The Crime Was in Granada

Antonio Machado
1936

Antonio Machado's poem "The Crime Was in Granada" is about a real historical event, the murder of the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca on July 18, 1936. Lorca was killed at the onset of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1937); it was a murder almost certainly politically motivated in part. The poem was first published in memory of Lorca in the newspaper Ayuda on October 17, 1936.

Lorca is said to have been killed by supporters of General Francisco Franco, who were intent on eliminating influential artists and other figures who did not support the general in his attempt to take over Spain. Others suggest that a personal vendetta was involved and that Lorca's support of those opposing Franco was only part of what instigated his murder. Either way, this killing was a shameful assassination of a great literary figure whose involvement in politics was minimal, despite his political convictions; this shame is a major theme in Machado's poem. That is, by emphasizing so strongly that Lorca was killed in his own hometown (he was born in 1898 just outside Granada, in Fuente Vaqueros, and his family moved to Granada in 1909), Machado suggests the degree to which Lorca's death was a terrible betrayal of fundamental decencies.

As a mature and powerful poem, "The Crime Was in Granada" is a respected work of Machado's. Most broader collections of Machado's poems, such as the Selected Poems, translated by Alan S. Trueblood, include the poem, and most larger libraries own a copy of Trueblood's translations.

Author Biography

The poet Antonio Machado was born on July 26, 1875, on his family's estate near Seville, Spain. His father and grandfather were scholarly men, and Machado would go on to teach as well. Machado began his schooling in Seville, but his family moved to Madrid, Spain's capital city, when he was eight years old. There, he began attending the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Teaching). This school was known for its progressive curriculum and for one instructor in particular, Giner de los Rios. De los Rios was a great influence on many of Machado's contemporaries, who, like Machado, went on to play prominent roles in the artistic and political life of Spain. Some of these figures have come to be known as the Generation of '98; most scholars associate Machado with this group. This generation of artists and thinkers attempted to revitalize Spanish cultural and political life.

After graduating from high school, Machado and his brother, Manuel, with whom he was close, went to Paris to work for a publisher. As they had in Madrid, in Paris they participated in the artistic and intellectual life of the city. Machado appreciated the heady pace of their bohemian life in Paris less than his brother did, and soon he was back in Madrid. There, he studied for a teaching certificate, as the early death of his father had reduced the family's finances, making it necessary for him to secure steady employment.

Machado's first teaching post was in the area of Spain called Soría. In Soría, in 1909, Machado met and married a young woman, Leonor Izquierdo. The couple spent time in Paris, where Machado began studying philosophy, a lifelong interest. In fact, Machado would go on to pursue a university degree in philosophy. The completion of this degree, along with his growing reputation as a poet, led to better teaching positions. The marriage did not last long, however, as Leonor contracted tuberculosis and died just three years after they married.

Machado's first published poems appeared in 1901 in a Madrid literary periodical called Electra. His first volume of poetry, Soledades, was published in 1903. Machado is known as an exacting writer who would destroy those writings with which he was not completely happy. He published four volumes of poetry as well as diverse other writings in his lifetime.

Throughout his life, Machado had close associations, or acquaintanceships, with other Spanish artists and intellectuals, including Federico García Lorca, whose death is recounted in "The Crime Was in Granada" (1936). Lorca was an internationally known literary figure by the time of his death, which was but one terrible event among many that so demoralized Spaniards during the civil war the country suffered from 1936 to 1939.

Machado died on February 22, 1939, in Collioure, France, where he and a number of others had fled, to escape capture and persecution by General Francisco Franco's forces. Machado's health had been failing for some time, and this difficult passage across the Pyrenees into southern France proved to be too much for the poet's fragile constitution.

Poem Text

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

Poem Summary

I

The first part of Machado's poem "The Crime Was in Granada" is called "The Crime," and it describes, or imagines, the assassination of Lorca. The first line of the poem says that Lorca "was seen, surrounded by rifles." By saying that the writer is "seen," Machado reinforces his idea that what occurred was a hideous "crime," since Lorca's having been seen in this context is akin to a crime having been witnessed. Notably, also, this first line declines to humanize Lorca's murderers—they amount to no more than the "rifles" they are carrying: "He was seen, surrounded by rifles."

In the next three lines, the setting of Lorca's journey to his death is imagined and described: he is escorted outside of the city ("down a long street"), into the surrounding countryside, in the "chill before dawn, with the stars still out." This simple description of Lorca's last walk manages to conjure a sense of a vast universe—cold, impartial, and uninvolved—so that Lorca's death strikes the reader as a terribly sad and lonely affair, lending a somber, mournful mood to the poem.

The next two lines are ironic in effect, as Lorca is killed "at the first glint of daylight." That is, the sun's rising would seem to be an occasion for joy, being somehow a rebirth—the signaling of a new day. Yet this is the moment Lorca is killed, the moment that a death, and not a birth, occurs. Thus, there is the sense here that nature does not concern itself with or coincide with the wishes of humans. Still, in the following two lines, Lorca is elevated above his "assassins," even if he has not been elevated above nature. This is so because the structure of the four lines, even in the original Spanish, encourages the reader to equate the sun's first rays with Lorca's look, from which his murderers shrink:

They killed Federico 

at the first glint of daylight. 

The band of assassins 

shrank from his glance.

The next line of the poem furthers this effect, as, in writing that the assassins "closed their eyes" as they shot, the idea of Lorca's visage, which is like a ray of the sun, underscores the murderers' moral puniness and blindness.

Lorca's death is next bluntly, simply described: "lead in his stomach, blood on his face." This simplicity, in its starkness, conveys the brutality of the writer's murder. The first part of the poem ends with an exclamation that Granada was "the scene of the crime," as if to say that no place would ever want to be known as the place that hosted such a shameful and horrible event. Certainly, in writing "poor Granada," Machado expresses his sympathy for the pain and shame Granadinos must feel.

II

The second section of the poem is called "The Poet and Death." In this section, Machado imagines Lorca in conversation with Death. Death is personified as an old woman. So, in place of Lorca's being seen walking down a "long street," in this section he is "seen with her [Death]," "un-afraid of her scythe." This indication of the poet's bravery in the face of death continues what is begun in the poem's first part, namely, Machado's paying homage to his fellow writer. Indeed, Machado writes that Lorca is "playing up to Death"; that is, he is in some way courting her and entertaining her. The suggestion is that Lorca is equal to Death—he is a man so extraordinary that a force as powerful as Death would be inclined to pass the time with him. To be sure, Death, says the poet, is "listening" to Lorca.

In the next lines' description of sunlight striking off towers and "hammers" pounding on "anvils," Machado conjures a tense, apocalyptic mood, commemorating the terribleness of the event. This reference to the "forges" where this ironwork is taking place also calls to mind strange, otherworldly places, places from which Death might emerge to make a claim. In the following lines, in which Machado imagines Lorca's conversation with Death, he calls to mind Lorca's own astonishing writing, often so full of elemental and startling imagery:

"The clack of your fleshless palms 

was heard in my verse just yesterday, friend; 

you put ice in my song, you gave my tragedy 

the cutting edge of your silver scythe;

More specifically, Machado is calling to mind the series of rural tragedy plays that Lorca most recently had been working on before he was killed: Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. In these lines and the immediately following lines of section II, Machado also emphasizes, again, Lorca's equality with Death, as Machado has Lorca calling Death "friend." The poet develops, in this part of the poem, the idea that Death and Lorca were always intimate—that Lorca was in some sense always in love with Death and even welcomes his death now that it has arrived. Hence, the following erotic flourish and Lorca's happiness at being finally alone with Death:

those red lips of yours that knew kisses once . . . 

