Spanish Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry: Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro
Spanish Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry
The Romantic lyric emerged during the time of the French Revolution, alongside two schools of thought: restoration and liberalism. In Spain, Napoleon’s invasion divided the country into two camps: traditionalists and liberals. The War of Independence against the French is considered a manifestation of the popular Romantic spirit and a resurgence of personal confrontation against a stronger opponent. The Romantic period arose from the perceived failure of the Enlightenment and rationalism. Characterized by irrationalism, a focus on intuition over reason, and a subjective worldview, the Romantic individual often fled from reality through love duels and suicide. Nature became a reflection of the author’s state of mind, and a new sensibility emerged: intimacy.
Romantic poetry is divided into narrative poems, which recount historical events, legends, or invented stories, and lyric poetry, which expresses characteristic themes such as love, the ideal woman, and melancholy. Romantic environments often include graveyards, night, and the moon. The most important authors addressed political issues. For example, Espronceda attacked despotism and social barriers in “Deserves Death,” and explored a love that cannot fill the void in “Hymn to the Sun.” He also wrote long poems such as “The Student of Salamanca,” in which love is portrayed as an illusion. Zorrilla appealed to the emotions and feelings of the reader, using expressions with color and dominating rhythms. Other noteworthy authors include Avellaneda and the Duke of Rivas.
Post-Romantic Poetry: Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro
In post-Romantic poetry, which emerged half a century later, two figures are fundamental: Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro. For Rosalía, poetry was a means to communicate her personal experience of depression and her sensitive character, which always yearned for her homeland, Galicia. She began by imitating Espronceda. In “Galician Songs,” she showed her pessimism and hatred of Castile. In “Follas Novas” and “On the Banks of the Sar,” she emphasized that pessimism is the failure and collapse of her love and religious ideas.
Bécquer’s Life and Work
As for Bécquer’s personality, he began optimistically but faced failures in projects such as his “History of the Peoples of Spain,” his love life, and his marriage. These experiences accentuated his melancholy. He endured reality as best he could, but he argued that the past held beautiful and important programs. His works were published in newspapers after his death by his friends, who gathered them in a collection titled “Works.” He also wrote important works such as “Legends.” He recreated the “Book of Sparrows” as “Rhymes,” and after his death, his friends collected and rearranged them.
Bécquer was influenced by foreign poets like Heine, especially Germanic poets, and Spanish poets like Gil y Carrasco, Zorrilla, and Quevedo. He complained about the inadequacy of language to express all his feelings, linking poetry to women, as he believed that feeling was inherently feminine. He used various literary devices, including diversity and difficulty hidden under a mask of simplicity, parallelism, explanatory anaphora, and a very simple lexicon.
Themes in Bécquer’s “Rhymes”
The themes addressed in Bécquer’s “Rhymes” include poetry, love, disappointment over the loss of love, neglect, indifference, and the importance of pain and anguish caused by heartbreak, which led him to reflect on the meaning of life, loneliness, and death. Bécquer and Rosalía introduced numerous innovations to poetry. They used poetry to explain their own experiences, made innovations in metrics, and influenced future Andalusian poets like Lorca and Machado. For example, the penultimate verse of one of Bécquer’s rhymes, “where silence dwells,” is the title of a work by Cernuda.
Analysis of “Rima XLIX”
Rima XLIX: “Once the meeting for the world, and walks past me and goes, smiling, and I say, how can you laugh?” Its metric is ABAB-CDCD, with hendecasyllables alternating with hexasyllabic verses. The theme is the breakup and reunion, the doubt whether she smiles for the same reason as he, hiding the pain inside. It uses anaphora: “And walk past me and smiling and I say goes.” Enjambment: “Perhaps she laughs, as I laugh.” It poses unanswered questions. Dilogy: “mask of pain.”
Analysis of “Rima XLI”
Rima XLI: “You were the hurricane and I the high tower defying its power: you had to crash or be shot down! It could not be!” Its metric is ABCB-ABCB-EBEb, with three hendecasyllabic verses and one pentasyllabic verse. The theme is the breakup. The first and second verses of each stanza describe the clash of differences in the third, and the fourth highlights the impossible love. It uses enjambments: high-tower, upright-rock. Antithesis: hurricane-high tower, coil-yield. Parallelism: first verses in the two stanzas and the fourth verse. Metaphors: you hurricane, ocean, beautiful; I high tower, rock upright, proud.