The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Luis Cernuda · Reality and Desire · all the poetry Cernuda chose to keep, gathered under one title as one book in eleven sections, ordered by date of composition, from about 1924 to 1962 · fourth edition, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1964, the last he prepared, published a few months after his death in November 1963 · the growth of the book by editions scored as part of the work · scored on Cernuda’s Spanish, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Spanish quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath, and Reginald Gibbons’s and Stephen Kessler’s translations for sense
Mode
The lyric in three manners joined as one life: the pure poem of the generation of 1927, the long line of surrealism made the speech of a forbidden desire, and the meditative, argued poem of the exile, in dramatic monologue and in the address of the self as “tú”
Mythos
A personal myth of Eden, fall and daimon: the garden of childhood lost, desire as both exile and vocation, the poet as the solitary who keeps faith with abandoned gods; Lazarus risen to a world without joy; Quetzalcóatl, Ludwig of Bavaria, Góngora, Larra and Mozart as types; the Chimera that destroys the one who serves it
Phase
Written from about 1924 to 1962, in Spain and then in exile, Britain from 1938, the United States from 1947, Mexico from 1952; gathered under one title in 1936 and enlarged in the editions of 1940, 1958 and 1964, the last published after the poet’s death
Presentation
Eleven sections in order of composition: strict short stanzas, décimas and quintillas; the Garcilasian lira and long stanza of the eclogue and ode; the long unrhymed line of the surrealist books, partly in prose; and the loose unrhymed hendecasyllable and heptasyllable of the later books, near to blank verse
Register
Cold more often than warm: transport remembered as annihilation, grief for the gods, elegy for a nation, then the plain considered speech of a man judging himself and his country without consolation
Scale
One self and its desire across a life: the body and love, a nation at war and in exile, history in its poets and kings, the vocation of art, the lost sacred, the garden and the sea of the south, and the cities of exile
Governing Proposition
One poet’s life in verse, kept as a single book under a single title and ordered by the dates of the poems, so that the conflict the title names, the self’s desire set against a reality that refuses it, works itself out across forty years: from the strict stanzas of a young man watching the world from behind a glass, through the open speech of a forbidden love in the long line of surrealism, the elegies of a civil war and the hymns to abandoned gods, to the plain, argued, unrhymed poems of an exile who addresses himself as another and refuses to go home. The wager of the book is that fidelity to one desire can be a moral law, that the man who keeps it and pays for it in solitude can make of that solitude a disclosure, and that a life’s changes of manner can be read as the stages of one argument.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Luis Cernuda was born in Seville in 1902 and died in Mexico City in November 1963. La realidad y el deseo is the title under which he gathered all the poetry he chose to keep, as one book, ordered by the dates of the poems. The title first stood over his verse in 1936; the book was enlarged in 1940, again in 1958, and a last time in the edition of 1964, from the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico, which he prepared and which appeared a few months after his death. That edition is the unit. Its growth by editions is part of the work and is scored as such, because Cernuda meant the title to stand over his life’s verse. The prose poems of Ocnos and Variaciones sobre tema mexicano, the criticism, the plays and the translations, Hölderlin and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida among them, are context, not the work.
The edition of 1964 holds eleven sections: Primeras poesías, the poems of his first book, Perfil del aire (1927), revised; Égloga, elegía, oda; Un río, un amor; Los placeres prohibidos; Donde habite el olvido; Invocaciones; Las nubes; Como quien espera el alba; Vivir sin estar viviendo; Con las horas contadas; and Desolación de la Quimera. The sections up to Invocaciones were written in Spain; Las nubes straddles the civil war and the exile; the rest belong to the exile, in Britain from 1938, in the United States from 1947 and in Mexico from 1952. A book of this size is weighed most on the poems that carry it, and they are named as the page goes.
The design is the first claim. One title over an order by date means that the conflict the title names is not stated once but worked out across a life: the young man of the first poems, who watches the world from behind a glass in décimas and short stanzas made with Guillén’s precision, and the eclogue and ode with their Renaissance finish, are the start of a story whose end is an old exile who has the reality and has lost the object of the desire. That is also the first charge. The first two sections are apprenticeship, kept as the beginning of the story rather than for their own necessity, and The Inevitable stands at 7.8, the lowest of the twelve.