Now, as always, gypsy, my own death, 

how good being alone with you, 

in these breezes of Granada, my Granada!"

Section II's closing reference to Granada manages to convey, as do the references to the city in section I, a sense of general blame, as Lorca's loving evocation of his native city seems somewhat undeserved, considering that its inhabitants were unable to protect him.

III

Section III of Machado's poem is untitled, as if to suggest the poet's exhaustion at the contemplation of such a terrible event; words to describe the subject of his writing finally elude him. Indeed, in repeating the first section's opening, which then trails off with an ellipsis, this sense of tired exhaustion is underscored: "He was seen walking. . . ." The poet's exhaustion also undoubtedly pertains to the exhaustion of Spaniards in general, as both the armies of Franco and the opposition had already, by the time of the full-scale inception of the civil war, committed numerous acts of terrible brutality.

The second line of section III follows a blank space on the page, as if to conjure once again the crime—but a crime the poet, in his exhaustion, again cannot bring himself to describe further. This blank space on the page also signifies Lorca's death—his absence. The poem ends with a lament and an exhortation:

Friends, carve a monument 

out of dream stone 

for the poet in the Alhambra, 

over a fountain where the grieving water 

shall say forever: 

The crime was in Granada, his Granada.

This shortest section of "The Crime Was in Granada" achieves a number of goals. First, it maintains that Lorca must be memorialized with a monument. Second, it insists on Lorca's greatness by proposing that a monument be placed in the Alhambra, an ancient, grand fortress and palace that is Granada's greatest edifice. Third, it suggests that this monument not only will memorialize Lorca but also will remind the world forever of the terribleness of the "crime" committed against him. Indeed, the crime is such an awful one that the Alhambra's fountain, personified like Death, will flow with "grieving water," crying "forever." Last, the closing of the poem reiterates Machado's sense that Spaniards, and Granadinos in particular, should feel shame for what happened to Lorca: he was betrayed and killed in the very town in which he grew up.

Themes

Betrayal

A civil war means that a nation is divided, that a country is at war within itself. Sometimes, these wars take place between obviously different groups within a nation, but not always. The Spanish Civil War was one of the latter wars. It divided friends from friends and family members from family members. As Spaniards picked their sides in the conflict, long-standing friendships came to an end, siblings broke forever with siblings, and parents were sundered from children. Further, some people involved in the war were ruthless in their tactics, acting as spies, informing on former acquaintances, and so forth. In short, Spaniards on both sides felt that they were subject to terrible betrayals, not to mention that each side felt that the other was betraying the future of Spain itself. In repeating so often that Lorca was killed in his own hometown, Machado conveys the idea that Lorca was betrayed by his own—and so he sounds the note of betrayal that was so prevalent a feeling in Spain at the time.

Shame

Machado's repetition that Lorca was killed in his hometown purveys the idea that Granadinos should feel shame for what happened. Somehow, the citizens of Granada should have prevented the murder of their talented son. Beyond this, Machado includes the theme of shame in his poem because of his particular political convictions. That is, he viewed with dismay the prospect of the triumph of General Francisco Franco's fascist forces. After all, as a fascist, Franco was associated with Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini; he was aiming to control Spain with an iron hand, squashing the democracy that preceded him. Thus, for Machado, those Spaniards who were supporting Franco should especially feel shame, for they were contributing to the cause of a leader who would halt the forward movement of Spain's political and cultural life.

Brutality

The Spanish Civil War was a bloody war, known not only for brutal assassinations such as Lorca's but for other atrocities as well. One well-known atrocity was the destruction in a bombing raid of an entire town, Guernica, along with a great number of its civilian inhabitants. One of the most famous of the well-known Spanish painter Pablo Picasso's works is a stark black-and-white painting depicting this atrocity, called Guernica, after the town. Like Picasso's stark painterly style in this painting, so Machado's stark poetic style and word choice in "The Crime Was in Granada" conveys the brutality of the event being described. The poet calls Lorca's assassination a "crime," so that we understand that a "murder" was committed, and he describes the dead Lorca vividly and bluntly, as a body with "lead in his stomach, blood on his face."

Style

Imagery

Poetic images are generally understood to be elements within a poem that create a sensory impression in the reader's mind, whether that impression is visual, aural, or dependent on another sense. Thus, the opening image in "The Crime Was in Granada" is of a long, empty street. Less obvious images in Machado's poem, however, are its sound images. For example, in section II, Machado describes "hammers pound[ing] on anvils" and the "clack" of Death's "fleshless palms." The load and heavy sound of hammers on iron, as much as the sharp crack of bone against bone, bring to mind the shots of the rifles that killed Lorca. The hammers on the anvils and the clack of Death's palms also evoke the staccato clapping that accompanies performances of flamenco music and dance, not to mention that one type of flamenco song is said to have grown out of the singing of forge workers. Flamenco music (and dancing) is an art form of Spain's gypsy population, most of whom reside in Spain's southern region of Andalusia. Granada, Lorca's hometown, is in Andalusia, and Lorca often celebrated the culture and art of Spain's gypsies in his work.

Topics For Further Study

• Research the aspirations, motivations, and beliefs of Spain's Generation of '98, with which Machado is associated.
• Research Federico García Lorca within the context of the Generation of '27, of which he was a part. What beliefs, concerns, and goals united this group of artists?
• Research the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Why did U.S. citizens decide to volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War? Why would they volunteer to give their lives in another country? How large was the brigade? How does it compare with other international brigades? What was at stake in this war in their view?
• Ernest Hemingway, the American writer, was a war correspondent in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Examine his war writings and explain his attitude toward the events he was witnessing. Or read and report on his fiction novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War.
• General Francisco Franco received substantial aid from Adolf Hitler's Germany and Benito Mussolini's Italy. Research the circumstances of this fascist web of power in Europe during the 1930s. What, exactly, is fascism?
• What are the roots of flamenco, the dance and music associated with Spain's gypsies?

Elegy

"The Crime Was in Granada" is a type of poem known as an elegy, a poem written in memory of someone who has died. Rules and conventions of elegy writing have differed over time, and the tone and approach taken in an elegy depend on whether the person being elegized was close to the writer or a more distant public figure. In cases where the person being memorialized was close to the poet, the tone of the elegy might be quite sorrowful throughout. In other cases, expressions of sorrow might be more restrained, with the poet concentrating on honoring his or her subject. Machado's elegy, on the whole, is quite restrained emotionally. His drive in the first part of the poem is to memorialize Lorca as one casualty of war among many, as the description of Lorca's assassination brings to mind any number of assassinations that took place during the Spanish Civil War. The second part of "The Crime Was in Granada" is similarly restrained, as Machado here is primarily interested in paying homage to Lorca as a brave man and a brilliant artist. Essentially, Machado waits until the final part of his elegy to convey his deep sorrow over Lorca's death.

