A Longing for the Light by Vicente Aleixandre

First published: 1979

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The poetry of Vicente Aleixandre, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1977, became more accessible to English-speaking readers with the publication of A Longing for the Light, a collection of translations from the Spanish by editor Lewis Hyde and fourteen other hands. Most of the poems in the English-language collection were initially selected by Aleixandre, and they exemplify some of the best and most representative works of Aleixandre’s career to 1979. The title is a translation of a phrase that Aleixandre used to characterize his poetry. Aleixandre used the metaphor of differing lights to describe his belief that poetry is both composed and read in differing circumstances. He advised his readers that his poems may be read in terms of “rainbow light,” understanding that he may have composed them in other lights, such as the “black light” with which he says he wrote his very early poems. In a sense, then, A Longing for the Light traces Aleixandre’s journey through various densities of light, exploring the relative solitude and connectedness possible to the human condition as well as the possibilities of the artistic vision and artistic creation to communicate.

His first published work, Ámbito (1928), shows the influence of Juan Ramón Jiménez and displays Aleixandre’s affinities with other members of the Generation of ’27, such as Jorge Guillén. Unlike Guillén, who believed that the poetic experience is a heightening of reality, Aleixandre believed that it is a means of tapping into the subconscious mind at the level where people are connected to the universe. Selections from Ámbito in A Longing for the Light are “Closed,” “Sea and Sunrise,” and “Sea and Night.” In these, as in the rest of the collection, night is a major player, “famous” and “quiet”: “Mouth—sea—all of it pleads for night.” It is an essentially sensual collection: “Either flesh or the light of flesh,/ deep,” he writes. In Ámbito, Aleixandre begins to develop a view of the universe that would unfold in his poetic career: The sea and the sun and the night all exist in a cycle of absorption, destruction, and rebirth.

His critics generally divide Aleixandre’s work into three major groups, the first of which, his Surrealist group, includes Espadas como labios (1932; swords like lips), La destrucción o el amor (1935; Destruction or Love, 1976), Pasión de la tierra (1935; the earth’s passion), Sombra del paraíso (1944, written earlier; Shadow of Paradise, 1987), and Mundo a solas (1950, written earlier; World Alone, 1982). He described his work beginning in 1928 as “a gradual emergence into light.” It seems that his way into the light was a path through the darkness of the subconscious, for in 1928, he read and became profoundly influenced by the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. His poetry thereafter self-consciously deals with many issues raised by Freud, most especially that of the existence of a subconscious mind, of dreams, of the ground of consciousness, of the libido, of the tension between love and death.

Aleixandre stated that the themes of his first period concerned creation and the possibility of the poet losing his own identity and fusing with the cosmos through an escape from the bounds of rational consciousness. Works of this phase explore the themes of love and death, the ability of the mind as well as of the universe to create and to destroy, and the power of the mind to connect with cosmic forces. These works are well characterized by a statement of Aleixandre’s translator Lewis Hyde, who notes that they represent “the reflective mind trying to think its way out of coherence and precision.”

Pasión de la tierra, included in A Longing for the Light, explores the poetic possibilities of Freudian dream imagery. Much of Aleixandre’s work relies on the kind of associative movement that one finds in dreams, and most of his poems ought to be read for their connections in this manner; coherence comes through associative links rather than through linear narrative progression. The prose poems of Pasión de la tierra represent Aleixandre’s poetic compositions most closely associated with the Surrealist movement. This collection is characterized by erratic and irrational images of turbulence and upheaval, of “torrential silence and lava,” of a speaker who is often threatened by death when isolated from love. It displays the author’s penchant for the macabre and even the gothic as it translates into a twentieth century idiom, to be developed further in Espadas como labios. This collection, represented by “Death or the Waiting Room,” “Silence,” and “Flying Fugue on a Horse,” has been called one of the most unfathomable works of twentieth century Spanish poetry. The prose poems express what Aleixandre terms the conciencia sin funda, or “consciousness without limitations,” and he notes that this is his most difficult book. His declared aesthetic intent is to utilize all of language, even the ugly and inharmonious, to reach that profound plane of consciousness. He states: “I shall not avoid even one word.”

Included in the second major group of A Longing for the Light, “Poems with Red Light,” are selections dealing with love and the physical world. In these poems, human sexual interaction may be viewed as emblematic of the nature of a universe that destroys and re-creates itself.

