Poetic Themes in Miguel Hernández: Nature, Love, Life, and Death
Poetic Themes of Miguel Hernández
Nature
Miguel Hernández (MH) was born in a rural Mediterranean environment. He lived in nature and was a great connoisseur and lover of flora. Wildlife and nature appear in many forms in his first four stages. As an adolescent and young artist, real nature shaped the character of his verses. He presents two different concepts:
- Nature connected to God: Nature is a symbol of purity and divinity.
- Nature-invention of language: Pure poetry. This appears in his first book, Perito en lunas. The poems in this book describe simple objects, “nature,” and everyday life, and they do not have titles. It is a still life surrounded by nature and unexpected metaphors.
In his third book, Wind in the People, land and nature serve to locate their social demands, always on the side of employees and the needy. In the final stages, in the work of Man Stalking, nature means freedom. When the natural goodness disappears, so does the landscape. In his intimate poetry, the Songbook and Ballad of Absences, when the war is over, nature reappears as a locus amoenus, where lovers are intertwined, represented by him and his wife, who are defeated by the vicissitudes and adversities of injustice and hatred. In the words of Francisco Umbral, MH “is alive in agriculture,” “is the prodigal son of nature, he leaves one day, replaced by culture, and then returns to her forever.”
Love
Hernandian poetry is love poetry. No poem falls outside the meaning of love: nature, women, son, friends, the people, life. The feeling of passion is the major axis, but that love adopts different formulations. In the conception of human love, outside of the Catholic stage, divine love can be distinguished:
1. The Sexual Awakening
Carpe diem and religious conflict. This poem uses the imagery of mythology to speak of their own sexuality. And there is a struggle over the spiritual and sexuality.
2. Love, Regret, and Love: The Illusion of Literary Tradition
MH is inspired by courtly love and pastoral poems. Love becomes a metaphor: the wound. Pasionero is the love of medieval songs (Love is like a prison). At this stage, the language is increasingly refined, and it comes as an expressive element of courtly love and pastoral poetry.
3. Love, Pain that is the Tradition to Reality
In 1934, MH falls in love with a dressmaker named Josefina Manresa and begins to rewrite the religious poetry of San Juan de la Cruz in an erotic key, influenced by Petrarch, Garcilaso, or Quevedo, giving birth to his first great book of love sonnets, The Ray that Does Not Cease. The poet speaks of a real, concrete love that tortures him for not being able to be enjoyed sexually. In mid-1935, his personal crisis leads him to pagan and civic-social complaints and moves to his love poetry: the poet seeks himself and recognizes his dependence on her. The beloved is nothing without experience, causing the dramatic rejection of the stage: the desire to live has now become eager to love, a moral conflict with the provincial and narrow-minded that rejects the call, producing erotic enjoyment and Hernandian “penalty.”
4. Love, Joy. Love-Fraternity
It is love for a woman who is going to give him a son (Song of the Soldier Husband). It is the love for his child that makes him overcome hatred and resentment, and in prison (Onion Lullaby), it is love and joy to tolerate the harsh reality of absence and deprivation. It is also the love of people that makes him fight for equality and justice. It is the love that prevails in Wind in the People.
5. Love-Hate
Towards the end of the war, MH is afraid because man discovers a threat to man himself. War and famine have led to hatred on the landscape. The man in his poems is animalized in Man Stalking, but the poet needs to air this new human condition to avert the crisis and work for hope.
6. Love, Hope
At the outbreak of the civil war, MH is faced with a disproportionate and menacing reality. To combat it in his last stage, the poet must belittle it and make it vulnerable. His literary model was Don Quixote. Hernández takes the sad reality and makes it his own, only hearing his voice and his state. His last poetry is full of longing for life in the face of so much death and misery. With Songbook and Ballad of Absences, we enter into a poetic diary of the writer’s life. During his prison life, the poet turns to himself, to his personal and inner world. It is the final phase of the re-humanization of poetry: shocking personal experiences with a background of terrible war are avoided or presented metaphorically. Absence is the very foundation of the construction of the Songbook and Ballad of Absences, but the discouragement caused by a life of absence is not an obstacle for MH to overcome his bitterness and culminate with a song of hope and victory over his ideals. This latest production is for love, an intimate and realistic love, but a love full of hope for humanity.