Personification

In personification a poet invests something not human with human qualities. For example, a poet might refer to thunder as "the sky's bellow," thus endowing the sky with a human "voice." Or a poet might call a fly "an irritating busybody," giving an insect another type of human attribute. Machado employs personification in his poem when he describes Death as an old woman and invests the fountain's water with human emotion (the waters of the fountain are "grieving").

Diction

Diction refers to word choice—a poet's decision about precisely which words he or she is going to use. Will a baby in a poem "cry," or will it "screech?" If it screeches, how will this choice of word affect the overall tone and meaning of the poem? An extremely important word in Machado's poem is "crime." To commit a crime means to break the law, yet what of law in times of war? Are not civilians killed every day in war zones, with no one ever having to pay the price? When is a civilian death in wartime not a reasonable casualty and instead, as Machado says of Lorca's death, a crime, a murder? When do persons other than soldiers become fair targets in times of war? Answers to these questions depend upon how the civilian is killed and what kind of war is being fought. In the case of Lorca, Machado's word choice is sadly apt and to the point. Lorca, no matter his political convictions, was not a justified target for assassination, and so he was, in effect, murdered in the first days of the Spanish Civil War. By including the word "crime" in his title and by referring to the scene of Lorca's death as "the scene of the crime," Machado's poem points to the brutal truth of what happened on July 18, 1936.

Translation

There are always difficulties involved when writing about a poem that has been translated into another language. Has the translator chosen the right words? What does a reader do with different translators' versions of a poem if the versions differ considerably? Are these differences of word choice, or are they perhaps differences in how entire lines or sets of lines are arranged grammatically and spatially? Ultimately, a translator must make many difficult decisions, some of which might change the nature of a poem significantly. For example, it may be impossible for a translator to present a poem's original rhymes or rhyme scheme, for there may be no way to create rhymes out of the words that the second language calls for in order to translate the meaning of a poem reasonably accurately.

Readers of translated poetry, in short, must be aware of the fact that they are reading a translation, as this will determine, to a certain extent, what they can discuss about a poem. More specifically, English-language readers of "The Crime Was in Granada" must remember that the poem was originally written in Spanish, so that, first, there are elements and effects in the original that are not present in the translation, and, second, there are quite possibly meanings and effects conveyed by the translation that are not in the original.

Historical Context

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Like so many European nations, Spain began vigorous attempts to modernize and democratize its governmental institutions beginning in the nineteenth century. Still, the course of these changes was never smooth, with the result that Spain was suffering great political instability in the early part of the twentieth century. Conservative, even dictatorial, elements vied with democratic-socialist elements, with no side ever gaining a firm purchase. On the eve of the civil war, a progressive democratic government was in place, but contesting its legitimacy was a coalition of conservative groups, which included fascist elements, the Catholic Church, the army, and other groups. The Civil War officially began with an uprising in Morocco of army forces under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, a fascist sympathizer who would go on to receive aid from other fascist European leaders, Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini, most notably.

As the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy suggests, Europe, in general, at that time was undergoing vast political upheavals. Indeed, like the United States, these countries were suffering economic depressions and other problems. As Franco began his war in Spain, the rest of the world looked on anxiously. To the watching world, the war in Spain augured what was almost certainly going to happen in Europe—a war between progressive and dictatorial elements. This European war was called World War II (1939–1945).

The war in Spain was also a cause for anxiety because, from the point of view of the United States, England, and other solidly democratic nations, the worst thing that could happen in Spain was for Franco to triumph. This would signal the strength of fascist currents in Europe. The forces that opposed Franco were called the Republicans, as they were for a democratic republic instead of the dictatorship Franco had in mind.

Compare & Contrast

• 1930s: In their attempt to modernize their governmental bodies, the Spanish have banished their royal family. The last acting king, Alfonso XIII, resides in Portugal in exile, refusing to give up his claim to the throne.

  Today: Despite its status as a democracy, Spain, like England, has a royal family whose ceremonial presence serves as a national symbol of unity. The current popular king, Juan Carlos I, is the grandson of Alfonso XIII.

• 1930s: Spanish society suffers a period of profound political instability that eventually erupts in the brutal Civil War of 1936–1939. This war's conclusion brings Spain under the rule of the dictator General Francisco Franco.

  Today: Spain is a parliamentary democracy like all other European nations and is a part of the European Union.

• 1930s: Antifascist sympathizers the world over congregate in Spain to fight against the forces of General Francisco Franco. Those who traveled from the United States to fight against Franco are known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and their fight is known as the Good Fight.

  Today: Spain's latest elected government, headed by Prime Minister José Zapatero, bands with other European nations to contest the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

• 1930s: Spanish artists such as Federico García Lorca and Pablo Picasso are internationally known as vital innovators in the arts.

  Today: The most internationally prominent Spanish artists are those who work in film, such as director Pedro Almodóvar.

• 1930s: Spain is economically hampered by a lack of industrial development.

  Today: Thanks to a period of steady growth in all sectors beginning in the 1940s, Spanish citizens enjoy a standard of living equal to that of citizens in other so-called First World nations.

Because people thought that the Spanish Civil War reflected the larger struggle in continental Europe at the time, many felt that they had to travel to Spain to fight for the Republican cause. The Republican armies consequently were truly international, with American fighters gathered together in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. As it turns out, Franco's forces won, but not without the valiant efforts of the Republicans and their supporters.

The Generation of '98

Machado is considered to be a member of what is known as the Generation of '98 (1898) in Spain. This group of artists and other public figures were united by their belief that Spain was ripe for refreshing new directions in the arts, politics, and society in general. Prominent members of this group besides Machado were, to name but a few, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and the writer known simply as Azorín. Most especially, this generation was eager for Spain to open itself up more vigorously to new ideas originating beyond its own borders, to the goal of Spain's becoming a more thoroughly modern nation in values and customs.

Federico García Lorca and the Generation of '27

A new, younger generation of artists followed the Generation of '98, establishing new standards of artistic expression. However, like their predecessors, they were vigilant in avoiding stylistics in any way reminiscent of nineteenth-century currents. One new trend that some of this later generation, including Lorca, embraced was surrealism. Surrealist artworks employ dream imagery and logic in their work, the sort of odd, startling images and juxtapositions of images that are characteristic of dreams. A strong surrealistic current is evident, for example, in Lorca's book of sequential poems titled Gypsy Ballads. Lorca remains most well known as a poet and a playwright.

Critical Overview

English-language (Anglophone) studies of "The Crime Was in Granada," considered on its own, are rare. Instead, most Anglophone criticism tends to be general estimations of Machado's work (his career as a poet), explorations of a group of poems (for example, a particular collected volume of poems), or examinations of some aspect of his work running throughout his career (for instance, the significance of fountains in his verse).

In terms of general estimations of Machado's poetic career, the criticism can be divided into two phases, according to Alan S. Trueblood. As True-blood writes in "Antonio Machado and the Lyric of Ideas" (in Letter and Spirit in Hispanic Writers: Renaissance to Civil War), early critics of Machado were "disconcerted" by certain "changes of direction in successive stages of his career." That is, some earlier critics had widely admired his first verse publications and then felt that changes in his later work signaled a waning of his vitality as a writer. However, with hindsight, these successive stages in Machado's career have come to be seen as the reasonable development of a writer whose sense of what he wished to accomplish changed over time.