Movement II
The first turn was into surrealism, in Un río, un amor and Los placeres prohibidos, the second written in 1931 in a long unrhymed line, partly in prose. Most of Cernuda’s Spanish contemporaries used the new manner for the image. He used it for open speech: “Diré cómo nacisteis, placeres prohibidos, / como nace un deseo sobre torres de espanto”
(I will tell how you were born, forbidden pleasures, / as a desire is born on towers of fear). The forbidden is not confessed; it is made a counter-law, set against the world’s order as the truth against the lie. The cost was immediate, in the reception of the 1930s and a reputation for scandal.
The disclosure is stated, not hinted, and it holds: desire is the self’s one access to reality, and a society that forbids the desire forbids the self. “Si el hombre pudiera decir lo que ama”
(If man could say what he loves) names the wager; “Libertad no conozco sino la libertad de estar preso en alguien”
(I know no freedom but the freedom of being prisoner in someone) gives its paradox; “No decía palabras, / acercaba tan sólo un cuerpo interrogante”
(He said no words, / he only brought near a questioning body) gives the body itself as the question. “Los marineros son las alas del amor” belongs to the same book. Nothing like it had been said so openly in Spanish poetry before, and The Unconcealment stands at 8.8, the second figure of the twelve.
Donde habite el olvido takes its title from Bécquer, Rima LXVI, “donde habite el olvido, / allí estará mi tumba”
(where oblivion dwells, / there my tomb will be). Cernuda turns the grave into a garden: “Donde habite el olvido, / en los vastos jardines sin aurora”
(Where oblivion dwells, / in the vast gardens without dawn). Love is remembered as an annihilation, and oblivion is the only dwelling left. The transport is cold, of the mind more than of the senses, and it is among the heights of the book. The garden of the first poems has become a garden without dawn.
Movement III
In Invocaciones the personal myth that carries the book becomes visible. The gods of Greece, Hölderlin’s gods, are load-bearing: “A las estatuas de los dioses” grieves for gods abandoned, and their abandonment is the world’s. The lighthouse keeper of “Soliloquio del farero” finds in solitude the thing he loves. Around them the myth takes its shape: an Eden of childhood and the garden, the “jardín” that recurs from the first poems to the last; a fall into the world’s order; the daimon of desire, which is exile and vocation at once; and the poet as the solitary who keeps faith with a lost god.
Las nubes straddles the war and the exile. “Lázaro” tells a resurrection from the inside, by the risen man, as a return to a world without joy. The risen man is the exile, and the miracle is the cost: the poem builds its myth rather than evoking it, and it is the exile’s poem before the exile, as chill a sublime as the language has. “Elegía española” mourns the nation at war; “A Larra con unas violetas” takes Larra as a type of the Spanish writer betrayed by his nation; “Impresión de destierro” and “Un español habla de su tierra” stand beside them. The Christian poems of the same section carry the sacred into the war years.
Here the charge on The Archetypal Deep is also plain. “Lázaro” and the gods of Invocaciones reach the gate. But much of the myth is the myth of one man, the poet as the misunderstood elect, and as the book goes on its figures turn more often into masks through which Cernuda speaks of himself than into archetypes the particular becomes. The Archetypal Deep stands at 8.4, a tenth below the bar of the upper tier, and it is the condition the book does not meet.
Movement IV
The second turn, and the more lasting, came in exile. Cernuda turned Spanish verse from the image and the music the poets of 1927 prized toward the meditative, argued, conversational poem of the English tradition: Wordsworth, Browning’s dramatic monologue, Eliot, and Hölderlin in German. The line loosens into an unrhymed verse close to speech, which keeps the hendecasyllable and the heptasyllable as an undercurrent; the poet addresses himself as “tú”, and so splits into the one who suffers and the one who judges. That doubling is what the late poems know: a self seen from outside, without consolation. The manner was out of step with Spanish taste for twenty years, the poet was read less than his peers, and he said so in his poems.
In Como quien espera el alba the monologue and the portrait carry the argument. “Quetzalcóatl” takes its figure from ancient Mexico; “Góngora” makes the poet of the Spanish Golden Age a type of the artist his nation betrayed; “Apologia pro vita sua” argues the poet’s own case. Ludwig of Bavaria listening to Lohengrin, El Escorial and Felipe II, and Mozart join the figures through which history and art enter the book. The charge falls here as well: the long meditations of this section and of Vivir sin estar viviendo restate their argument, the poet’s solitude, the indifference of others, the consolations of art, more than they advance it, and in stretches plainness becomes flatness. The heights grow rarer as the book goes on.
