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:
My childhood is memories of a patio in Sevilla
and a bright orchard where the lemon trees ripen;
my youth, twenty years on the soil of Castilla,
my life, a few events just as well forgotten.
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:
“Light of Sevilla, the great palace house”
Light of Sevilla, the great palace house
where I was born, the gurgling fountain sound.
My father in his study. Forehead round
and high, short goatee, mustache drooping down.
My father still is young. He reads and writes,
leafs through his books and meditates. He springs
up near the garden door, strolls by the gate.
Sometimes he talks out loud, sometimes he sings.
And now his large eyes with their anxious glance
appear to wander with no object to
focus upon, not finding anywhere
to rest in void. They slip from past and through
tomorrow where, my father, they advance
to gaze so pityingly at my gray hair.
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.
Machado in Madrid and Paris
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 in
cluding 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 modernismo5. 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:
Mysterious and silent
he came and he left us.
You could hardly meet his gaze,
it was so profound.
He spoke with a touch
of timidity and loftiness,
and you could almost see the light
of his thoughts, burning.
He was luminous and deep
as a man of good faith.
He might have been a pastor of lions
and, at the same time, of lambs.
He scattered thunderstorms
or carried a honeycomb.
The wonders of life,
of love and pleasures
he sang in deepest poems
whose secret was his own.
Mounted on a rare Pegasus
one day he went off to the impossible.
I pray to my gods for Antonio.
May they always save him. Amen.6
Soria and hills of blue ash
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:
Leonor, do you see the river poplars
with their firm branches?
Look at the Moncayo blue and white. Give me
your hand and let us stroll.
Through these fields of my countryside,
embroidered with dusty olive groves,
I go walking alone,
sad, tired, pensive, old.
Although after Leonor’s death Machado immediately requested and obtained a new post and so left Soria forever, the obsessive memory and conscious daydream of Leonor and Castilla stayed with him throughout his life. The impact of Soria is recorded in Campos de Castilla (Fields of Castilla), and especially in its expanded edition five years later (1917) when Machado had left the region. It is a volume of solitude, bare Castilian landscapes, memories of Leonor, and Spain as seen through the critical, reforming eyes of a poet of the Generation of ’98. The language is spare, exact, yet sonorous, with a grave emotion. Machado (unlike Lorca, who learned from Machado’s popularism) was never fond of the baroque or for that matter of Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), Spanish greats whom he considered excellent examples of late-Golden Age excess. Machado’s poems could be any village of Castilla or Andalucía, and his presence that of the accurate lone observer.
Baeza and dreaming elsewhere
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
—”Proverbs and Songs”
After Leonor’s death and his departure from Soria, Machado spent seven years in Baeza, teaching in another rural Spanish instituto. He wrote abundantly, but the forms and tone were different. He expressed himself now in verses that, like later Lorca, were based on prosody of popular Spanish song. He wrote brief, aphoristic philosophical poems, and he wrote sonnets, the latter for the first time. Castilian gravity gives way to Andalusian irony and humor in the philosophical and allegorical verses of this period.
Learn to wait. Wait for the tide to flow,
as a boat on the coast. And don’t worry when it buoys
you out. If you wait, you will know victory,
for life is long and art a toy.
And if life is short
and the sea doesn’t reach your galleon, stay
forever waiting in the port,
for art is long, and never matters anyway.
In Baeza, Machado managed to obtain an advanced university degree in philosophy in 1919 by commuting to Madrid. At the time, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was a member of the examining board. Machado’s interest in the degree was not to enhance his modest, high school teaching career. Rather, he had become addicted to philosophy and, he claimed, gave himself to reading only philosophy during these years. He writes long series of proverbial verse in the manner of one of his preferred poets, the medieval Spanish rabbi Sem Tob (Shem Tov):
In my solitude
I have seen very clear things
that are not true.
His poems of this period are on the way to epiphany, always secular, with Heraclitean skepticism for absolute truths, yet always seeking.
Also in Baeza he perfects the special dream focus in which landscape provided the poet with the symbols to express nearly all ideas and emotions. This simple Chinese device of using the outer landscape to describe the inner landscape of the spirit is among the oldest techniques used by poets. Antonio Machado, however, prefaces a step to the usual procedure, because even his outer landscapes have had their origin in open-eyed memory dream. The poetic mechanism is, in its three steps:
The poet dreams of a remembered landscape,
which he describes as an outer landscape, and
which he transforms into a symbol of his inner landscape.
Steps 1 and 3 are inner landscapes, with step 2 a mirror in the outer world of steps 1 and 3. And at times Machado bypasses the second step and proceeds directly from first to third. The strange beauty of Machado’s best poems may be followed logically if we remember his method: the poet dreams a remembered landscape, he then presents a temporal reflection of his dream—an outer landscape—to the reader, who in turn reads back into it the original dreamed landscape. Occasionally, as mentioned, the poet moves directly from step 1 to 3, omitting step 2. Then the poet dreams of his own inner landscape.
Precisely this poetic process, made explicit in his later philosophical reflections on time and abstraction, permits Machado his most mature work, poems of a secular mystical character. The mystical nature of these poems lies in Machado’s dream vision and follows the familiar vías of the mystical process. The poet, as it were, is blind before the world about him, blinded in an afternoon of tedium in which sun and consequently time both seem to stop; in this darkness the
poet opens his eyes in dream to a world of light. Through dream, his mind takes flight, he awakens, the world is revealed in images of startling clarity, and the outer and inner worlds of symbolized nature conjoin.
In one typical poem, “Desgarrada la nube; el arco iris” (“The torn cloud, the rainbow”), we have an analogue of San Juan de la Cruz’s awakenings. Here dream, landscape, and a metaphysical equivalent to the instant of mystical astonishment (asombro) in the Spanish saint are all present:
The torn cloud, the rainbow
now gleaming in the sky,
and the fields enveloped
in a beacon of rain and sun.
I woke. Who is confounding
the magic crystal glass of my dream?
My heart was beating
aghast and bewildered.
The lemon grove in blossom,
cypresses in the orchard,
the green meadow, sun, water, rainbow.
The water in your hair!
And all in my memory was lost
like a soap bubble in the wind.
After citing a landscape that is emerging from a sky of rain, the poet himself awakes, emerging from dream. It is stated abruptly: “I woke.” The dream was a preparation, as was the stormy landscape with its beach of sun. His awakening leaves him astonished and dumb. After the darkness of the former dream, he is barely capable of speech and is given to exclamation. No verbs, and each thing of nature carries the force of great clarity and importance. It is enough merely to cite the existence of these things of nature, quickly, without qualification or explanation.
Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) Page 3