Despite these changes in Machado's verse over time, certain poetic elements remain fairly consistent. For example, Machado often employs images of fountains and roads in his poems, as in "The Crime Was in Granada." Machado's sense of the evocativeness of fountains derives from his southern Spanish provenance, as fountains in courtyards are common features in southern Spanish buildings, including Machado's own childhood home.

Criticism

Carol Dell'Amico

Dell'Amico is an instructor of English literature and composition. In this essay, she considers Machado's poem about Federico García Lorca within the context of the characteristic elements of Machado's and Lorca's work.

Within a few years of the first publication of "The Crime Was in Granada," Machado had died. As a poem written near the end of his life, it contains many elements typical of many other poems he wrote. Yet the way in which Machado incorporates typical qualities of Federico García Lorca's works, as a way of paying homage to his fellow writer, distinguishes this poem.

One of the tenets of Spain's Generation of '98, with which Machado is associated, was that the art of the new twentieth century should reflect the modernism of the era. For Machado, this meant ridding his poetry of typical nineteenth-century flourishes (adorned language) and syntactical (grammatical) complexities. The modernism of his prose, in other words, is seen in his plain choice of words and straightforward sentence constructions: there are few rare words to be found in Machado's poetry and few lines that require a reader to read many lines before understanding their meaning within some larger, lengthy, and complex sentiment. This simplicity of diction and expression is especially evident in the first section of "The Crime Was in Granada"; indeed, portions of this first section are particularly stark in their simplicity and straightforwardness, as is seen in the description of the killing itself:

Federico fell, 

lead in his stomach, blood on his face. 

And Granada was the scene of the crime.

Machado's decision to write an especially blunt description of Lorca's assassination can be attributed not only to his modern poetic method but also to his sense that one of the poem's purposes was to document an atrocity that should not in any way be romanticized. The means of Lorca's death should strike the reader as a brutality and nothing else.

Section I of "The Crime Was in Granada" is in other ways reminiscent of Machado's work as a whole. For example, its initial description of the country landscape in which Lorca is killed attests to the importance of landscape in general in Machado's writing. As Willis Barnstone has written in Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet, "clear geographical images" are highly characteristic of Machado's art. As Barnstone also points out, the Spanish poet is an "introspective and landscape-oriented" writer, a writer in whose poems "landscape, or the open-eyed dream of it, does all." Landscape, he says, "is thing and symbol." Of course, since "The Crime Was in Granada" is primarily designed to be a poem written in honor of Lorca, it is not a poem in any way dominated by a focus on landscape. Nevertheless, the opening description of Granada's outskirts, where Lorca was killed, is both "thing and symbol" in the poem. It is "thing" because it is a simple description of how Machado imagines the scene on the morning of Lorca's death. It is "symbol" as well, because the description of the scene conveys ideas:

He was seen, surrounded by rifles, 

moving down a long street 

and out to the country 

in the chill before dawn, with the stars still out. 

They killed Federico 

at the first glint of daylight.

At the same time, Machado's description of the scene is factual in the sense that Lorca was apprehended just before dawn and killed soon after. Machado's emphasis on the cold of the early morning hours appropriately conveys the cold and terrible nature of the writer's murder. Moreover, instead of being a symbol of warmth, the first rays of the sun in the poem are yet one more cruel detail, as Alan Trueblood's choice of the word "glint" as a translation for these first rays conveys. That is, "glint" calls to mind a sharp brilliance, a cutting ray that suggests the bullets that pierce Lorca's flesh. The cold, cutting universe of the first section of "The Crime Was in Granada" communicates, in short, the cruelty and loneliness of Lorca's tragic death.

Section II of "The Crime Was in Granada," the poem's longest section, is Machado's homage to Lorca. It is his homage in one important respect: Machado takes great pains to evoke much of what is characteristic of Lorca's own writing and artistic concerns. For example, Lorca is known for his interest in the art of Spain's gypsy population, which is largely southern Spanish in provenance, as gypsy territory stretches from South Asia through southern Europe and into the north of Africa. This population is known for its vital music and dance traditions, which in Spain developed into what is known as flamenco. Flamenco songs take on many subjects, such as love, death, and the beauty of nature. Sometimes gypsy entertainments feature only singers, backup singers, and guitar players. At other times, a dancer or group of dancers will accompany the song. In either case, a certain staccato rhythm often predominates. This is so because flamenco dancers (both men and women) stamp their feet as they dance on wooden floors, the female dancers play castanets (small wooden clappers held in the hands), guitar players occasionally rap on their guitars, and even onlookers clap a sharp accompaniment.

Machado calls to mind flamenco song and dance in his inclusion of the sound image of "hammers" pounding on "anvils," "on anvil after anvil in the forges." This mention of forges reminds Machado's readers of how flamenco song flourished in the forges of Granada and other southern Spanish towns. There are many forges in these towns, mainly because the architecture of the south utilizes ironwork extensively: heavy wooden doors are adorned with iron details, houses are fitted with strong iron balconies, windows are faced with decorative iron bars, and so forth. Many gypsies worked and continue to work in these forges, singing to the rhythm of the iron-headed hammers striking the iron anvils.

The way in which many southern Spanish artists like Lorca (and Machado) began incorporating flamenco traditions in their art was fairly revolutionary, as the gypsy population in Spain—along with their art—had been disdained by the general population and elites for a very long time. To many Spaniards, gypsies seemed, and even continue to seem, an impoverished, rough group, stuff merely for tourists to think that they are witnessing the "real" Spain. A better picture of gypsies is that they have entirely different values from those of the Spanish mainstream, unique ideas about what makes life worth living and how life should be lived. The gypsy population guards its own traditions and culture jealously, making little attempt to join the mainstream. Thus, Lorca's and others' acceptance of this fact, along with their embrace of gypsy traditions, was a gesture that insisted on the greatness of these traditions as well as any population's right to be a part of the Spanish nation without necessarily conforming to the values and customs of the mainstream.

What Do I Read Next?

• The expansive collection of Machado's poems in Selected Poems (1982), translated by Alan S. Trueblood, offers an excellent view of his breadth and development as a poet. This volume is also attractive for its inclusion of the original Spanish text of the poems alongside the English translations.
• Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems (1987), translated by Richard L. Predmore, is Machado's second published collection of verse. Reading a collection of a poet's poems as he or she wanted them to be collected in a single volume—as opposed to reading a collection of a poet's poems from many different volumes compiled by an editor—is a necessary exercise for students of a poet's work. The original Spanish-language text of Machado's poems is included in this book.
• Poet in New York and Other Poems (1940), translated by Rolfe Humphries, is a collection of poems by the young Federico García Lorca about his time in New York City and other places in the northeastern United States in 1929–1930.
• The plays Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba are Federico García Lorca's three brilliant rural tragedies. They are published singly and together, with one compilation having an introduction by the poet's brother, Francisco. This collection is titled III Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, Bernarda Alba (1947), translated by Richard L. O'Con-nell and James Graham-Luján.
• Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain, 1936–1939 (1987) is a compilation of writings by members of the brigade of American citizens who fought against General Francisco Franco's fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. The collection is edited by Alvah Cecil Bessie and Albert Prago.