Con las horas contadas holds “Poemas para un cuerpo”, the body and love late in the life. And the elegy “1936”, written late, opens on a command: “Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros”
(Remember it, and make others remember it). A veteran of the Lincoln Brigade, met in San Francisco, redeems a cause by his fidelity to it. The plain line is at its most exact here, and with “Peregrino” and “Despedida” it shows why the plainness is an instrument and not a failure of music.
Movement V
Desolación de la Quimera closes the book. The Chimera of its title is the desire that destroys the one who serves it. “Díptico español” carries the exile’s quarrel with Spain: “Es lástima que fuera mi tierra”
(It is a pity it was my land), and it answers “Elegía española”. “Peregrino” refuses the return in its first words: “¿Volver? Vuelva el que tenga”
(Return? Let him return who has), and so answers the gardens of the first books. “Mozart” and “Birds in the night” belong to the same last book, art and the lives of artists seen as the poet’s own case. Late, too, is the satire “Supervivencias tribales en el medio literario”, on the literary life of Spain.
Take the décimas of the first book and the late satire, the two most distant things in it, and they obey one law: the solitary against the many, the desire against the world’s order, the poet’s integrity against the tribe. The law holds through surrealism, elegy, hymn, monologue and satire, and The Inner Law stands at 8.6; it stops there because the range is wider in manner than in matter, one man’s case throughout. The same lens holds The Encompassed at 8.0: the self, the body, love, the nation, history, art, the sacred, the garden and the city of exile are held, while labour, the family and the social world beyond the poet are thin or absent. The reach came late. The Spanish poets of the 1950s, Gil de Biedma, Brines and Valente, took the late manner as their model; the “poesía de la experiencia” of the 1980s claimed him as its father; Paz’s essay placed him for the Spanish-speaking world. Under the dictatorship the book reached Spain chiefly from the late 1950s, and The Imperishable is charged for that interruption, to 8.9.
On this desk the book stands a tenth below Neruda’s Residence on Earth (8.6), which leads it on seven axes, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition among them, while Cernuda leads on The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed; two tenths below Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads (8.7), which leads on nine, while Cernuda holds the deeper disclosure, the larger turn and the wider range; and level with Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday (8.5), which leads on eight and has the larger sum, Cernuda leading on The Unconcealment, The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed. It is level too with Buñuel’s Viridiana (8.5), another Spaniard in Mexican exile setting desire against the Spanish order. The book stands at 8.5 in the fourth tier, held by its aggregate and by one unmet condition, The Archetypal Deep.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is put to a life’s verse, and it finds necessity in the design and surplus in the parts. The design is required: one title over an order by date, so that the conflict the title names works itself out across forty years, from the young man at the window of the first poems to the old exile who has the reality and has lost the object of the desire. The late poems need the early: “Peregrino” answers the gardens of the first books, and “Díptico español” answers “Elegía española”. What holds the axis at 7.8, the lowest of the twelve: the first two sections are apprenticeship, kept as the start of a story rather than for their own necessity, and the long meditations of Como quien espera el alba and Vivir sin estar viviendo repeat their argument more than they advance it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: desire is the self’s one access to reality; a society that forbids the desire forbids the self; and the man who keeps faith with it pays in solitude, exile and the loss of the world he loved. Los placeres prohibidos, written in 1931, names homosexual desire as the truth against which the world’s order is the lie: “Libertad no conozco sino la libertad de estar preso en alguien”
(I know no freedom but the freedom of being prisoner in someone). It is disclosure, not confession. The exile books add the émigré’s double bond with the nation that cast him out. Held below 9.0 because the disclosure circles one self, and its later stages restate it more than they deepen it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Height and frequency both. The heights are real and recur through the middle of the book: the cold transport of “Donde habite el olvido”, where love is remembered as an annihilation and oblivion is the only dwelling; the grief of “A las estatuas de los dioses” for gods abandoned; the lighthouse keeper of “Soliloquio del farero”, who finds in solitude the thing he loves; “Lázaro”, a resurrection told by the risen man as a return to a world without joy, as chill a sublime as the language has; and “1936”. The elevation is cold more often than warm, of the mind more than of the senses, and the axis is indifferent to which. What holds it at 8.5 is frequency: the later books are argued and deliberately prosaic, and the heights grow rarer as the book goes on.