Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (3 page)

The instance of Machado and his Andalucía is a curious exception and anomoly. Don Antonio discovers his ballads and common speech first in his acquired homeland, Castilian Soria. There he instills in many poems, including his masterpiece “The Land of Alvargonzález,” what is parallel to what Wordsworth and Coleridge preach and voice in the
Lyrical Ballads
(1798): the common speech of the people in traditional forms free of essayistic meters and the clichés of worn poesy. But then in 1912, by the chance assignment of his next job, Machado is sent to a new Andalucía: the rural Andalusian city of Baeza where he teaches, and Úbeda where he strolls on long afternoons. He tastes the salt of popular songs and he, too, as the ultimate poet of ’98, enlarges his vision to include his newfound lyrical south. The younger Lorca will spend most of his literary life as a genius of the popular (the traditional folkloric) in poems and plays, and will die at thirty-eight. Machado turns thirty-seven when he begins to sing in his own, original Andalusian voice.

Machado is a meditative nature poet who has written poems about landscape in which no speaker seems to exist (a quality he shares with classical
Chinese poetry), and who is the metaphysical explorer of dream, landscape, and consciousness below language.

Antonio Machado y Ruiz began his pilgrimage, from a landscape of memory to the sea of death, in the white city of Sevilla, where he was born on July 26, 1875. In that same year Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague. Astrology and stars aside, there is in these poets a coincidence of some essential qualities. They are the quietest, most introspective, and landscape-oriented writers of modern poetry. Landscape, or the open-eyed dream of it, does all. It is thing and symbol. Semioticians speak with restrained ecstasy about that instant of significant communication when all codes are right, when semiosis takes place. For Machado and Rilke the evocation of significant landscape, usually through dream, is the instant of semiosis—when it all comes together. Both these philosophical poets usually left philosophy and theory aside in their poetry and expressed all idea through sound and image, through incantatory speech and landscape. Don Antonio, however, managed in his two long series of notation poems he called “Proverbs and Songs” to combine his passion for philosophy with image. This is his aphoristic side, never without whimsy and self-mockery, in which he manipulated image to tell his metaphysical tale.

Machado’s childhood years in Sevilla pervade the early poems. Antonio was only eight when the family moved to Madrid in 1883, but images of the Andalusian city continue to lurk in his poems till the very end. Sevilla, with its gardens, fountains, white walls, ruined churches, cypress trees, and solitary plazas, was a city with nature in its center. Madrid does not appear in the poems (until two late poems written there during the civil war), although it is in Madrid that Machado became a poet. But there is a logic to the preference of Sevilla over Madrid. The most obvious reason is that Antonio Machado and his poet brother Manuel did not begin their careers as late Baudelairean city poets; rather, following turn-of-the-century measures of what poetry was, they were recorders of nature. It was Sevilla, not Madrid, that allowed them nature and the city at once.

But beyond the nature of the city is Antonio Machado’s obsessive turn to memory. Machado writes that “love is in the absence.” In fact the absent, remembered place is more significant than the place where one is. So in Madrid Machado recalls Sevilla. Only in Soria, unique in his experience, will he actually write about the Soria of the moment, in part, because this small provincial capital northeast of Madrid in Castilla la Nueva (New Castilla) corresponds so completely to his Generation of ’98 ideas of Castilla, including its ruinous decadence, its folklore, its profundity.
But once gone from Soria to Baeza in northern Andalucía, he will dream back constantly to the years 1907–12 in Soria, where he discovered the land, where he met and married his very young wife Leonor, who died three years later (1912). The many poems in
Fields of Castilla
about Leonor are written in Baeza. But, as mentioned, in
Baeza
Don Antonio also discovers Andalusian song, which figures strongly in
New Songs
(1917–1930). But I should point out that most of the songs written in Baeza, while using a melody and form inspired by Andalucía in the south, still sing about Soria, its inhabitants, and the mountains of the north.

After Antonio left Baeza for Segovia in the north, there was the same transfer of vision to the earlier place. Now he recalls the south. And finally, in the terrible days of civil war, he returns once again to childhood Sevilla. In fact a line found in his pocket a few days after he died in exile in Collioure, France, is “Estos días azules y este sol de la infancia” (These blue days and this sun of childhood). His own biographical poem “Retrato” (“Portrait”) points to his primordial landscapes—Sevilla of his childhood and Castilla of his young adulthood:

In his later forties or early fifties, Machado wrote a sonnet, “Light of Sevilla, the great palace house,” recalling his father, a literary man who died young. As he often does, Machado plays with time so that in the last lines of the poem, his father’s eyes will look upon the child speaker who is now, suddenly, the graying writer:

As seen in “Light of Sevilla,” Machado’s childhood comes to us from memory, but apart from announcing that he was born in the great palace house with gurgling fountain, which he may have remembered, there is no child in the poem. The poet enters only in the last line to inform us that he already has gray hair. Apart from a few anecdotes about childhood in Sevilla scattered through his prose, we know Machado’s Sevilla only through his poems. And he is rarely a child in those poems but a young man (which he never was in his native city), who is the dominant persona in his first books,
Solitudes
(1903) and
Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems
(1899–1907). The young man is a romantic figure in solitude, in love, in idyllic Sevilla, and already a poet looking at the horizon for clues to his enigmas. Yet sometimes, even among the first poems, the young man becomes the mature older Machado as in the bleak and extraordinary “On the Burial of a Friend,” where he watches the gruesome act of burial under a terrible July sun. We do glimpse children, in references to small schoolchildren and a stern schoolteacher or to the tumult of young voices as they escape from class to run around the pleasant streets. There are also glimpses of a child lost at a fair, little girls singing in a group, and in one poem, XCII, the boy Antonio is sitting on a wooden horse on a whirling merry-go-round.