Machado's own respectful attitude toward gypsy culture undoubtedly derives from his father, who was a serious scholar of these and other southern popular traditions. (Machado's family, like Lorca's, hails from the south, from the southern Spanish city of Seville. Like Granada, Seville has a large and flourishing gypsy population and set of traditions.) More to the point in terms of Lorca and gypsy arts, he is known for a very beautiful sequence of poems called the Gypsy Ballads, which, like the series of three rural tragedy plays Lorca had just completed before his death (Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba), draw extensively on gypsy styles and themes. In this context, we find Machado's notion in "The Crime Was in Granada" that Lorca imagines Death as an old "gypsy" woman. Here, Machado reminds the reader of how flamenco song-poetry contains so many brilliant evocations of the inevitability and grandeur of death, a fact that underwrites the lucid tragedy of Lorca's last superb plays:

"The clack of your fleshless palms 

was heard in my verse just yesterday, friend; 

you put ice in my song, you gave my tragedy 

the cutting edge of your silver scythe;

Section III of Machado's poem to Lorca again emphasizes many of these same ideas. That is, Machado stresses the idea that Lorca—like Machado himself—was a southern poet interested in all of the diverse traditions of southern Spain. This is seen in Machado's call for a tomb for the poet in the Alhambra, Granada's greatest structure, and his mention of a fountain in this regard. The Alhambra is a structure that calls to mind all of Spain's history and southern Spanish history in particular. It evokes southern Spanish history in the sense that it was originally built as a Moorish palace by Moorish rulers during their occupation of southern Spain. It was one of the Moors' most beautiful buildings, containing much of what classic Moorish architecture is known for: towers, decorative tiles, and courtyards with pools and fountains. Thus, one significant aspect of the Moorish heritage in southern Spain is found in the typical characteristics of the region's architecture—the tiled courtyards and the lovely fountains, for example. Once the Moors were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century, the Alhambra was inhabited by Spanish nobles, who added to the structure and its gardens.

Since the Alhambra has twenty-three towers on its primary outer walls, Machado says in section II that "Sunlight caught tower after tower"; he means here that, as Lorca was escorted out of Granada, the first rays of the sun were highlighting the tops of these towers. In stating that Lorca merits a tomb or memorial in the stunning Alhambra, Machado is saying that Lorca deserves a great honor. Equally important, he reminds the reader that Lorca embraced all of southern Spanish history; unlike others, he did not attempt to forget the Moorish past and heritage—to which, indeed, gypsy traditions can be connected, thanks to the gypsies' association with northern Africa.

Source: Carol Dell'Amico, Critical Essay on "The Crime Was in Granada," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Salvador J. Fajardo

In the following essay, Fajardo examines Machado's war sonnets—their sequence and "how they reflect Machado's own evolution in the context of the [Spanish] Civil War."

Antonio Machado wrote his nine war sonnets in 1938. They appeared together in the June 1938 issue (no. XIX) of Hora de España. On the whole the sonnets have not elicited particular interest, and when they have done so, their reception has been generally negative. In his book on poetry of commitment, Lechner dismisses them as not particularly interesting; Sánchez Barbudo in La poesía de Antonio Machado finds in them a "tono de énfasis declamatorio," while Lázaro Carreter, in his article "[e]l último Machado" says that Machado's poetry is not well suited to the demands of his "ímpetu político y bélico" (119–134). Generally speaking, these views highlight a series of problems related as much to our critical deficiencies as they are to the intrinsic interest of the poetry. Actually, we still tend to approach committed poetry with the same instruments that we apply to traditional lyrical expression, and our expectations also remain the same.

This difficult problem needs to be addressed with imagination and acumen, so as to lay to rest some of the hackneyed ideas that are regularly served up whenever we deal with committed poetry, or committed literature in general. In most cases—and I include Lechner and García de la Concha in my caveat—readers of committed poetry fail properly to contextualize the texts they address. As well, neither commitment to a cause, nor the demands of historical circumstance necessarily reduce the significance or impact of poetic communication. And perhaps it is this latter aspect of the poetry that one ought to focus on: communication First, what the poet is communicating and wether he does so effectively; second, with respect to the poet's own trajectory (that is to say, viewing the poetry as an expression of the speaker's condition at the time) what does it express? In this manner we can distinguish in committed poetry, and in Machado's sonnets, their role as action in a context, and action from a context. For one thing, communication as a whole can be viewed as an action; in this sense, communication "is not a neutral vehicle for the conveyance of messages, but rather an inherently political practice that constitutes the site of the struggle over what defines knowledge in our society." Certainly this applies to Machado's sonnets and to their role in conveying what defined knowledge for the poet during the Civil War.

In my approach to the sonnets I want to look at their disposition as a sequence, and seek to show how they reflect Machado's own evolution in the context of the Civil War. To my mind, the sequence expresses the sundering of the poet's self by the conflictive reality around him, as well as an effort to achieve a workable subjectivity overall, through a development that seeks to join his post-symbolist and engagé agencies. Students of Machado have located as early as the 1907 edition of Soledades, galerías y otros poemas the beginning of his transition away from symbolist/solipsistic individualism and toward the "yo fundamental" concerned with a collective task. In this latter position poetry becomes communicative action engaged in what Cerezo Galán describes as an "acto poético de conciencia," oriented toward "la búsqueda de una palabra esencial, que pueda convertirse en un vínculo común" (573). This concern will predispose the poet favorably toward socialist ideas which would respond to those "gotas de sangre jacobina" that he always felt he had. For Machado, human beings define themselves in dialogue, in contact with the "other." And this contact, or outward disposition, encompasses as well a relationship to the material world: "Mi sentimiento ante el mundo exterior, que aquí llamo paisaje, no surge sin una atmósfera cordial. Mi sentimiento no es, en suma, exclusivamente mío, sino más bien nuestro. Sin salir de mí mismo, noto que en mi sentir vibran otros sentires y que mi corazón canta siempre en coro aunque su voz sea para mí la voz mejor timbrada" (Los complementarious 41–42 & II, 102).

I see these views as an evolution away from Kant's radical notion of human freedom and toward an organic, expressivistic position such as that proposed by Gadamer or Charles Taylor. In fact, Machado's cordial understanding is quite in tune with Gadamer's notion that understanding transcends the distinction between subject and object. And because, following Heidegger, Dasein involves both a relationship to others and to past and future, Gadamer says: "Understanding is not to be thought of so much as an action of one's subjectivity, but of the placing oneself within a process of tradition, in which past and present are constantly fused (Gadamer, Truth and Method 258).

Charles Taylor argues that this hermeneutic tradition harks back to the romantic philosophy of language developed by Herder and Humboldt and continued, somewhat modified, by Heidegger (and, thereafter, Gadamer). For Taylor this involves the doctrine of expressivism, according to which language implies three aspects: first, "through language we can bring to explicit awareness what we formerly had only an implicit sense of"; second, "language enables us to put things in public space"; third, it "provides the medium through which some of our most important concerns, the characteristically human concerns, can impinge on us all." Language in general, Taylor says, is "a pattern of activity, by which we can express/realize a certain way of being in the world, that of reflective awareness, but a pattern which can only be deployed against a background which we can never fully dominate, and yet a background that we are never fully dominated by, because we are constantly re-shaping it" (Taylor, quoted by Callinicos, 98).

