Life, Love, and Death in Miguel Hernández’s Poetry
Miguel Hernández’s poetry revolves around three main themes: life, love, and death. Love is reflected and expressed in different ways. In Perito en lunas, love is linked to nature. Sensitivity is lit; poems reveal natural vitality, always reflecting their sensitivity and vitality. After this sensual phase, Miguel Hernández finds his voice and his ‘wound’—love—with El Rayo que no cesa, which reveals the poet’s inner wound embodied in the ‘lightning’ and ‘knife’. Love is tormented passion. The wound of love is also embodied in the tragic symbol of the ‘bull’, which represents the figure of the lover who refers to virility and strength; it is the tragic destiny of a struggle that inevitably leads to death.
The central theme of El rayo que no cesa is love: the discovery of the passion of love and the pain of love, not discouraged by the elusiveness of the beloved, and love as an unreachable, platonic distance. The loving experience is divided into three topics: the painful complaint, the disdain of the beloved, and love and death.
When the environment of the Republic and the Civil War broke out, it dragged Miguel Hernández to a poetry of witness and report; solidarity will now be the motto, and the fruit of his commitment is Viento del Pueblo. It is the start of a time of committed poetry. The poet also grows solemn meters. This is a ‘poetry of emergency’; the mature expression of the poet is now undeniable, and themes, full of ideology, ranging from heroic exaltation, going through the sarcastic and the belligerent, to the loving and, above all, social. In this context, the theme of love blends with the poetry of combat and is subject to a political-social approach.
In 1937, his second book of war, El hombre acecha, appeared. With the last remnants of the Republic’s life, Miguel entered into the shadows. He lived the death of his first son and the birth of his second son, to whom he dedicated “Nanas de la cebolla”. Upon getting out of jail and back before finally being arrested, Miguel Hernández gave his wife a manuscript: Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias, in which he reaches poetic maturity. His poetry is now naked, intimate, and heartrending. Love, frustrated by absence, and the loneliness of love lived from prison, carry desolation and pain; nevertheless, for the poet, love is a force. His beloved is now wife and mother. “Thirst” is a symbol not only of the desire of the beloved but also of the desire for freedom.
Miguel Hernández merges both things: life and work. The life and work of Miguel Hernández are inseparable, being a reflection of the other and vice versa, both flowing to suffering and death. We could make an exception in his early poems (before integrating El rayo que no cesa). There is no death. With Perito en lunas, there is a touch of death and sadness. The ‘wounds’ of Hernández begin to breathe air in El rayo que no cesa. In the poetry of Miguel Hernández, love and death find their accommodation in the command of ‘bull’ and of ‘blood’, ‘the sword’, ‘the knife’, ‘lightning’… They are the symbols of wounds.
In Viento del Pueblo, death is part of the struggle and life and love for the people. Miguel Hernández modulates his voice to pain and pessimism in El hombre acecha: the poet begins the intimacy of a path he will not leave. When the war is over, he goes to jail, and disease and despair become more cruel; the poems of Miguel Hernández darken with disappointment and sadness. Consisting in prison, his work Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias closes the cycle of life and death, returning to love.