Prosas Profanas, and Other Poems by Rubén Darío

First published:Prosas profanas, y otros poemas, 1896 (English translation, 1922)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Although Latin American literature has a long and honorable history, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that it began to produce writers, especially poets, whose innovative techniques and technical mastery brought them worldwide recognition as significant and influential artists. Among this group, one of the first, and certainly one of the most important, was Rubén Darío, whose Prosas Profanas (“profane hymns”) is among the most innovative and enduring works of Latin American verse. As a key part of Darío’s complete writings—which are considerable, given the brief span of his life—Prosas Profanas is indicative of the scope, breadth, and power of his poetic achievements.

Born in Metapa, Nicaragua, in January, 1867, and christened Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, the poet began a lifetime of wandering at the age of fourteen. By the time he was nineteen Darío was living and studying in Chile, where he spent several years that were critical to his development as a writer; in Chile he absorbed the latest works by Central and South American authors as well as European authors. He later lived in Argentina, Spain, and France, where he edited an influential and innovative literary journal, Mundial, in Paris.

With the outbreak of World War I, Darío returned to live in Latin America. To relieve his considerable financial difficulties, he embarked on a strenuous lecturing tour that took him as far north as New York City, where he fell seriously ill. He returned home to Nicaragua, where he died on February 6, 1916, at the age of forty-nine.

At an early time during his travels, he had shortened his name to Rubén Darío. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz, among others, saw in this choice of names a deliberate attempt by the poet to link himself to the great literary and artistic traditions of the Middle East, uniting both Jewish (Ruben) and non-Jewish (Darius, king of Persia) heritages. Whatever the ultimate source or reason, his choice of name clearly indicates that Darío considered himself to be, like his poetry, original, but he also tacitly acknowledged his debt to the great creations and creators of the past.

Latin America had always maintained close cultural ties with Europe and prided itself on its transatlantic culture. This was especially true in artistic matters, including literary influences. After the middle of the nineteenth century, these European influences exerted a profound pressure on Latin American writers. The literary models of modernism and Symbolism, largely inspired by French examples, were especially important, and Darío’s Prosas Profanas shows the considerable influence of both.

Modernism helped writers such as Darío break free of the conventions of earlier poetry. Modernism encouraged new and innovative uses of language, including the incorporation and adaptation of peasant or folk forms and the creation of new and individual poetic structures. In the hands of a writer such as Darío, modernism and the use of rhythm were more than poetic forms or devices. Modernism and rhythm became for him a way of looking at the world and seeing everything in it as mysteriously yet intimately connected. Darío believed that it was the poet alone who could express these connections, through the power of the art of poetry. For Darío, analogy was an exalted expression of the imagination.

Darío was also deeply influenced by the writings of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, but his natural preference, reinforced by his readings of French poets such as Charles Baudelaire, was for the aristocratic refinement and symbolic mannerism of Poe rather than the democratic vistas and demotic cadences of Whitman. Darío’s careful choice of words, his preference for sensuous and emotion-laden rhythmic patterns, and his refined and often rarefied subject matter all reveal his debt to Poe and to Poe’s French admirers. Throughout Prosas Profanas the scenes and settings are of far-off and long-ago places, often aristocratic and courtly, with an emphasis on the artificial and the self-consciously theatrical.

The influences of modernism and Symbolism are especially notable in Prosas Profanas; the poems in this volume rely primarily on sensations and feelings rather than on ideas or logical progression. This is seen most clearly in the way that the various poems present the reader with a succession of different facets of human emotion. Darío, using his masterful command of language, symbolism, and analogy, moves smoothly from a frivolous tone to the hedonistic and on to the erotic, ending, finally, in a wistful, almost elegiac reflective fashion, affirming the presence and importance of beauty in human life while accepting beauty’s momentary and perhaps illusory nature.

The poems in Prosas Profanas are linked through the feelings and emotions the various lyrics evoke rather than through the ideas they present. It seems to have been the poet’s purpose to create in his readers an appreciation of the awakening to a sense of pleasure, including sensual, even erotic pleasure—an experience that he had encountered in his own life. The poems attempt to capture those emotions through the use of allusive, symbolic language and settings. While there is in the poems certainly an acknowledgment that such pleasure is fleeting, there is also the insistence that pleasure is no less real for being transitory.

