldview does not separate life from death, but sees death as another name of life:
You can see a process in his poetry, for which life goes from being a mere excuse for an elaborate poetry (“Perito en lunas”), to become the focus and level, virtually eliminating the production of literature in “Cancionero and ballads of absence “, a book where life and death are the stars all through a short term, simple, direct. Between these two extremes, life and death have different relationships in “The lightning that does not stop,” “wind people” and “Man lurks.”
In “Perito en lunas, Miguel Hernández taken as poetic material outside, the elements and everyday life of a pastor, but after their juvenile earnest readings of the classics and his desire to acquire a poetic technique that sublimating those experiences vulgar life. But the poetic process of Miguel Hernández takes you in, will be leaving the reading and contemplation of external objects as poetic material linked to intelligence, to refer to his own inner life, her pain, her love, her pain, her life and his death as poetic material linked to emotion.
From “The lightning that does not stop,” life is the big problem that overwhelms and shook our poet: the life and existential problem and life in general, the great mystery of life in the world. Since Miguel met his future wife, love is poetry, love life becomes a matter of art. Miguel Hernandez takes his own life with all its love and pain and transforms it into poetry.
In this book, the relationship between life and death is through the sense of tragedy. Exuberant and sensual life unhappy and lonely lover shows his power by becoming carnivorous knife, lightning does not stop, a torrent of daggers. Life in its intensity becomes loving and threatening death, thus the tragic tone that characterizes this work and that perfectly embodies the symbol of the bull: love, life and death. The bull is momentum constant love, life full of passion and virility, blood of punishment and the certainty of death. The fullness of life which shows the bull in his agony comes from the imminence of death, and that union of life and death is that interested Miguel Hernández and concentrating all the tragic sense of love, life and death offers “The beam that does not stop “
Moreover, death in this book appears (apart from love) in the “Elegy” he wrote to the death of his friend Ramon Sijé. In this poem, death appears as something completely alien and brutal, seizing his friend. As in love, the star of this book is the “I” of the poet, so here, speaking of the death of his friend, also focuses on their feelings, their pain. Life, death, earth, whose union we shall see more and more in his next book, and show here their identity, although in this case negatively, as a block facing the poet, who remains outside the cosmos drive and insensitive:
To “wind people” life is still the star of the poetry of Miguel Hernandez and, since his life now is to defend the Republic against Franco’s coup, this is a book of war. The role of the “I” that characterized “The lightning that never stops” disappears. Also the complex literary development “Perito en lunas.” This is now poetry in the service of a cause: the defense of the Republic.
Since it is a war book, written during the war and to encourage soldiers, is a work where life and death are continuously present. Death is an everyday thing that happens every time. But it is not considered in the “Elegy” Ramon Sijé from a purely subjective point of view, but starts and Miguel Hernandez to include it in a cosmic sense and pantheistic. The whole earth, nature, stars, stones, are a unit with the man who fights for freedom. The war is made by the poet in an absolute sense, epic, and death occurs in this sense, in ways that match all of them in the final exaltation of life and the struggle for freedom.
So, sometimes we find death as heroic, which has naturally assumed the hero with pride and a haughty attitude that exalts the warrior’s death, life itself in all its glory:
Since war is characterized by the denial of individuality in favor of an idea or common cause, which is above the people as isolated individuals, we also found that the death of a soldier, a comrade in arms, refuses as an absolute end. The fallen comrade is still alive in the race, the legend, the heroic. This happens in the “Elegy second” dedicated to the death of Pablo de la Torriente:
The most characteristic feature in the life-death vision offered by this book of war is the configuration of the cosmic and natural on the outlook of Miguel Hernández. Being immersed in the collective of the war and give up their subjectivity, the world appears as a whole is a full life in which man is an element with stones, trees, stars. This applies to new pantheism death, as in “Elegy first” dedicated to Federico García Lorca. Here Lorca’s body is composted in the eternal cycle of life through the plant:
But all these aspects with which death occurs Miguel Hernández can not be understood without such changes in their outlook on life. The exaltation vital that operates in this book can not be attributed only to being a book of trench designed to keep the morale of the troops and launch into battle. While this is true, it is necessary to note also how the poet achieves this exaltation.
The highlight is the integration of man on nature and life understood as something beyond individual subjectivity. Man is part of the cosmos, astral and the great cycles of nature. The hands, the sweat, blood, work, land … are the same thing. This elemental is life for Miguel Hernández, not social conventions, religious or economic:
But not all men fall into this pantheistic vitalism. Only the poor and those who fight for freedom, only farmers who are in contact with the land pure. Miguel Hernández vitalism becomes political as the war in a vital and basic question: the struggle of nature and real life against inauthenticity of men who deny that vitalism, that put legal limits, religious, who exploit it economically. The political confrontation is especially vital in the poems “Hands” and “Sweat”
With “Man threatens” the vital pantheism poetry that characterized the struggle of “wind people” changes sign but remains essentially the same concept telluric and cosmic attached to the human. But whereas before it was an optimistic and heroic vitalism, in this book that the defeat of the war and feels close, it becomes a dark pantheism death.
Death is everywhere the world is dark and cold. The constant presence of death even separates man from nature. The union that we have seen before between man and nature through the olive trees now becomes, with the imminence of defeat, in separation:
Since this is still a war book, remain issues associated with life and death of the previous book. The enemies of the people here are still characterized by inauthenticity, to get away from the vitality that characterizes the employee as is evident in
Before this triumph of death, the inauthentic, the fullness of life and heroic warrior in the previous book is disappearing and giving way to a more tragic, in which hunger, cold, prisons, war wounded are filled with darkness and gloom the vitalism of Miguel Hernández. However, while playing with a more somber and less exalted, pantheism persists, human life is understood and justified, even in this situation of loss and darkness, in all of nature. In fact, when extolling the country, Spain, the poet resorts to this earthy union of man and land, faced with imminent defeat, becomes a refuge, together with living and dead beyond life and death, victory or defeat. Thus we see in “Mother Spain”:
In “Song and Ballad of absence” we find that life and poetry are definitely confused. Finished and war, locked in a prison far from his wife and son, Miguel Hernandez uses poetry as a medium through which life becomes a simple word, without rhetoric, without any intention beyond simple expression of her innermost feelings vital.
Death are now closer than ever, and without the heroic sense of the war. Death first reached him in the death of her first child, with only ten months old, but is also present in the prison, as the imminent future, as a sentence of death, as a kind of all his colleagues near and far:
The proximity of death is expressed without drama, with everyday. In some cases, death is associated with “I” of the poet and then the deep thoughts of life and death takes the classical form of the brevity of life that brings Hernandez Manrique, Quevedo and Calderón:
Many times this is the death of his son. In these cases the drama of the poem is greater, as is directed or to express feelings of absence and that his death left in the “I” of the poet