Miguel Hernández: Life, Death, and Love in Poetry
In all the biographies of Miguel Hernández (MH), his life and work are inseparable. MH was convinced that life is accepting reality as a penalty, a succession of injuries. Life is but a machine of destruction.
Most of his poems contain a certain insouciance, a conscious, and in certain limited circumstances, natural optimism. His life goes one way (dreams of devoting himself to poetry) and his work another (looking at the world through his admired poems). Many poems pay homage to nature with exulting joy: plants, rocks, animals… These poems show an MH who seeks jubilant and vital experiences in the mountains or the desired refuge of the classical, singing the harmony of nature.
After the excitement of nature comes melancholy, which is nothing more than an internalization of the life around him. There is a touch of sadness that pervades the landscape and fills the poet with sadness. MH is adding experience to his writing, in the same way that his life is nourishing his poetry. Each poem is something of life and death. Life always appears threatened by uncontrollable forces. Everything that is born of life is doomed to die. It is a tragic vitalism wrapped by an overwhelming fatalism. Both elements make up the image of the world that MH has.
Any strategic poet’s work is crossed by a molten vitalist exaltation with death. In man, the poet offers the same freedom to their eyes, hands, feet, arms… everything.
It is characteristic that the poet constantly dislocates to ensure fullness as he lives. He absorbs all the juices of nature, living all the emotions of his favorites. He lives with love and passion for discovery (Maruja Mallo), love as a tremulous attempt (Carmen Samper), love as absence (Josefina Manresa), and love as Platonic distance (Maria Cegarra). Consumed in a sinvivir of searches and definitions that lock him up in confusion, doubt, and pessimism. From all this, deep wounds are left caused by hurricanes, storms, knives, lightning…
Life and death are part of a sensual and passionate network. Death came when the poet’s love is denied. From that feeling, discouraged, although not faced until the poet learns of the death of Ramón Sijé. Then, his verses are filled with anger, pain, hacks, wounds…
Death as a poetic subject is a first-order, recurring topic in MH, as it was in Quevedo.
Death is not a distant event to the poet’s own experiences. Three of his sisters die, his firstborn dies a few months after birth, and friends and acquaintances are killed, among them, Ramón Sijé.
His teen son, Manolillo, dies at only ten months, which was a merciless blow to the heart of a man who loved children passionately and would survive that blow.
During the composition of The Man Lurking, Miguel becomes a man turned inward. His intimacy is peopled with a daunting vision of many injuries, deaths, resentment, and hatred without end. Spain had declared war, and his poems are tinged with pain. When war happens, poems darken with disappointment and sadness. Composed in jail, it might be described as a diary of desolation. This is what the songs and ballads of absences become. His son dies first, he has been sentenced to death, he knows prison life, he is whipped by a disease, treated medically ill, and lives in absolute solitude.
But above all calamities, there are love and freedom. The strength and rebellion of MH begin to crack, and he sees an inevitable end in singing the pieces of what he leaves behind in life on the road, the agony towards which he flies, the sadness of war, weapons, and men. And in the blackness and so much blood, the poet’s voice is not rhetoric. It takes on nostalgia and talks to his son and wife in the poem Child of Light.
The last poems are the most tender and melancholy of the entire work of MH. It completes the cycle back to love because there is no salvation or redemption possible without love. The beloved and the son appear constantly, while longing for the jets that are dying, he breathes hope for immortality. Love gives wings to the poet; only he who loves flies.
There have been many forebodings of death. Many events dramatically penetrate his biography, and the book and its author define themselves as beings that almost always coexist with the idea of death.