Love in Miguel Hernández’s Poetry: A Comprehensive Analysis
Love in the Poetry of Miguel Hernández
Miguel Hernández’s poetry is profoundly loving; no poem exists outside a loving context: nature, women, son, friends, people, and life itself. Throughout his career, however, love takes on different forms. Passion is the central feeling around which his poetry revolves. We can see this in various ways:
A. Sexual Awakening and Religious Conflict
The natural meaning of love relates to sex. In his youth, Hernández’s poetry mentions lust but places it in mythological settings. His love poetry is marked by an opposition between spirituality and sexuality; the transcendent and the worldly delight. Influenced by his environment, he initially suppresses sexuality, blaming the city and engaging in internal debate about the lure of sexual pleasure. This represents the impetuousness of his youth.
B. Courtly Love and the Literary Tradition
Hernández begins to feel love for a woman. Freed from religious constraints, he uses abstraction to express love, aiming for a supreme ideal. His sources are courtly love and pastoral poems. The metaphor of the wound, from medieval songbooks and mysticism, symbolizes life, and love creates this injury.
C. From Tradition to Reality
When Miguel Hernández finds true love, he revisits religious and erotic poetry, influenced by Petrarchan idealization. From these traditions (religious and erotic poetry, Petrarchan love), a fatal love arises—a love that cannot be sexually enjoyed. It is real love, always tied to the carnal relationship. His personal crisis permeates his love poetry, reflecting his dependence on the beloved for identity. He is nothing without her. Rejection generates the drama of this stage: his longing collides with provincial morality, which rejects erotic pleasure, producing suffering. Rejected by his girlfriend, he completes his Petrarchan work and begins an anti-Petrarchan realism (idealized love versus real love). This love is symbolized by the bull: wild and in the arena.
D. Love-Joy and Fraternity
Hernández’s love for his wife and son, and his identification with humanity and nature, blossoms. Love, as the essence of life and death, becomes central. Upon learning of his wife’s first pregnancy, he writes Song of a Soldier Husband in Prison, and later, Nanas de la cebolla (Lullabies of the Onion), dedicated to his second child. This combines the tenderness of a loving caress with the violence of war and imprisonment. His war poems reflect a tender, brotherly love fighting for equality and justice.
E. Love-Hate
At war’s end, the poet’s vision clarifies, and he feels fear, even of himself. In Village Wind, he reflects on the animalization of man: man as a threat to man. War and hunger generate hatred, and nature and goodness vanish. Hernández shows love-hate; though he rejects and hates it, he reflects it for others. He is driven to work with hope.
F. Love-Hope
During the Civil War, vulnerability and the sad reality of war’s threat emerge. His poetry longs for life amidst death and misery. He writes ballads based on absence, but discouragement doesn’t prevent him from exceeding bitterness. He culminates with a song of hope and victory, a painfully realistic conception of love—love as hope, starring his wife and children.
F.1. The Absent Wife
Despite his prison isolation, Hernández’s deep love for his wife continues, but it shifts from personal love to a maternal intimacy and solidarity. Near death, she gives him hope to live. This affirmation of life, in the Song, represents the result of historical drama on personal and social levels.
F.2. The Son’s Theme
Hernández’s life was full of drama, but the joy of his first child’s birth is followed by the inner pain of its death. This generates deeply affected parental love poems. With his second son’s birth, he uses symbols of wings and birds, singing of hopeful and joyous freedom. He is confident in the new generation’s fight for a better world. Love for his child connects with brotherly love and love for humanity.
F.3. Testament Poetry
Hernández views his life as an act of love. He consistently uses light-shadow, positive-negative, future-past oppositions. Struggling with the negative past, he teaches that man’s future and hope overflow, even at the end, boasting a brilliant and triumphant optimism.