In Espadas como labios, Aleixandre returns from the prose poems of Pasión de la tierra to verse or, more specifically, free verse characterized by his evolving and idiosyncratic style. He maintains the surreal idiom. Aleixandre challenges the reader to make the leaps in comparisons and in irrational logic with him, like those in “At the Bottom of the Well (The Buried Man),” when “in the ear the echo was already solid,” and in “The Waltz,” when things clash together: “seashells, heels, foam and false teeth,” a kiss turns into a deadly “fishbone.” His poetry is of the realm of heightened senses, in which moments of transformation follow one after another with lightning rapidity. Accustomed to working through only one poetic experience in a lyric poem, the reader is challenged by Aleixandre’s demand to move with him through series after series of a rapid succession of transformative images. In this volume, Aleixandre is already using one of his characteristic poetic devices (one that will appear again in the title of his next volume), that of juxtaposing with the word “or” two elements that may be set in contrast or that may be intended as comparisons or that may even be meant to represent the same thing.

Destruction or Love and Shadow of Paradise have been said to form the cornerstones of Aleixandre’s work. Destruction or Love is a very complex work, produced as the poet returned to health after a serious illness. Aleixandre describes the volume’s theme as “the poet’s vision of the world,” the “amorous unity of the universe” in which a poet’s vision of a whole cosmos becomes coherent within this world of change through love. He turns from the spiritual to the physical and to that kind of consuming love that allows the individual, through his or her own destruction, to become one with the cosmic forces in a mystical union.

Images of the elemental forces of the universe and processions of living things on earth flicker in a panoply as parts of a woman’s body transform into emblems of the universe. In “The Jungle and the Sea,” wild animals “draw their swords or teeth/ like blood” out of an innocent and loving heart. Tigers’ claws sink into the earth like love into a heart. Above them flies a “bird of happiness” toward “the distant sea that recedes like the light.” A human being’s actual ability to fuse with the cosmos is questionable, for solitude informs the mortal state, and finitude prevents an individual from being anything other than a physical being of the material world. The sexual act, then, becomes the sole means of becoming one with the universe, for in it, the individual and the light of individual consciousness emblematically die, permitting oceanic darkness to overwhelm the psyche. In “The Wholeness Within Her,” the speaker longs for “love or death,” knowing he is threatened by “light or fatal sword” that “could never break up the wholeness of this world.”

World Alone reflects Aleixandre’s plunge into postwar depression. Sadness and a return to hope mark the third group of poems. The speaker of “Under the Ground,” for example, becomes the serpentine “dark shadow coiled among tree roots” as he contrasts life above and below ground, life and death. The poem ends, as Aleixandre’s poems often do, with a paradox that sends the reader back into the poem to make it divulge its meaning. In this volume, he writes, “man doesn’t exist.”

In Shadow of Paradise, published after the Spanish Civil War, Aleixandre revises his most dismal vision of World Alone and returns to the pristine world of Málaga and the Mediterranean of his childhood, although such hopeful works as “The Hands” are set in contrast to those like “What Happens to All Flesh.” Aleixandre believed that World Alone was the transition point between his earlier, more Surrealist phase and his work to come. In it, he fuses his dream style with one more accessible to waking consciousness, more “coherent.” Many of its poems look forward to the shift in subject matter that occurs in Historia del corazón (1954; history of the heart). In Shadow of Paradise he begins his turning away from the completely interior world to the waking world of living humanity, envisioning the possibilities of compassion in daily life. The physical body and the soul are blended and separated, as are the metaphysical circumstances of each. As with much in Aleixandre’s work, the cognizance of the human being’s ultimate isolation colors everything, so that paradise here must remain only a shadow, as his title indicates.

Works published in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War are represented in the section “Poems with White Light.” This section includes poems from his books Nacimiento último (1953; final birth), Historia del corazón, En un vasto dominio (1962; in a vast dominion), and Retratos con nombre (1965; portraits with names). Fundamentally a pessimist, Aleixandre made a breakthrough with Historia del corazón. Prior to this volume, he explored the depths of human solitude, but in Historia del corazón, he writes: “This now is the opposite of human loneliness. No, we aren’t alone.” Here, the sky shines “with mercy.” The volume marks the change in his poetic world from the surreal to the real and adulates the possibilities of communication, of friendship, brotherhood, and other ties of the human heart that occur within the cycle of life. The images and style are as accessible as those of Shadow of Paradise. Critics have praised several of the love poems in this collection, wherein, possibly for the first time in Spanish poetry, the love relationship becomes conscious of its own myths and illusions. The human condition Aleixandre describes as a “lightning flash between two darknesses.” The “dream or its shadow” is that on which we “feed,” and, Aleixandre writes, “Its name is Love!” Although Aleixandre’s thematic focus has, in these postwar, more accessible, more hopeful poems, shifted in many ways, the problem of solitude remains.