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Part of the myth is built. Cernuda constructs a personal myth that carries the book: an Eden of childhood and the garden, the “jardín” that recurs from the first poems to the last; a fall into the world’s order; the daimon of desire, both exile and vocation; the poet as the solitary who keeps faith with a lost god. The gods of Greece in Invocaciones are load-bearing, their abandonment the world’s, and “Lázaro” builds rather than evokes: the risen man is the exile, and the miracle is the cost. What holds the axis at 8.4, below the gate: much of this is the myth of one man as the misunderstood elect, and in the later books Góngora, Larra, Mozart, Verlaine and Rimbaud are more often masks through which the poet speaks of himself than archetypes the particular becomes.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the generation of 1927, the pure poetry of Guillén and Salinas, the Garcilaso and Góngora they revived, and Bécquer behind them. Cernuda turned twice, and paid for both. First into surrealism, which he used, unlike most of his Spanish contemporaries, for the open speech of a forbidden desire; the cost was immediate, in the reception of the 1930s and a reputation for scandal. Second, and more lasting, in exile: he turned Spanish verse from the image and the music the poets of 1927 prized toward the meditative, argued poem of the English tradition, Wordsworth, Browning’s dramatic monologue, Eliot, with Hölderlin beside them. The manner was out of step with Spanish taste for twenty years. Held below the highest marks because the English model was a proven path in its own language; the swerve is within Spanish, and wide there.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the book loses part of what it knows. The first instrument is the single title over a chronological order: the conflict of reality and desire is shown as a life’s process, and the shifts of manner, pure, surrealist, elegiac, meditative, are its stages rather than changes of fashion. The second is the late form: an unrhymed line close to speech, which lets the poem argue, and the address of the self as “tú”, which splits the poet into the one who suffers and the one who judges. The dramatic monologue lets the exile speak as Lazarus or as a figure from history and so see himself. Held at 8.4 because the whole is cumulative rather than designed as one structure: the sections were made as separate books and joined, and some poems in the exile books would say much the same in another form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence first. Some ninety years of return since the book first took its title, and sixty since its last edition, with criticism of weight: Octavio Paz’s essay on him, Philip Silver’s study of the myth of Eden in Cernuda, the editorial labour of Derek Harris and Luis Maristany, and Spanish poets who wrote on him as poets, José Ángel Valente and Jaime Gil de Biedma among them. The questions it plants stay open: whether the late poems’ self-justification is a flaw or the subject; how the desire of the middle books bears on the moralist of the late; whether the exile’s refusal of Spain is wound or vantage. The late line, its pauses and its plainness, keeps teaching poets. Held at 8.5 because the yield concentrates in fewer poems than the size of the book suggests, and the scholarship is narrower outside Spanish.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is Spanish poetry of the twentieth century, with Spanish America beside it. The intrinsic force: the book made two things possible in Spanish that were not possible before it, the open poetry of homosexual desire as moral argument, and the meditative poem of the English kind, argued, unrhymed and dramatic, in place of the image-driven lyric of 1927. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Spanish poets of the 1950s, Gil de Biedma, Francisco Brines and José Ángel Valente, took his late manner as their model against both the rhetoric of the Franco years and the social poetry of their elders; the Spanish “poesía de la experiencia” of the 1980s and after claimed him as its father; and Paz’s essay placed him for the Spanish-speaking world. The reach came late, after 1950, and is discounted for the delay; outside Spanish it is real but thin.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, in the order Cernuda gave it, with a critical edition; nothing of the work is lost. Fabric: nothing in its surface is fixed to a moment beyond the war and the exile it is about. The span is some ninety years from the first gathering and sixty from the last edition, in the row whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. The charge is on presence. In Spain the book’s presence was interrupted: its author was an exile, and the frank poems of desire and the attacks on Spain made it awkward under the dictatorship, so that it reached its readers there chiefly from the late 1950s. It is now taught and read across the Spanish-speaking world; outside Spanish it lives among poets and in the academy. Charged below the row’s usual figure, to 8.9.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on the Spanish, with the limit stated: the music of the verse is weighed from knowledge of its manner, not by a native ear. The command is wide: the strict short stanza of the first book with Guillén’s precision; the eclogue and ode with a Renaissance finish; the long breathing line of the surrealist books; and above all the late line, unrhymed, keeping the hendecasyllable and heptasyllable as an undercurrent while sounding like considered speech, with the pause and the plain word as its weapons: “¿Volver? Vuelva el que tenga”
