Miquel Martí i Pol’s Creation: A Reflection on Factory Life
Miquel Martí i Pol, Creation
In Creation, each of the seven stanzas of blank verse decasyllables shows a parallel with the seven days of creation in the world that the Bible describes. The poem was used to represent the creation of “a new worker” in the factory. The fragment analyzed contains only three of the seven stanzas.
In the first verse, the author tells us about the protagonist’s first day in the factory. He is stunned by the threshing machine, which prevents communication, making him feel alone and frightened.
The second verse belongs to the second day, where the author gradually adapts to the factory and says he is learning to communicate through symbols, a metaphor that could be interpreted as a fading sense of loneliness.
Finally, in the last stanza analyzed, the author describes the fifth day, in which he claims to feel as if he had been born between machines and no longer denies the tired and monotonous routine.
Through expressions such as “stunned by the threshing machine,” “learned the rhythm,” or “as if we had been born between machines,” the author conveys the idea of getting a living factory model, that is, creating a new worker.
Through his poem, Martí i Pol conveys the feeling that causes hours of work in a factory: he presents the contrasting experiences of workers between the outside world and the inner world. In the world inside the factory, deafening rants make a noise in a hostile and frightening environment. But the outside world represents joy and freedom. Gradually the conception of the world changes as the worker is absorbed by the factory, ultimately becoming an unreal reality.
This absorption is described through a comparison (“we liquefied the time”) that causes this feeling to take on a physical nature, and readers can understand the strength of the factory.
In this poem, we can observe the characteristics of Martí i Pol’s poetry. These highlight his critical but ironic tone, in which the author presents a poetry of complaint but does not reach the extreme of being catastrophic. This maxim is this positivism in all his poetry. Though he suffered from the disease, Miquel Martí i Pol maintained a tireless enthusiasm that led him to poetize suffering, talking about love, death, and desire, in order to positivize others (part of his historical context).
We could summarize that in his poetry, the descriptive and narrative tone predominates, but it is not devoid of tenderness, humor, and a good metaphorical section, mixing lyricism and denunciation.
The analyzed fragment belongs to a book called The Factory, which represents a tribute to the workers, some unsung heroes as opposed to the owners, and at the same time is an autobiographical work in which we see what it was like for workers living in the factory.
For this reason, we consider that poetry belongs to naturalism (Germinal) but still sends a message that is much more hopeful, intending to keep the penalties from becoming a collapse.
Moreover, we could also interpret the work differently, considering the contrasts between our inner world, closed and dark, and the outside world where freedom reigns (lyrical introspection), which are not mutually exclusive but complementary realities.