In this context, a reading of Machado's war sonnets shows them functioning:

1. as communicative action (putting things in public space);
2. as an exploration of human concerns in the context of the Civil War;
3. as an explicitation of Machado's trajectory from a personal to a public space and a realization thereby of his own split agency. This realization also relates to Gadamer's notion of understanding within a tradition.

It should be noted, first of all, that from 1936 to 1939 Machado was devoting most of his waning energies to the prose pieces that he regularly produced for Hora de España and La Vanguardia—by and large in his "Juan de Mairena" voice—, and for some public occasions when he was asked to speak. The upheaval of the war and his failing health were not propitious to the writing of poetry, and with his brother Manuel, on the other side, there was no question of writing any drama. Upon his removal to Valencia in November '36, however, Machado, impelled by outrage at the indiscriminate bombardment of Madrid, and by admiration at the courageous defense of the capital by its inhabitants, seems to regain some energy. In an interview for La Vanguardia in Valencia (November 27, 1936) he begins: "La guerra está en contra de la Cultura, pues destruye todos los valores espirituales.... Y es el pueblo quien defiende el espíritu de la cultura.... Ante esta contienda, el intelectual no puede inhibirse. Su mundo está en peligro. Ha de combatir, ser un miliciano" (Antonio Machado. Poeta en el exilio 258–59). This is the claim that he is putting forth about himself: he will be a "miliciano," combatting with his own weapons—words and ideas.

During the period proper when the sonnets are composed (from March 1938 on), Machado had begun to write political pieces for La Vanguardia. By writing the sonnets he was relying on his considerable "symbolic capital," to borrow Pierre Bourdieu's phrase. Machado was fully aware of the problems of writing verse under such circumstances; thus, when he sent the first four sonnets to Juan José Domenchina, editor of the Republic's "Servicio español de información," he says: "Le envío esos cuatro sonetos de circunstancias que quisieran estar a la altura de las circunstancias. Creo que dentro del molde barroco del soneto, contienen alguna emoción que no suelen tener los sonetos" (Whiston 150).

As communicative action, the sonnets represent Machado's "armas de combate." They are the most effective weapons that he could forge because they tap powerfully his "symbolic capital":

1. as poetry—and, of course, Machado's prestige was still very much the poet's;
2. as sonnets proper, because the genre is the most highly structured and demanding, the most clearly "poetic" form available.

This very form requires of the reader a meditative, reflective pause, a self-distancing from circumstance, parallel to that of the poet upon their composition. The striking contrast between the chosen form—which is like an invitation to meditative dialogue—and the circumstances in which the form is cast into the public forum, makes their functioning as action more patent, reminding the reader that the values the sonnets incorporate are theirs, that the Republic defends them. These values are the background to the conflict; they cannot be sensed, realized, unless one pauses and reflects. At the structural level this is the communicative action that the sonnets perform. This outward tension is matched by an inward within the sonnets proper: the clash between their form and their subject. For while the form tends generally toward a resolution through the logic of meditation—1. situation, 2. complication, 3. resolution—the subject, the multiple sunderings of the war, seems not liable to such containment. Yet the form holds and functions with great effectiveness, just as the values espoused by the Republic, by the people, should supersede the sunderings of the conflict.

It is my contention, as I mentioned earlier, that the sonnets constitute a structured whole and should be read as such. On the one hand sonnet V divides the sequence into two parts, I to IV, and VI to IX. Across these two parts individual sonnets echo one another as VI to II, VII to III, VIII to IV, and IX to I. The dual structure of the group shows a development from the general symbolic (or representative) in I to IV, to the specific circumstantial, in VI to IX. Sonnet V represents, and inscribes, the sundering of past and present, of friend and foe, of National and Republican spaces, of personal and public spheres and spaces as well. This sonnet also addresses the inner sundering of the poet between his post-symbolist and his committed voice, in the sense that his post-symbolist expressivism, while it realized the need for cordial understanding, had not fully integrated it or put it into practice. This the war will bring about. At the same time the sequence as a whole seeks to contain within its general disposition the development of the poet's voice, and to show it as a necessary evolution required by the needs of the conflict and the poet's assumption of his public responsibility as another "miliciano," one with intellectual weapons.

In his excellent book on Machado's war writings James Whiston does a reading of the poems in which he seeks to counteract the oft-expressed negative views I mentioned above. His interest is to uncover in these poems the poetic values to which Machado had accustomed his readers. On the whole I agree with Whiston, but my interest lies elsewhere. While I cannot go here into the analytic details of the sonnets, I do want to show how they conform to the pattern that I just suggested by looking at the main thrust of each piece. Also, I am less concerned in seeing what the sonnets are than seeing what they do. In fact I am convinced that, generally speaking, we would gain much if we looked at committed poetry less as expression and more as performance.

Each one of the sonnets seeks to overcome some sort of division, or conflict. The first, harking back to perennial values of resurgence and birth, contextualizes the war immediately under the aegis of a Spring which is "[m]ás fuerte que la guerra." Against the background of the telluric forces of nature, violence and death are aleatory. The menace from above, "el ominoso trimotor," can only be momentary, its rumbling overcome by the "agrio son de tu rabel florido." In contrast sonnet IX, "A Lister," appears to deal with specifically partisan concerns. Yet, though at this concrete level, there is a confrontation between a particular occasion and its background, where communication—in this case a letter—renews in the poet, some hope in the future. Lister's letter against the background of the war is like the "rabel florido" of the Spring against the sound of menacing airplanes. In the last two lines the poet specifically relates his own endeavor to that of the soldier: "Si mi pluma valiera tu pistola / de capitán, contento moriría." It is easy to think of the sonnet exclusively as a propaganda piece—though even in this sense it works rather well. But seen as the concluding installment in a development, and relating it to the first, the sonnet to Lister supports and confirms the implicit concerns of the collection: both the soldier and the poet are "milicianos" in a war that defends lasting human values, a "lucha santa sobre el campo ibero." As the final installment in the series the sonnet also marks the point of arrival for Machado, and inscribes the trajectory between his agency as poet and his agency as poet/"miliciano." The fusion, however, is not complete. The last two lines quote a voice, and stand out against the rest of the sonnet. The citation suggests a more active level of communication, a concrete situating of the piece in a public context, as if the meditative thrust of the sonnet as form were superseded by the requirements of public action. Also, the concluding distich's condition as quote authorizes their somewhat emphatic tone. Retroactively the sonnet, and its conclusion, accomplish for the sequence its performative role as a public statement that defines the poet's participation in the conflict.

In sonnet II the poet reconnects with his personal poetic past through imagery and direct reference: "perfil zancudo . . . de la cigüeña," "vuelo de ballesta," "campo empedernido," "Soria pura," "alto Duero," and "rojo Romancero," the latter being a reference to the Alvargonzález sequence. Like the surge of Spring in I this memory is contrasted with the war, again represented as the threat of an airplane and seen as a tragic re-enactment of the Alvargonzález violence: "¿o es, otra vez, Caín, sobre el planeta, / bajo tus alas, moscardón guerrero?" Again the poet actively puts his symbolic capital into play, engaging his entire poetic past in the present conflict. In sonnet VI the general threat of the airplane has gained specificity—"Alguien vendió la piedra de los lares / al pesado teutón, al hambre mora, / y al ítalo las puertas de los mares"—, rumbling against the emotion—laden memories of the poet's Sevillian childhood, the personalized, intimate remembrance of the man, as well as of the poet.

