Spanish Poetry: Masterpieces from Machado to Aleixandre
**Antonio Machado**
And not really pain, I know: expresses the deep anguish that torments him and manifests an unknown origin.
It’s Spain, charanga and tambourine (The Ephemeral Morning): describes society critically in early 20th-century Spain.
An evening, gray and cold (Childhood Memory): over time, a lost time that is located in childhood.
The afternoon is dying (Field): dialogue of the poet with elements of nature that become clues to the melancholic state of the decadent soul.
Memories of my childhood are a yard in Seville (Portrait): describes his origins, personality, disposition for love, alienation from modernism, his loneliness, and his taciturn character, always blissful.
Who pays me this staircase? (The Arrow): expresses his longing for God, a living, miraculous God.
Walker, your footprints are the path (Proverb and Song XXIX): the way, over time.
How good it is to know the vessel: existential concerns.
Palace, good friend (To Jose Maria Palacio): admiration for the friend, so longingly, like Leonor.
One morning in April was smiling: identification of the poet with the elements of nature.
**Juan Ramon Jimenez**
The evening is falling, sad mystery (Sleepy): decadent.
My soul’s sister is from heaven: twilight landscape and dreams.
Brother of my soul! Oh, yellow rose: perceives something unspeakable with poetic language but that points to the essence of reality.
Water bird (Sad Ballad of the Water Bird): constant dialogue with nature, in which the poet’s inner torments are projected and routed to pantheism.
Plenitude of today is: the search for the exact word that allows approaching the essence of things.
Ay, laugh: desire to merge with the essence of nature.
Eternity, beauty: a desire to merge with eternity.
The gods had more substance: presenting his conscience as an element of unity that gives meaning to the world.
If I, for you, had created a world for you: his desire for divinity and eternity grows.
**Luis Cernuda**
The breeze is recent: the contrast between foreign realities and the closed world of the poet.
Did not speak a word: obsessive concern for the image of desire.
Go back to the closed garden (Old Garden): mixes the sensual with reflective memory and nostalgia.
Casts light shade (Andalusian): nostalgia for his land.
Again? Return to what you have (Pilgrim): no intention of returning home.
**Federico Garcia Lorca**
My oppressed heart (Alba): pessimism and indifference.
Guadalquivir River (Ballad of the Three Rivers): comparison between two Andalusian rivers.
The moon came to the forge (Romance of the Moon, Moon): death of a gypsy child at full moon.
I’m scared to lose the wonder (Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint): bitterness of unrequited love.
The dawn of New York has (Dawn): contrast between modernity and nature.
**Rafael Alberti**
The sea. The sea: nostalgia for the sea of Cadiz.
Where the wind, undaunted, rebels (Madrigal to the Tram Ticket): influence of Gongora that he transfers to modern times.
No one understood the secret night (The College Angels): raises the value of what was really learned at the Jesuit school in Santa Maria.
I left for you my woods, my lost (What I Left for You): homesickness for paradise lost.
Today the clouds brought me (Song 8): homesickness and a glimpse of Cadiz, his people.
**Vicente Aleixandre**
You came and you went softly (Adolescence): pure poetry.
That happy body flowing in my hands (Drive It) / It wanted: sensual cut, report on a love that hurts the heart of the poet.
Do not forget, early (Kisses): a masterpiece of singing to the essential, the elements of nature, and the contrast of the reality of the poet with love always in the background.
If you see my eyes (Paradise City): beautiful portrait of the city of Malaga, his particular paradise.