En un vasto dominio opens in a most physical way, with poems that deal with bodily parts, in order to examine minutely the functioning of humanity. It is the story of humanity evolving. The poet then shifts his focus to a rich stream of Spanish life, from town square to cemetery, from local history to a young couple who have between them the capacity to ensure the continuation of life. In “Human Matter,” for example, the entire city is described as “one substance” in which every action affects everyone and everything.

Poemas de la consumación (1968; poems of ripeness) and Diálogos del conocimiento (1974; dialogues of knowledge) are grouped together as “Recent Poems.” These books are represented by several poems, one of the most compelling of which is “The Old Man Is Like Moses”: “not with the useless tablets and the chisel and the lightning in the mountains/ but with words broken on the ground, his hair/ on fire, his ears singed by the terrifying words.” In Poemas de la consumación, old age is portrayed as a time in which the possibilities of love are past. Diálogos del conocimiento universalizes the intensely personal vision of Poemas de la consumación. In Diálogos del conocimiento, fifteen dialogues are actually juxtaposed monologues, reflecting the failure of spoken language to reach another individual as well as the necessity of artistic expression to verbalize the significant. Aleixandre’s intent is to show that any situation can be perceived differently by everyone. As the title indicates, he examines the various ways in which life experience teaches one to know and to understand. “To know by experience is to love,” he writes, and “To know intellectually is to die.” He introduces the distinction between knowing with the mind and knowing with the body. For example, in “Sound of the War,” the voices of a soldier, a sorcerer, a bird, and a lark talk—but not to each other—about war. Aleixandre’s groundbreaking prosody in the Diálogos de conocimiento is of an unforgettable and majestic slowness.

Bibliography

Aleixandre, Vicente. A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre. Edited and translated by Lewis Hyde. 2d ed. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. Includes an informative introduction by Hyde as well as a descriptive bibliography that features Aleixandre’s own brief critical summaries of his individual books.

Cobb, Carl W. “Poets Uprooted and Rebellious: Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre, Cernuda.” In Contemporary Spanish Poetry, 1898-1963, edited by Carl W. Cobb. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Discusses the significant characteristics of works by writers collectively known as the Generation of ’27. Includes an accessible explanation of the aesthetic and thematic significance of each of Aleixandre’s works.

Daydi-Tolson, Santiago, ed. Vicente Aleixandre: A Critical Appraisal. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1981. Contains several chapters in English on Aleixandre as well as the poet’s Nobel Prize lecture and an English translation of an article on Aleixandre’s work by Carlos Bousoño.

Harris, Derek. “Prophet, Medium, Babbler: Voice and Identity in Vicente Aleixandre’s Surrealist Poetry.” In Companion to Spanish Surrealism, edited by Robert Havard. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2004. Places Aleixandre’s poetry within the context of the evolution of the important Surrealist artistic movement in Spain.

Morris, C. B. A Generation of Spanish Poets, 1920-1936. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Places Aleixandre with his contemporaries, showing generational affinities among the poets and examining them as links in the greater Spanish literary tradition.

Murphy, Daniel. Vicente Aleixandre’s Stream of Lyric Consciousness. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2001. Provides a detailed analysis of the Surrealist nature of Aleixandre’s poetry, focusing on Destruction or Love. Examines the role of Sigmund Freud in Aleixandre’s work, his poems’ narrative structure, and how his poetry was influenced by earlier writers.

Schwartz, Kessel. Vicente Aleixandre. New York: Twayne, 1970. A Freudian critic offers an accessible introduction to Aleixandre’s work.

Soufas, C. Christopher. The Subject in Question: Early Contemporary Spanish Literature and Modernism. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Examines a number of works of drama, fiction, and poetry—including Aleixandre’s—from late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain, focusing on their modernist characteristics.