“It was a gentle air” is a representative poem expressing this sensibility. Set in a kingly court, perhaps “in the reign of Louis, King of France,” perhaps a completely imaginary setting that never existed in reality, the poem tells in a dreamlike fashion of a time when courtiers and courtesans assumed various guises, sometimes of classical deities and at other times of simple shepherds and their lovers, yet all are equally artificial while remaining, in some paradoxical fashion, real. Throughout the poem there is a constant sense of the erotic, never quite openly stated but expressed in a subtle, hinted fashion. The power of the verse—and perhaps its true meaning—comes in its use of the sounds and resonances of the words and their rhythms as well as their references to lost golden ages. The French royal court before the Revolution and the mythical Arcadia are evoked as representative of times and places where beauty and pleasure were accorded their true and therefore dominant place in human life. Time and modern life have left this land behind, but the poems remember and, in a sense, re-create beauty and pleasure for the reader. In this fashion, lost beauty is revived, if only in the mind of the reader.

“Sonatina” continues the theme through the metaphor of the fairy tale. The sad princess sits in her tower, waiting for her prince to come and rescue her. She is like a butterfly, imprisoned in its cocoon and ready to awake. Already, in the distance, “the joyous knight who adores you unseen” is on his way. The poem is about the princess in the beautiful, tragic moment before her deliverance.

The poems “Blazon” and “The Swan” use the swan, that most typically poetic of birds, in subtly different fashions. In “Blazon,” the “snow-white Olympic swan” is praised as the symbol and the inspiration of true poetry. The swan is, in a sense, both the poem and the poet, who makes art and who makes his or her life into a work of art: “the regal bird who, dying, rhymes the soul in his song.” This power is heightened in “The Swan,” where through the romantic power of art, the song of the swan—which was once heard only at its death—never ceases; instead of marking an end, the song signals “a new dawning and a new life.”

“Symphony in Gray Major” is one of the key poems in Prosas Profanas. In an impressionistic fashion the poem presents a seaside scene where the sun, the waves, and an old sailor dozing and dreaming on the wharf merge into memories of other places and other times (“that distant land of mists”), which then return to blend into the present. “Symphony in Gray Major” is notable not for what it reveals but for what it suggests.

Prosas Profanas occupies a central position in Rubén Darío’s works. It reveals an artist who is capable of exploring to the utmost the limits of language and imagery and who does so with wit, imagination, and a natural affection for the positive rhythms of human existence.

Bibliography

Acereda, Alberto, and Rigoberto Guevara. Modernism, Rubén Darío, and the Poetics of Despair. Dallas, Tex.: University Press of America, 2004. Focuses on the element of despair in Darío’s life and work, placing this depression within the context of nineteenth century philosophy, particularly the works of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Castro, Juan E. de. “Rubén Darío Visits Ricardo Palma: Tradition, Cosmopolitanism, and the Development of an Independent Latin American Literature.” In The Spaces of Latin American Literature: Tradition, Globalization, and Cultural Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Describes how Darío and other Latin American writers, artists, and intellectuals negotiated a relationship with Western culture. Demonstrates how the region’s literature has roots in specific cultural, political, and economic conditions.

Gonzales-Gerth, Michael, and George D. Schade, eds. Rubén Darío Centennial Studies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970. Collection of essays considers various aspects of Darío’s work and is especially informative regarding the extent of his knowledge of the works of other poets and their contributions.

Imbert, Enrique Anderson. “Rubén Darío.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Sole. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Assesses Darío’s writings both as an independent body of work and as an influence on Latin American literature in general. Argues convincingly that Darío’s writings divide Latin American literature into “before” and “after” periods, and that therefore Darío is a major transitional figure.

Moreno, Cesar Fernandez, ed. Latin America in Its Literature. Translated by Mary G. Berg, edited by Ivan A. Schulman. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980. Thematic study of the region’s writers addresses Darío’s literary contributions in a number of areas. Significant essays touching on Darío include “Ruptures of Tradition,” “The Language of Literature,” and “Social Functions of Literature.” Excellent for placing Darío within his social, political, and cultural context.

Paz, Octavio. Introduction to Selected Poems, by Rubén Darío. Translated by Lysander Kemp. 1965. Reprint. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. A premier Latin American author presents an insightful and rewarding study of Darío, placing his work within the context of both Hispanic literature in particular and world literature in general.