The Poetry of Mistral by Gabriela Mistral

First published:Desolacion, 1922 (Desolation); Ternura, 1925 (Tenderness); Preguntas, 1930 (Questions); Nubes blancas, 1930 (White clouds); Tala, 1938

Critical Evaluation:

Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, on April 7, 1889, of Spanish and Basque lineage; her father, who deserted the family when Lucila was but a child of three years, was a teacher and a poet. Her early years were spent among the peasants, and the poet, who speaks of herself as one of the campesinos, put the peasant’s love of the land and the countryside into her poetry.

To understand the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, one must know something of her life. To begin with, she always thought of herself as a teacher first and a poet second, even after she had been awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1945. She began her teaching career at the age of fifteen, with unusual success. In 1912 she became a teacher in secondary schools, moving up from primary schools, with the help, it is said, of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who later became President of Chile, the poet’s native land. During the years 1918-1922 the poet served as director of liceos at Punta Arenas, Temuco, and Santiago. In 1922 she had become so well known in educational circles that she was sent to Mexico to help in the educational reforms in that country. Her fame spread, and in later life she held a host of educational and official positions. She taught in the United States at Columbia University, Vassar, and Middlebury College. She was Chilean representative on the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations, in Geneva. She was Chilean consul in Naples, Madrid, Lisbon, Nice, and Santa Barbara, California. She died in New York City in 1957.

Gabriela Mistral’s first fame as a poet came when three sonnets on death were read for her (though she was in the audience) at Chile’s Juegos Florales, in 1914. These poems, which brought her national acclaim, were, ironically, the indirect result of a suicide. Gabriela had fallen in love with a young man about five years before. The young man, Romelio Ureta, killed himself with a gunshot when he was unable to repay money he had “borrowed” from the railroad which employed him, to help a friend in need of funds. Also ironically, her first published volume of poems appeared, not in her native Chile, but in the United States, in 1922, after interest in her poetry had been generated by Federico de Onis, in a lecture on her poetry at the Columbia University Instituto de las Espanas. This volume was DESOLACION.

Part of the poetry in DESOLACION, in the section entitled “Dolor,” was also the direct result of the death of the young man she loved. But there are also poems which show the poet’s interest and feeling for religion, her deep maternal feeling for children, and her inspiration in teaching. There are also some poems for children, as well as those written for the adult public. The poems about love show that love for her, at least as a poet, was not a sensual gratification, nor was it joy. The poet tells the reader that it is a bitter experience that ends with death, unless it is the kind of love that becomes almost a religion, so that it can transcend mortality. Her own love, as she writes about it, was an overpowering, jealous love, so strong that it made her, a plain woman, into one of beauty. She describes in “El Ruego” (The Prayer) how she wants her dead lover, a sinner because he took his own life, admitted to the presence and grace of God, despite his sinful end; she pleads humbly, but at times even forcefully, for him. Herself childless, another side of love that Gabriela Mistral celebrated is maternity, the fruits of love. The poet says that sterility which brings forth no child is a source of shame, and the woman who suffers it a tragic figure. Woman, she says, is instinctively maternal.

Maternity and teaching fused together for Gabriela Mistral. In her “Teacher’s Prayer” she begs God to make her more maternal than an ordinary mother, so that she may love her young charges as a mother, though they are not of her flesh and blood. In “La Maestra Rural” she compares the rural school-teacher with Christ, saying that the teacher’s kingdom, like Christ’s, is not of men; she exclaims that the teacher must be pure and glad of heart, that she must be willing to accept misunderstanding and hurt, if necessary, to be a successful teacher of children. This same love of children is also reflected in her poems for children. And along with her love for children she reveals in her poetry, and in her public statements about her career as a teacher and educational administrator, a love for the poor, the unfortunates of the world, which is akin to maternal love.

As a poet Mistral began with the theme of death, following the loss of her beloved, and death recurs in her work throughout her career. Death often appears in the poetry as impurity, or as a process of disintegration. In writing of death, as in writing on other topics, she uses concrete details. Her figures of speech, her descriptions of death, are graphically specific; she seems often to emphasize even a lurid aspect to death.

Life, death, and religion are for the Chilean poet inextricably intertwined, as they are for most poets in the Christian tradition. Religion seems for Gabriela Mistral an emotion, rather than a ritual of faith. She seems to feel that Christianity is the hope of the peoples of the world, not of the individual alone; but it is a Christianity that is neither doctrinal nor conventional. She is reputed to have regarded herself as strongly anticlerical, though very religious. That she evaulated herself correctly as religious, one may guess from poems that are actually prayers or hymns.

In the early poetry of Mistral one finds little lightness or gaiety; she is sad, at least serious, when her tone is not tragic. Her poetic vocabulary is filled with words of suffering, pain; notably, she uses verbs of violence and pain. Her language is suggestive, too, of underlying violence and turbulence. Even when she writes of nature, it is viewed as the peasant knows it—not a smiling nature, but one from which a living must be wrung.

Mistral’s later poetry, as one finds it in TALA, published in 1938, is more complex, showing greater maturity of view and craft. Insofar as subject matter is concerned, the reader notes immediately a greater objectivity and a wider scope of subject matter in the later poems. One whole section of TALA is called “America” and is devoted to the country that Gabriela Mistral knew and loved. But in the other sections of the volume, too, one finds a wider interest. Her America is a larger land than her native Chile; it is the whole of Latin America, the land of many mountains, a land of varied climates, and a land of many people with long histories. She writes of the Indians of her America, their tragedy, their poverty, and their hopes. In her poems, writing about the Incas, the Mayas, the Quiches, the Quechuans, the Aymara, she displays her love of people, her concern for the poor and the unfortunate. In the later poetry she could write of her own experience as well. The death of her mother, which affected the poet deeply, is the subject of a poem in this volume, as was the death of her beloved a source of earlier poetry.

By 1938 the poet had become conscious of her craft; this fact is borne out by the notes she included with TALA. In these she comments on her poetic vocabulary, justifies her use of certain words, and notes her use of specific rhyme schemes. Her choice of words with a distinctly rural flavor is commented upon. She notes that she is influenced by the popular dialect of her own region and country, as distinct from the language from the Spanish classics.

Among historians of Hispanic-American literature, Gabriela Mistral has been regarded as a woman poet who simply ignored the traditional place of women in her culture and, by so doing, became a great writer and public figure. She has been regarded as a romantic (in the literary sense) rebel against the formality of the literary trends of the 1880’s and 1890’s, one who began as a poet of disillusion but became a voice of love for the suffering mankind of her time—the children, the mothers, the peasants, the Indians, and the Negroes. Critics have seen in her work such varied influences as the Bible, the poetry of Tagore, the poetry of Amado Nervo, of Mexico, and the poetry of Ruben Dario, of Nicaragua. Her best-known poems are reputed to be her CANCIONES DE CUNA (LULLABIES) and RONDAS DE NINOS (SONGS OF CHILDREN), known and sung throughout South America. Even before she was awarded the Nobel Prize she was heralded and acclaimed as a moral force throughout the South American continent, both as a poet and as a teacher.