Life and Death: Miguel Hernández’s Poetic Journey
If anything characterizes the poetry of Miguel Hernández, it is its vitality. In his poems, life, blood, passion, war, and love are presented to the reader in all their intensity. The runaway passion for life inevitably leads to the presence of the other side of life: death. Miguel Hernández’s worldview does not separate life from death but sees death as another name for life:
You can see a process in his poetry for which life goes from being a mere excuse for elaborate poetry (Perito en lunas) to becoming the focus and level, virtually eliminating the production of literature in Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, a book where life and death are the stars, all through a short, simple, direct term. Between these two extremes, life and death have different relationships in El rayo que no cesa, Viento del pueblo, and El hombre acecha.
Perito en lunas
In Perito en lunas, Miguel Hernández takes as poetic material the outside, the elements, and everyday life of a pastor, but after his juvenile earnest readings of the classics and his desire to acquire a poetic technique, he sublimates those vulgar experiences of life. But the poetic process of Miguel Hernández takes you in. He will be leaving the reading and contemplation of external objects as poetic material linked to intelligence to refer to his own inner life, his pain, his love, his life, and his death as poetic material linked to emotion.
El rayo que no cesa
From El rayo que no cesa, life is the big problem that overwhelms and shakes our poet: the existential problem of life and life in general, the great mystery of life in the world. Since Miguel met his future wife, love is poetry; love of life becomes a matter of art. Miguel Hernández takes his own life with all his 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, the unhappy and lonely lover shows his power by becoming a carnivorous knife, lightning that 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 a constant momentum of love, a life full of passion and virility, blood of punishment, and the certainty of death. The fullness of life which the bull shows in his agony comes from the imminence of death, and that union of life and death is what interests Miguel Hernández and concentrates all the tragic sense of love, life, and death that El rayo que no cesa offers.
Moreover, death in this book appears (apart from love) in the “Elegy” he wrote to the death of his friend Ramón 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, he also focuses on his feelings, his pain. Life, death, and earth, whose union we shall see more and more in his next book, show here their identity, although in this case negatively, as a block facing the poet, who remains outside the cosmos, driven and insensitive:
Viento del pueblo
In Viento del pueblo, life is still the star of the poetry of Miguel Hernández 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 El rayo que no cesa disappears, as does the complex literary development of 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, it 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” to Ramón Sijé from a purely subjective point of view, but starts and Miguel Hernández to include it in a cosmic and pantheistic sense. The whole earth, nature, stars, and stones are a unit with the man who fights for freedom. The war is made by the poet in an absolute, epic sense, 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 find that the death of a soldier, a comrade in arms, is refused 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 giving up his subjectivity, the world appears as a whole, a full life in which man is an element with stones, trees, and 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 to Miguel Hernández cannot be understood without such changes in his outlook on life. The vital exaltation that operates in this book cannot 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 in 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, and land are the same thing. This elemental is life for Miguel Hernández, not social, religious, or economic conventions:
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 pure land. Miguel Hernández’s vitalism becomes political as the war is a vital and basic question: the struggle of nature and real life against the inauthenticity of men who deny that vitalism, that put legal and religious limits, who exploit it economically. The political confrontation is especially vital in the poems “Hands” and “Sweat.”
El hombre acecha
With El hombre acecha, the vital pantheism poetry that characterized the struggle of Viento del pueblo 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, where the defeat of the war is felt close, it becomes a dark pantheism of 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, a separation:
Since this is still a war book, issues associated with the life and death of the previous book remain. 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 the heroic warrior in the previous book is disappearing and giving way to a more tragic one, in which hunger, cold, prisons, and war-wounded are filled with darkness and gloom the vitalism of Miguel Hernández. However, while playing with a more somber and less exalted pantheism, 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”:
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias
In Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, we find that life and poetry are definitely confused. Finished with war, locked in a prison far from his wife and son, Miguel Hernández uses poetry as a medium through which life becomes a simple word, without rhetoric, without any intention beyond the simple expression of his innermost vital feelings.
Death is now closer than ever, and without the heroic sense of the war. Death first reached him in the death of his first child, only ten months old, but it is also present in the prison, as the imminent future, as a death sentence, 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 the “I” of the poet, and then the deep thoughts of life and death take the classical form of the brevity of life that brings Hernández 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: