Miguel Hernández: Exploring Themes of Life, Love, and Death
Life, Love, and Death: The Essence of Miguel Hernández’s Poetry
Miguel Hernández’s poetry is deeply rooted in experience. What greater literary experience is there than life, love, and death? His work, particularly in Song and Ballad of Absences, synthesizes existence around these three constants, as expressed in the poem I Came with Three Wounds: “He arrived with three wounds: love, death, life.” All of his work revolves around the mysteries of life, procreation, and death: love as a sign of life, light, clarity, and the perpetuation of the species, but also love and destruction, death, shadow, and darkness. These three themes are his three wounds: love, death, and life.
If we were to synthesize Hernández’s poetry, love would have to be a central qualifier. Virtually every poem touches on some aspect of love: nature, women, sons, friends, the people, and life itself. The feeling of passion is the main axis around which his poetry revolves. But that love takes different forms, from first love to sorrow and the love-hope shown in his later poems. Hernández is considered a pioneer in converting the imaginary love of literature into the real expression of true love, with sensuality and sexuality included.
The metaphor of the wound becomes a symbol of life in Hernández’s work. His poetry is interested in breathing through the wound, “knife, keep flying, wounding” in The Beam That Does Not Stop.
He embraces true love and doesn’t give up his feelings, but gives his voice echoes from the past: religious-erotic poetry and Petrarchan love are born in That Continues Ray, a book of love sonnets. For Hernández, love is also torture, a fatal threat: not because it is unrequited, but because it cannot be enjoyed sexually. The experience of rejection (in love with Mary Cegarra, impractical, impossible for sexual love with his girlfriend, the relationship finished with Maruja Mallo) causes the vitality of his poetry creates, helplessness, the drama of that period: the will to live have become eager to love, erotic enjoyment rejection occurs: the tragic vein, the so-called pena hernandiana (Hernández’s suffering): “You can not myself with grief” at Shady Grief. The beloved does not allow to reach and resists his Puritanism: “I am not satisfied, no, I despair.” “I’m dying of caste and simple.” After their marriage looking for love in his wife and offspring, “I love your belly town and sowing” in Song of the Soldier Husband. The care love from father to son and the bitter experience of war and the prison becomes in love, joy, “Your laughter frees me, lme gives wings” on The Onions Nanas. Love as the essence of life and death will overcome the hate unleashed by the war: “How much hate / Just for love.” Love is the foundation of all that exists and is projected and infuses everything.
Towards the end of the war, man becomes a threat to humans, is animation. The war and famine have led to hatred. It generalizes the uncontrolled threat of a homo homini lupus without exception (the man is a wolf to man) “Today’s love is death, / and the man stalks the man, in The First Song from The Man Threatens.