Vitalism in Miguel Hernández’s Poetry: Love, War, Death
Life and Death in the Poetry of Miguel Hernández
The poetry of Miguel Hernández is pure vitalism, present in his life: blood, passion, war, and love in all its intensity. Death is a name, mostly of life.
Perito en Lunas (Expert in Moons)
Perito en lunas is an homage to Góngora and an exercise in style; intelligence to be in fashion in 1927. Love, life, and death do not appear with intensity.
El Rayo que no Cesa (The Unending Lightning)
The love theme of El Rayo que no Cesa is very complex and is marked by symbols, where the union of the penalty for the absence of the beloved and love becomes a component not only traffic, but the man in his solitude becomes the passion and desire loving arms. On the other hand, we have a duality between the purity of the beloved and poetic dirt, Catholic heritage, as in the poem “I Threw a Lemon” (“He slept the blood on his shirt and turned to the porous and a golden chest pointed and dazzling sentence”) and “My Name is Mud but Call Me Michael.” Love/life becomes death and threat, giving the tragic tone that characterizes this work and that is embodied in the bull. The loving impulse is constant, certain of the imminence of death.
Vientos del Pueblo (Winds of the People)
Vientos del Pueblo is a war book, written during the war to encourage the soldiers, where life and death are present. War is raised in an absolute sense, epic and death, a daily occurrence, comes in all different ways that coincide with the final exaltation of life and the struggle for freedom. Sometimes death is a heroic act that must be undertaken with ease and with the pride of a hero (“If I die, I die with my head held high”). The highlight is the integration of man from nature, and life understood as something beyond individual subjectivity. Man is part of the cosmos, where sweat, blood, labor, and land are the same thing and now the subject of his love for life. Vitalism politics becomes a vital and basic question and is especially in “Hands” and “Sweat”.
El Hombre Acecha (Man Stalks)
Here, before vitalist pantheism, optimistic and heroic, is taken by the defeat of the war in a dark pantheism of death that fills everything and even separates man from nature (“Today love is death and the man stalking the man.”) Remain the issues associated with life and death. The enemies of the people away from the vitality that characterizes the employee as is evident in “The Old Men.” The wounded are filled with darkness and gloom vitalism, but life continues and it is understood and justified, yet, in all of nature. The poet exalts the nation with the union of man and earth earthy as a union of the living and dead beyond life and death as seen in “Mother Spain”.
Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias (Songbook and Ballad of Absences)
Life and poetry are definitely confused. After the war and locked in a prison, using poetry as a means by which life is transformed into word, channel expressing their innermost feelings. Death is closer than ever, their first child in prison. In some cases, death is associated with the “I” of the poet and the brevity of life. In others, the failure of his son with a dramatic motor that expresses the feelings of the poet (“In my house needed a body. Two abound in our house.”). Love becomes a physical vision and body, without sin, the meaning of life and death. It focuses on the figures of the wife and child from the womb so that he is a part within the cosmos of love. The love is not a bull suffering from loneliness and rejection, but the poet who sings the womb of his wife’s poems whip deeper and excited. The cosmic dimension loving vision is clearly shown in the poem “Child of Light and Shadow” where flesh-cosmos joins the figure of the wife ends in the symbol of the child. There is a declaration of love for the concrete and carnal (“Less your body, everything is confusing”) and is a single element whose meaning lies in the love child.