Life, Death, and Social Commitment in the Poetry of Miguel Hernandez

Posted on Aug 19, 2024 in Physics

Life and Death in the Poetry of Miguel Hernandez

In addition to love, life and death are the three major themes of the work of Miguel Hernández. This is well summarized in a few verses of the Song and Ballad of Absences. Both life and death appear as indivisible and are interpreted from two perspectives:

Existential Meaning (Philosopher Heidegger): “Man as a being born for death”, an idea found in Spanish literature, for example, Jorge Manrique (“Our lives are the rivers”) and Quevedo (“Living is dying every minute to go.”)
Sense of Solidarity: Death as a seed, as the essence of man who dies and who stays in the race.

In his first book, there was above all an enthusiastic chant of life, nature, and love. Then, during the war and, especially, in the elegies, appears the fatalistic idea of death as a tragedy. Finally, in his later poems, Songbook and Ballad of Absence, life and death embrace, always intermediated by the power of love.

On occasion, death is confronted with determination and even fiercely, especially in the era of war and in the poems of harangue to the troops. Love and death appear linked to the perpetuation of life. Procreation through the love of a new life overcomes death: the child as a hope after death. Consequently, his view of death, finally, leads to nihilism (to nothing) but is related to the continuity of being in the species.

Elegies

Miguel Hernandez writes numerous elegies to relatives and friends. This is not an inclination toward a literary sub-genre but rather a response to the reality in which he lived: many deaths, especially premature. Examples:

Three sisters of the poet
His friend and mentor, Ramon Sijé
Friend and admired poet, Federico García Lorca
His first son, who died before their first birthday

Symbols of Life and Death

The issues of love, life, and death permeate all his poetry and are expressed through symbols and images repeatedly. For example, love and life are associated with light and clarity, while death is represented as shadow and darkness.

Miguel Hernandez has a primitive and organic worldview: life as a cyclical phenomenon and regenerative. “We must kill to live,” (“Song of the Soldier Husband”), “The dead, frozen in a fire that burns, / beat with the living in a stubborn way” (“Child of Light and Shadow”).

Within this worldview, he essentially uses two symbols: bones and rain.

Bones

This symbol appears in the four stages of the poet’s poetic development, but its meaning evolves. It symbolizes both death (image traditionally associated with death) and life.

Rain

Rain is a symbol of life, an element that nurtures nature. This is evident in his early poems: “No rain, and skulls are the mountains…” In his love poetry, rain symbolizes love towards the “dry” life of the poet: “Oh, rain, love, my dry life!”

The rain and storm, also associated with lightning, becomes destructive: “And directed me the insistence / destructive rays of rain” The rain is also associated with crying.

On the other hand, the rain feeds the death that blooms. Finally, there is rain and hope despite all the tragedies.

The Social and Political Commitment of Miguel Hernández

His first stage is a conformist, reactionary period that is in the wake of conservative Catholic thought and where it is understood that work and dedication are the ways to reach God. In his early published theatrical work, Who has seen you and who sees you and shadow of what you were, he goes so far as to condemn the acts and revolutionary postures of anarchists and communists of the workers.

Before the war, we find the second stage (period of social protest). After his second visit to Madrid, a change happens from the political and social (Asturias revolution, riots in Cadiz) and new friends of the poet. Now he is certainly on the side of the weakest: the worker and starts a new social poetry.

When war was declared, he enlisted in the Republican side, which identifies with the poor rebel against the murderer, the rich… considering poetry as a weapon and using it as propaganda and encouragement of the troops in the trenches. In a third stage, we find the poet of Orihuela with a real and militant commitment, which contrasts with the position taken by the poets of the 27 who become socially alienated. They are men of the city that reflected the popular and the people’s problems as some folk. García Lorca and Alberti only concerned themselves with submitting a poem for the people. Miguel Hernández goes beyond, is melted and assimilated with the people. He uses his poetry to dignify man, the laborer from the countryside and the city worker and to make them aware of their rights and possibilities to get them.

Both Winds of the People and The Man Stalking are books that we can consider of social and political commitment but have two different positions:

In Winds of the People, written in 1937, the tone is upbeat, encouraging, and enthusiastic. It sings the hope of victory.
But The Man Stalking, published in 1938, is the pessimistic view of the war. It sings the anguish of imminent defeat.

Winds of the People is a book with a fighting spirit, but with a breath of fraternity, freedom, and communion with the people. The poet is above all “wind”, air, breath that gives life through communication and speech. His poetry draws on the ethical content of solidarity with the underdog, the exaltation of love for the land, heroism, and freedom. He has gone from the “I” of the individual, to the “we” of the collective. The style is clear, transparent, and straightforward to be understood by the “vast majority”, the metric is also popular (the romance) and the metaphor is simplified. I get an epic tone led to a collective protagonist (blood, sweat, work). However, at no time does he leave the lyric, and its profound human depth is what endures and supports its greatness over time.

The Man Stalking was written when the Republican defeat is imminent. The poet takes stock of deaths, jails, feels hurt and hatred and human tragedy. The poetry is daunting, with large and painful verses, almost prosaic.

