Miguel Hernández: Themes of Nature, Love, and Life in His Poetry
Miguel Hernández: Themes of Nature, Love, Life, and Death in His Poetry
Topics: Nature, love, life, and death.
1. The Theme of Nature
Miguel Hernández was born in a rural environment near the Mediterranean. He lived impregnated with nature and was a great connoisseur and lover of wildlife, flora, and the mineral world of the Levantine environment. Nature comes in many forms in four stages (works).
In his first stage of adolescence and as a young artist, the real nature appears in the character of his verses. He presents two very different conceptions of nature in these first steps:
- Nature connected with God. Nature is a symbol of purity and divinity.
- Nature connected with the invention of language: pure poetry. This nature appears in his first book, Perito en lunas. The poems in this book describe simple objects of nature and everyday life (watermelon, palm, toilet, …) and do not take a title (it would be the solution to the riddle.) It is a still life surrounded by nature with unexpected metaphors.
In his third book, Viento del pueblo, land and nature serve to locate their social demands, always on the side of employees and the needy. In the later stages, as in El hombre acecha, nature means freedom. When the goodness of natural things disappears, so does the landscape.
2. The Theme of Love
Hernández’s poetry is love poetry. The feeling of passion is the major axis, but that love adopts different formulations. Analyzing the concept of love for human beings, regardless of the divine love of the Catholic stage, we can distinguish:
- The sexual awakening (carpe diem) and religious conflict.
- The love, regret, and love, the illusion of literary tradition. Miguel Hernández is inspired by and drinks from the sources of courtly love (15th century) and bucolic poems. Love becomes a metaphor: the wound.
- The love-pain that goes from tradition to reality.
In 1934, Miguel Hernández fell in love with a dressmaker named Josefina Manresa and began to rewrite the religious poetry of San Juan de la Cruz in an erotic key, being influenced by Garcilaso, Petrarchism, or Quevedo, giving birth to his first big book of love sonnets, El rayo que no cesa (1935). The poet speaks of a real love, namely, that torture is not about not being reciprocated, but because it cannot be enjoyed sexually.
- The love-joy. Fraternity is love for the woman who will give him a son (Canción del esposo soldado).
It is love that makes the child overcome hatred and resentment, and in prison (Nanas de la cebolla), it is love and joy to tolerate the harsh reality of absence and deprivation. Also, love for the people makes him fight with them for equality and justice. It is love that prevails in Viento del pueblo.
- The love-hate. In the final stretch of the war, Miguel Hernández discovers that man is a threat to man himself. The war and famine have led to hatred on the landscape. The man in his poems is animalized in El hombre acecha, but the poet needs to air this new human condition to avert the crisis and work for hope.
- The love-hope. When the civil war broke out, Miguel Hernández was faced with a disproportionate and menacing reality. To combat this, in the last stage, the poet must belittle and make it vulnerable. His literary model was Don Quixote, who had been the opposite.
Hernández takes the sad reality and makes it his own, only hearing his voice and his state. His last poetry is full of longing for life due to so much death and misery. With Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, we enter a true poetic about the daily life of the writer. During his prison life, the poet turns to himself, to his personal and inner world. It is the final phase of the re-humanization of poetry: shocking personal experiences with the substance of the horrible war that has been evaded or metaphorical.
3. Life and Death
The poetry of Miguel Hernández is a poetry of experience. Indeed, the poetic world of Miguel Hernández is defined as love and death, with life. In his work, all stages of growth of the individual happen, from the babble and the naivety of childhood crushes to the awakening of consciousness and sex. Poetically, life and death are joined in two ways.