Sonnet III is a celebration of Valencian work and fecundity. The war is only implicitly referred to in the contrast between past and present: "feliz quiero cantarte como eras." Sonnet VII, on the other hand, emphasizes the enemy's destruction of such riches:

Manes del odio y de la cobardía 

cortan la leña de tus encinares, 

pisan la baya de oro en tus lagares, 

muelen el grano que tu suelo cría.

Poetry as communicative action in a time of conflict also seeks to do this. The Republic's defense of cultural values is then itself a "poetic" endeavor.

Sonnet IV stands sharply against the overall meditative tone of III. It focuses on the immediacy of death, individualizing the impact of the war through the death of a child and the mother's sorrow: "¿Duermes, o dulce flor de sangre mía? / El cristal del balcón repiquetea. /—¡Oh, fría, fría, fría, fría, fría!" Sonnet VIII recontextualizes IV in terms of the war. Spain is now the mother, confronted by her traitorous son (the sonnet's epigraph, "A otro conde don Julián" presumably refers to Franco). The accusation is now quite specific but is not described in terms of politics, rather as a betrayal of nurturing which transcends ideology, just as in sonnet IV the death of the child and the mother's sorrow transcend any partisanship.

Sonnet V is in many ways the keystone to the sequence. Its topic is the very division that it marks within the sequence between Machado's two agencies, his poetic past and his engaged present. These two components of the poet's self figure in the multiple sunderings addressed in the sonnet: the sentimental past, represented by Guiomar, sundered from the writing present by the war's "tajo fuerte," is also a poetic and a political prehistory to the conflict. The disjunction is also rendered in terms of space (Atlantic/Mediterranean) and as the cropping of a possible intimate future: "la flor imposible de la rama / que ha sentido del hacha el corte frío." The sonnet marks both a division and a transition. It divides the sequence of sonnets, as I mentioned above, between the first that inveigh against the war in general human terms, and the last four, where specific responsibilities are explored in a notably committed voice: on these terms, the poet embodies his country's sundering. The sonnet is transitional in the sense that it formally holds together the sequence and contributes to its overall thrust or development in terms of the personal history of the poet's voice toward political agency, a voice impelled by the requirements of the transformed public space into which it is thrown.

In this sense the division the sonnet incorporates foregrounds the new conditioning of this poetry as active, engaged communication, as communicative action. The sonnet sequence explicates Machado's own trajectory from general expressivism to commitment, and recontextualizes his poetry at this moment, as required by circumstance but also as rooted in his own evolution. In fact, with a more trenchant voice, the same concerns are transmitted here that sustained Machado's meditations on Castile, and inspired the prescient tragedy of "La tierra de Alvargonzález."

The particular structuration of the nine sonnets as a whole composes both a sundering and a communicative action, in terms of the poet's own vital trajectory, as well as in terms of his country's immediate past and present. Also, the sonnets' communicative intent wants to mold the readers' own response as a communication between past and present moments that does not forget but engages their difference. The reader of Machado would note the particular use made by the poet of his poetic pre-history as a selected past from his anguished present, as the past from which his present has evolved. They form different moments of the same being, seen from a present of conflict. Thus do the sonnets' communicative action seek to reconstruct personal and political sunderings as moments and spaces (the war zones) of a communicating whole: the struggle separates and identifies, for it leads us to search, in our own past and among our opponents, for the possibility of communication in conflict.

Source: Salvador J. Fajardo, "Machado's War Sonnets: The Sundered Self," in Nuevas perspectivas sobre el 98, edited by John P. Gabriele, Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 1999, pp. 63–71.

Elizabeth Scarlett

In the following essay, Scarlett examines the image and purpose of fountains in Machado's poetry, including its role as a "feminine counter-discourse" to "the poet's masculine discourse of solitude."

Readers of Antonio Machado's poetry have often selected the road as his most central image, a metaphor for life as a journey with no fixed destination (Zardoya 340). A close second, it has been suggested, is running water in a variety of forms (Ribbans 26). Water in motion conveys well Machado's conception of poetry as "la palabra esencial en el tiempo." The river and the ocean, representing the course of an individual life and the collective destiny of death, are permanent metaphors in Hispanic poetry thanks to Manrique, a debt that Machado acknowledges openly. The multiple meanings of fuente have a similarly rich history in Spanish poetry, especially in the divine wellsprings of mysticism: Juan de la Cruz's "fonte que mana y corre, aunque es de noche" and Teresa de Jesús's inner fountains build upon a Biblical tradition of the fountain as source of life and goodness, and hence, of divinity. Symbolist and modernista fountains are an intervening influence to which Machado also responds: they tend to pour out nostalgia musically against a motionless or silent background. Having absorbed these images, Machado develops his own set of associations for the fountain. I hope to clarify how this image contributes to the meaning of poems in which it appears, and to draw attention to a particular motivation that makes Machado's fountains uniquely conspicuous in his early poetry. This is his employment of the fountain as articulate water that offers a feminine counterdiscourse in opposition to the poet's masculine discourse of solitude.

Criticism of Machado has noted the capacity for speech enjoyed by the fountain in Soledades (1899–1907). As Zubiría asserts, "Ciertamente, las fuentes de Machado son manaderos de melancolía, y lo que cantan la tristeza de los amores perdidos, o el dolor de la existencia" (38). Alonso has suggested that the fountain embodies femininity in the fluidity of its water and masculinity in the stone construction that holds the water in place (147). Both Zubiría and Lapesa view the fountain represented in Machado's early poetry as the most vital and significant one. While fountains also appear in Campos de Castilla (1907–17), Nuevas canciones (1917–30), and the Cancionero apócrifo (1924–36), it is with decreasing frequency and prominence. The fountain is mentioned in twenty-two of the ninety-five poems contained in the expanded edition of Soledades. In contrast, the 152 poetic texts that compose Campos de Castilla include only three mentions, and only five of the 217 poems or poetic fragments of Nuevas canciones are graced with fountains.

The difference is more than one of quantity. The fountains of post Soledades volumes are usually more conventional; they are not gifted with the eloquence of earlier examples. They often blend in with the rest of the landscape. In a few instances they are distant echoes of the vocal fountains from before, but their clarity has diminished with repetition. This study will focus above all on the more significant fountains in Machado's first complete volume of poetry. Further examination of fountain imagery in Soledades shows that it substitutes for a suppressed part of the poetic self; the philosophical Other of the Noventayochistas aligns itself through the fountain with the otherness of repressed memories, silenced voices, and half-forgotten scenes and sentiments. In the network of associations that grows from one poem to the next, a feminine Other comes to speak through the dripping, laughing, or bubbling fountain. The poet assigns the gender that he is not (female) to the voice that reminds him of when he does not possess: love, or the past. This lost element varies from poem to poem. The use of gender is in keeping with the dichotomies of male/female, subject/object, civilization/nature, mind/body, day/night, and life/death that Beauvoir discerned at the foundation of patriarchal culture. The first term in each is the more familiar, comfortable, identifiable, rational, or controllable one from the point of view of patriarchy, or culture that takes the male subject as its center. The feminine that signals absence in opposition to the poet's presence, and past to his present, is found not only in his use of fountains but in a series of other images developed throughout Soledades: the phantoms, mysterious hands, and voices that guide him along the galleries of the soul.