Images and Symbols in the Poetry of Miguel Hernández

Miguel Hernández creates a poetic world itself and internal intertextuality. Their images and symbols are of great expressive force. Many of them are repeated but vary in intensity or significance as the vital and creative stage of the poet changes. There are two primary sources that nourish the Hernandiana symbols. Both come from nature: the first connects with the telluric, the other is related to the cosmic.

Symbols as the Creative Stage:

Step 1: The poet is fixed in nature, describes it as a real object and its metaphors refer to the material and the low. The symbol that stands out is the moon.
Stage 2: Objects become metaphors of regret and loving. Stand out as symbols of lightning and the bull.
Stage 3: Images magnify the value of people and encouragement for the war. Highlights the symbols of wind and earth.
Stage 4: Everything is reduced to a symbol of what was destroyed and the lack of freedom, love, justice… At this stage, light and shadow are transcripts of the high and the declined, joy and hope against the tragic and unfortunate.

Moon

The moon is a central element in his poetic universe, which is clearly defined in the first stage but represents a constellation of meanings. It represents the real and immediate nature. In Perito en Lunas, it stands as the center of their universe. The poet declares himself “moons expert” in two senses: one, natural, for its contemplation as a shepherd, the other artistic, as all objects in the environment are described as lunar forms.

The round objects are identified with the full moon, but also others, like horns, are represented as a waxing or waning moon. Used to describe everyday objects: watermelon, eggs, a loaf of bread, the hat… But it also refers humorously to indecent elements, as in “toilet”.

In the development of his poetry, the symbol acquires two broad meanings:

The moon as a behavioral paradigm of nature as a model (Moon writer’s creative process)
The moon as a behavioral paradigm of nature represents the cycles of nature: moon phases (new, growing…), seasons (spring, summer…) and finally, life stages (childhood, adolescence…). It is identified with night and death and is thus opposed to the sun, which is related to the day and life. The moon appears as a misfortune. In Winds of the People it symbolizes the inevitability of slavery and sorrow for the tragedy of war. The moon, at times, becomes a symbol of fertility savior (“To the moon come / you lie to give birth”). The moon is equated with light, a central metaphor of the ultimate salvation.

b) The moon symbolizes the creative process model writer Miguel Hernández, the poet of the blue, the new moon reaches fullness: the full moon. The moon phases represent the evolution of poetry, the rise of the operator, increasingly luminous moon, crescent moon and full moon. The moon is round the symbol of perfection. The circle, as the highest expression of the harmony becomes, in its first stage, the definition of God.

Ray

In the second stage of the round symbols disappears and appears as sharp as a manifestation of bleeding and pain fate (for the love by social injustice…) are frequent images of knives, daggers, swords… and, above all, the beam.

The beam has two meanings: the ray of light from the sun, and lightning storm. From these two ideas are born connotative values.

As a negative element:

The beam is named after his collection The Ray Continues. In a context of love, the poet seeks carnal pleasure and encounters with the social rules or the rejection of women. The beam emerges as a symbol of distress for not being reciprocated. Lightning is the unfulfilled desire (“Do not cease this ray that dwells in me”).
In the wartime period is a negative image, a destructive force:

The positive side:

The beam means strength, claw, even in a context of love is a burden of positive (“Ascend lips / electric / vibrant as lightning”)
Also appears as a social metaphor that reflects the strength and courage of men who are like lightning in defense of their work, home…

Toro

It is one of the symbols of Hernandez. Take the reference to its own environment but also the tradition and the national holiday, it worked for Jose Maria Cossio in the preparation of the encyclopedia Bulls.

In his first compositions were identified with death. In “Final Summons” in honor of the bullfighter Igancio Sanchez Mejias died from catching a bull, representing the real death.

In the context of love has two meanings:

The bull, in freedom, symbolizing virility and natural instincts.
The bull in the square symbolizes the fate of love, doomed to pain and death.

In his epic poem the bull represents strength and grip. In poems like “The Winds of the People” the backlog of animals set up a bestiary characterization of heroes. The bull is opposed to beef, a derogatory symbol of man he is socially humiliated or humiliated at work.

Wind

It is the symbol par excellence of the epic poetry of Miguel Hernandez, who is defined as “wind people”. It is a symbol of social and political commitment, although throughout his poetic career has been having different meanings:

In its first natural value alternates atmospheric phenomenon in the wind mystical and religious cleansing of his poetry.
In the second period, the wind is identified with the image of the desired woman.
In the third period of the war, the wind is seen as the people’s strength. The poet is wind, whose strength comes from people and serves to carry the seed of solidarity and fight against injustice.
In the fourth period, the prison, is a reversal in meaning. Becomes hatred, bitterness. Is a negative: the wind of bitterness that makes it impossible to love.

Earth

It is conceived as a mother because it gives life and is the host after death: the earth is the cradle and grave. It is a matter that gathers all the poet’s worldview. Therefore, it has come to be called “the poet of the earth.”

Represents the cycle of nature: life-death-life.

Light and Shadow

In the last stage requires a dialectic of the symbols of light, as the life, hope and shade, ie, death and frustration. Initially, a reference appears mystical divine light, under the influence of San Juan de la Cruz. In his love poetry displayed contrasts of light and shadow. At the end of his life and his poetry appear verses of the victory of light over darkness. It is the triumph of hope:

The victory connects with joy for the future of the child, identified with the sun and light in “Son of light and shadow.”