(Return? Let him return who has). The diction is exact and unornamented by choice. Held below 9.0 on three charges: the apprentice work of the first two sections; the late stretches where plainness becomes flatness and the argument outruns the verse; and the self-justification that costs some poems their shape.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs the whole, and the title states it: the self’s desire set against a reality that refuses it, and faith to the desire as the one fidelity. Take the two most distant elements: the décimas of the first book, a young man at a window watching a world in which he takes no part, and “Supervivencias tribales en el medio literario”, the late satire on the literary life of Spain. They obey the same law: the solitary against the many, the desire against the world’s order, the poet’s integrity against the tribe. Between them it holds through surrealism, elegy, hymn, monologue and satire, and that width earns the figure. Held at 8.6 because the range of the law is wider in manner than in matter: it is one man’s case throughout, and narrowness of that kind is not coherence.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as a lyric body of forty years, held by one consciousness. The self and its desire, fully. The body, in the poems of love and in “Poemas para un cuerpo”. Love and its failure. The nation, in the elegies of the civil war, “Elegía española” and “1936”, and in the exile’s quarrel with Spain, “Díptico español”. History, in El Escorial and Felipe II, in Larra, Góngora and Ludwig of Bavaria. Art and the artist’s vocation, in Mozart, Góngora, Verlaine and Rimbaud. The sacred, in the lost gods of Greece and the Christian poems of Las nubes. Nature, the garden and the sea of the south; the city of exile. They are integrated through one lens. What holds the axis at 8.0: labour, the family and the social world beyond the poet are thin or absent, and the others are seen from one vantage.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.8, then The Made at 8.7. A text that survives whole in the order its maker gave it; a disclosure that holds, desire as the self’s one access to reality and the price of keeping faith with it, made in Spanish as no poetry before it had made it; and a command of the line that runs from the strict short stanza to the plain, argued verse of the exile.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8: the design is required, but the apprentice sections and the repetitive late meditations are not. Then The Encompassed at 8.0, where labour, the family and the social world beyond the poet are thin, and The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 8.4: a personal myth built in part and elsewhere worn as a mask, and a whole made cumulatively from separate books rather than designed as one.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, The Living Form at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short, its personal myth of Eden and exile built in part and elsewhere the mask of one man. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 7.8, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. The twelve sum to 101.8, and the book stands at 8.5.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Luis Cernuda’s La realidad y el deseo in its fourth edition, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 1964, the last he prepared, published a few months after his death in November 1963: eleven sections, from Primeras poesías to Desolación de la Quimera, in order of composition, written from about 1924 to 1962. The growth of the book by editions, from 1936 through 1940 and 1958 to 1964, is part of the work. Outside the unit, and named only as context: Ocnos, Variaciones sobre tema mexicano, the criticism, the plays and the translations. Weighed most: “Si el hombre pudiera decir lo que ama”, “Diré cómo nacisteis”, “No decía palabras”, “Los marineros son las alas del amor”, the sequence Donde habite el olvido, “A las estatuas de los dioses”, “Soliloquio del farero”, “Lázaro”, “Impresión de destierro”, “A Larra con unas violetas”, “Elegía española”, “Un español habla de su tierra”, “Quetzalcóatl”, “Góngora”, “Apologia pro vita sua”, “Poemas para un cuerpo”, “Desolación de la Quimera”, “Díptico español”, “Peregrino”, “Mozart”, “Birds in the night” and “1936”. Known less closely, as a manner rather than poem by poem: much of Como quien espera el alba and Vivir sin estar viviendo, and Égloga, elegía, oda in detail; the wider bands on The Inevitable and The Made record it. Every score is judged on the Spanish, which was not in hand; nothing was measured on a text and no quotation was checked against a file. Spanish is quoted only where its words are certain; beneath each quotation stands a close English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation. The music of the verse is weighed from knowledge of its manner, not by a native ear. Translations · Reginald Gibbons’s Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda (1977), close and plain, for sense across the book; Stephen Kessler’s Desolation of the Chimera (2009) and Forbidden Pleasures (2015), for the later and the middle books. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the poems. Poems are cited by title. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of poems and lines in the book, the publishers of the earlier editions, the separate first printing of Desolación de la Quimera, the date and title of Paz’s essay, the publisher and date of the critical edition of Derek Harris and Luis Maristany, and a tribute to Cernuda by the Córdoba poets of the 1950s.