The most distinctive poem of childhood is “The Voyager,” where through “a childhood dream” we witness a brother leave for a foreign land. Then, the brother is back, and by now gray, disappointed, and recalling failed dreams of his youth. In this opening poem of
Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems,
we fittingly see the room and the family of a presumed childhood memory. The poem is fictive or, better said, an imaginative combination of many strands of the poet’s memories. One of his younger brothers, Joaquin, did go to the Americas, as did his father, but not during the poet’s childhood. Machado’s beautiful and melancholy Eden in Sevilla hardly touches on the child Antonio. Yet one line, with beauty and pain, takes us right into the boy of his childhood, and this is the previously noted, last line of verse he will write: “These blue days and this sun of childhood.”

In Madrid the young man becomes a poet. However, the interesting life of freedom, the battles as a young artist, and his voyages abroad do not make it into the poetry. Oddly, he skips himself in the city and the city itself to leap ahead to Soria, which he will visit in May 1907, in anticipation of his teaching post there. Soria is captured in lines here and there and particularly in “Banks of the Duero,” which he places near the beginning of his volume. Madrid is not a city without poetry for Machado; it is simply not the subject of his poems, just as equally interesting Segovia will not be. In Madrid he writes, and by the time he leaves for Soria in late autumn of 1907, he has already composed and published the first great part of his oeuvre. Except for the war poems about Madrid, most of which he writes while in pastoral Rocafort in Valencia, the one poem that takes place in city streets, those of Granada, and which he definitely wrote in Madrid, is the elegy to Lorca. He composed it immediately after the terrible news of Lorca’s execution was confirmed. From all this we can say that Antonio, who loved Madrid, Segovia, Valencia, and Barcelona, and in his letters speaks of his exile in the provinces, is a poet of the provinces. Nature is in his poems as seen by an invented young man in an Edenic Sevilla, by the walking country schoolteacher in his afternoons of wandering, and by the fantastic dreamer in the love poems to Guiomar.

In that Madrid of his young manhood, Machado leads a bohemian literary life. He writes poems, essays, and reviews. He collaborates in newly founded periodicals, works briefly as an actor, and takes several trips to France where he meets Rubén Darío and also Oscar Wilde after his release from English prison. On Machado’s last trip to Paris, his crucial encounter is with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher of time,
la durée
(duration), and of mystical experience determined by the evasion of every day’s external, mechanical clocktime. No one person in life so piercingly affects the active thought of Machado as does the French philosopher.

Antonio finishes his first book,
Soledades,
in 1903. This book has disappeared as such. He drastically cut and revised it before including it in
Soledades, galerías y otros poemas
in 1907. It does not appear separately in any of the editions of
Complete Poems
published during his lifetime. The “galleries” in the new book are, like Borges’s labyrinths, symbolic passageways of his interior vision. His first books reveal the temptation, acceptance, and at the same time, discomfort with
modernismo
⁵
. Machado is struggling to suppress or go beyond the
modernismo
that he recognizes in
those early poems, whose fullest incarnation is Rubén Darío’s life and art. Both friends recognize their common ground and their disharmonies. So in a series of mutual literary-assassination poems, they each write elegies to the other, very much alive, poet.

Darío fixes Machado in a splendidly sensitive poem that reveals a profound and luminous figure, and at the same time a timid and quiet man of good faith. Darío sends his young friend “off to the impossible” on a strange mythological steed. To be certain he will stay there and not alter his way of being, even in death or limbo, Darío puts Machado in the elegiac past, prays to his own gods, presumably those spirited
décadent
French poets who had nurtured the Nicaraguan poet; and to be absolutely sure that Antonio will not return or reform, he asks his gods to save him forever, and to preserve him as he is then. In his “Oración por Antonio Machado” (“Prayer for Antonio Machado”), he portrays the poet:

By 1907, Machado wanted a regular job and became a schoolmaster in Soria, in an
instituto
(a public high school) where he taught French. His life’s profession was the lowly schoolteacher in rural institutes (in the poem “Rural Meditation” he called himself “this humble teacher / in a country school”). There in Soria he met Leonor when she was thirteen and married her two years later, July 30, 1909; he was almost thirty-four. In 1910 Antonio obtained a fellowship to study in France, and the couple went happily to Paris. Machado attended the lecture course with Henri Bergson in January 1911. But by July, Leonor revealed strong symptoms of tuberculosis. On their return to Castilla la Nueva in September, he nursed her as her health failed. She was only eighteen in 1912 when she died. In 1962 in Soria, I spoke at length to an old gentleman who fifty-three years earlier had been at their wedding and who described how Antonio used to push Leonor in a wheelchair up into the hills during her last summer. Machado remembers those hills in a series of poems of self-deceptive memory and depressing awakening: