Miguel Hernández: Love, Death, and Life in Poetry
Miguel Hernández: Love, Death, and Life
I come with 3 wounds of love, of death, of life.
Love + Life = Death
Death = Life + Love
Death + Love = Life
The metaphor of the wound is considered to belong to the language of passionate love in tragic medieval songbooks.
Love in the Poetry of Miguel Hernández
In the first stage, the poet reproduces influences from 19th-century romantics, such as Bécquer and Espronceda. His compositions show a writer leaning towards mythology and eroticism, often with the theme of unrequited love, treated in a Platonic form. This first stage includes works like “Perito en Lunas.”
After this stage, eroticism and sexuality become predominant. We find Miguel Hernández closer to religious experience, thanks to the influence of Ramón Sijé and passionate readings of San Juan de la Cruz.
The most representative play on the theme of love is “El rayo que no cesa” (The Ceaseless Lightning). The theme is the manifestation of the poet’s passionate, unfulfilled love. The presence of the knife is part of a mythical conception of the passion of love, culminating in the symbol of the lightning as the poet’s love and destiny.
The violence suggested in the symbols is located in a passionate and metaphysical climate of “ceaseless lightning.” The poet’s destiny is fatally drawn toward a world of love imbued with dark foreboding, hence the recurrence of black, which ends with the image of the bull. The poet is drawn toward death because of his passion for love.
His experience of love is built on three topics: the complaint, the beloved, and love as elusive death. The lover’s passion lives as loving torture. The beloved is always inaccessible and displays the poet as submissive. In August 1932, Miguel met Josefina Manresa, declaring his love, and two years later, they formalized their courtship. The relationship began to cool in the spring of 1935, when Miguel started to approach other women, notably Maruja Mallo, with whom he had a brief but intense relationship. According to José Luis Ferris, this relationship was so intense that it was addressed in “El rayo que no cesa,” written that summer. Another woman Miguel felt affection for was María Cegarra, whom he met at a tribute to Gabriel Miró. He tried to approach her in September 1935. He dedicated a sonnet manuscript, “Will this lightning that I live not stop?” from “El rayo que no cesa,” to María. At the end of 1935, Miguel found that María did not reply to his letters, and his dreams were broken again. In early February 1936, Miguel wrote to Josefina’s father to ask for forgiveness and restore his courtship with his daughter, which was carried out.
The Different Faces of Love
Miguel Hernández was in love with Josefina Manresa, Maruja Mallo, and María Cegarra, showing four different ways of representing love in his works, particularly in “El rayo que no cesa”:
- The first representation is as a person, before the love of Josefina Manresa.
- The second is as the bull, a representative symbol of passion, masculinity, and bravery.
- The third is as mud, losing its own entity, and the person is personified in the most humble and low.
- The fourth is as the docile and tame ox that obeys the wishes and whims of his beloved to get her love and attention.
He passes from divine love to human love, with all that this process entails. In “El rayo que no cesa,” Miguel has been spared the religious ballast and has reached the arms of love. With the advent of the Civil War, Miguel opened a new stage in his writing, marked by personal commitment. He enlisted in Madrid, in the 5th Regiment of the Republican army in November, becoming part of a brigade dedicated to cultural work under the orders of Pablo de la Torriente, a Cuban journalist. Miguel traversed various parts of the Republican front and had the opportunity to know firsthand the cruelty of the martial strife, while increasing his commitment to the social and political cause within the Communist Party. On March 9, 1937, he married Josefina. On April 19, Josefina had to leave to care for her sick mother, who died days later. Josefina stayed with her sisters to care for them and awaited the birth of their son. We can find three main lines of argument: death, earth, and his wife. In “Viento del pueblo” (Wind of the People) and “Cancionero y romancero de ausencias” (Songbook and Ballad Book of Absences), the man is identified with the full sunlight and the woman with fertilizing power.