While I seek to privilege the fountain as feminine voice springing from the poet's consciousness, this seme or sub-meaning of the image is connected to and bolstered by other semes that I will illustrate as well. Kristeva describes how the branching out of meanings and connotations from the symbol is one of the chief ways in which "art seems to bypass complacency and, without simply turning mourning into mania, secure for the artist and the connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing." The fountain, through the multiplicity of its associations, thus goes beyond the mere description of the lost Thing; naming alone does not help to transcend suffering. Along with prosody and identification with an all-forgiving ideal, the polyvalence of the sign and symbol ensures that the poetic artifice will stand on its own outside of the writer's psyche to make transitory beauty or the lost object of love more permanent. This polyvalence "unsettles naming and, by building up a plurality of connotations around the sign, affords the subject a chance to imagine the nonmeaning, or the true meaning, of the Thing" (97). Just as many of Kristeva's examples have to do with mourning for lost maternal love, we shall notice a strong maternal coloring of the memories brought to mind by the articulate fountain in Machado.

In this way, we find that the fountain as reminder of maternal nurture is closely related the fountain as projection of a feminine counterdis-course. This in turn is connected to the fountain of the childhood home and of nostalgia for that period, which for Machado necessarily entails a sense of the centrality of the fountain in Andalusian architecture and urban planning. The Andalusian fountain, reminiscent of the fountain as oasis in Islamic architecture, carries the added connotation of the harem fountain, which is activated by means of a few poems that engage in Hispano-Moorish orientalism. These timeless fountains are found alongside the fountain that keeps time, the Bergsonian water clock (clepsidra). The noria, or water wheel, signifies the drudgery that seems to govern human existence, and it heralds the poet's later concern for the socially oppressed. Another fountain that reminds the poet of mortality is the stagnant pool he situates in cemetery landscapes. This in turn is balanced in other poems by his reworking of the mystical fountain or source of eternal life in a way that incorporates existential anguish and doubt. We shall also find the fountain as reservoir of a nearly lost oral culture, entoning ancient rhymes and legends, and with an erotic shading, as a setting for chance romantic encounters. The provincial fountain that spouts monotonously contrasts with the fountain that represents the faculty of poetic creation and source of inspiration. This metapoetic fountain speaks in a feminine mode, turning the image into a concrete muse and bringing us full circle to the fountain as feminine Other normally repressed within the male subject's consciousness.

The flexibility of the image does not dilute its potency, but rather causes a chain of associations to be built, so that for the careful reader all fountains are present in each instance. Riffaterre incited a new appreciation of the importance of semes, semantic units that cluster to form sememes and underlie surface meanings in a series of poems, and Bousoño applied this to Machadian studies in his observation of bisemic image chains: those sequences of images in which a single seme, not necessarily the most obvious one, rises to the surface in each image because of the influence of others in the chain. At the same time, however, the multiplicity of associations in such images produces a continental deferral of ultimate meaning in such a way that the latter can never be concisely defined. Sesé noted that Machado's constant visualization of thought resulted in a criss-cross between mental and physical realities that was at bottom undecidable: "Parece como si el poets dudara entre los paisajes exteriores y la región secreta del alma. Se confunden a menudo, y siempre mantienen íntimas correspondencias" (58). Hence, I will clarify as many correspondences for the fountain as possible, as well as their interrelations, but I will not claim to have singled out the ultimate meaning of the image in the Machadian poetic universe.

The most autonomous of all his fountains is the one that awaits the poet behind the rusty gate of an old park in "Fue una clara tarde, triste y soñolienta" (VI). Here the author turns the fountain jet into something akin to Luis de León's vocal river in "Profecía del Tajo." At the end of the latter text, the river itself rears its head to spout ominous predictions of the Muslim Conquest at King Roderigo, prophecies that ring true in the light of ensuing history. "Fue una clara tarde" also endows a current of water with speech in an Iberian tradition that may date as far back as prehistoric river worship in areas settled by Celts. In contrast to the sibylline Tajo, however, Machado's fountain is a more private voice, and the subject about which it discourses is the poet's past compared to his recollection of it. Along with the narrator, we have unlocked a garden of things past: instead of future doom, as in Luis de León, the spirit that inhabits the fountain conjures up forgotten gloom from youthful days. As part of the masculine/feminine tension in the poem, the fountain cheerfully but insistently offers up these remembrances of unhappiness to the poet, who walks away in a manner resembling defeat.

The animism that imbues the fountain with life makes it a mirror reflection of the narrator, who engages in dialogue with it. But like the reverse symmetry of the mirror, the fountain reflects the opposite of what the poet would like to believe about his past. There is no recovery of lost happiness to be hoped for, since even that happiness is an illusion invented by the poet. The lighthearted mood of this interlocutor also strikes a contrast with the melancholic male subject. The attribution of a feminine gender to the fountain ("hermana la fuente") makes the opposition of this voice to the poet's complete, and hints at another source of solace besides deceptive nostalgia. Since the singing and rhyming fountain can be seen as a generator of verse and hence a poet in her own right, then writing itself is the genuine solace that reveals the falsity of the nostalgia in which the poet is submerged. In this way, the fountain as feminine counterdis-course combines with the fountain as muse and as metapoetic commentator in this poem. The poet's most explicit desire (recovery of past happiness) may be denied, but this second source of pleasure is offered in its stead by the feminine Other or sister fountain.

After the fourth verse, which introduces the fountain that sounds or rings, the image emerges again in the tenth, where it can be heard singing couplets of bubbles. The inanimate object is not only given a subjectivity; it assumes the role of poet parallel to the author, who at the same time creates the verses sung by the water. The play of mirrors becomes clearer when the dialogue between lyric voice and Other begins, and the poet and fountain address each other as brother and sister:

La fuente cantaba: ¿Te recuerda, hermano 

un sueño lejano mi canto presente? 

*** 

—No sé qué me dice to copla riente 

de ensueños lejanos, hermana la fuente. (431)

The symmetry of this mirror reflection is upset by discrepancy between the two memories. While the poet expects to hear a happy, forgotten story of the madness of love, the fountain goads his memory to convince him that the sorrow he feels in the present is the way he felt then as well:

—Yo no sé leyendas de antigua alegría, 

sino historias viejas de melancholía.

Fue una clara tarde del lento verano.... 

Tú venías solo con tu pena, hermano; 

tus labios besaron mi linfa serena, 

y en la clara tarde, dijeron tu pena.

Dijeron tu pena tus labios que ardían; 

la sed que ahora tienen entonces tenían. (432)

At this point the poet bids the fountain goodbye forever, as the bitterness of recognition is harder to bear than his own melancholy. Sesé notes, in addition to the modernista preciosity of the word "linfa" for water, how the fountain represents here, as it does elsewhere in Machado, "la parte de su alma o de su espíritu en que se alían la lucidez y la ansiedad" (145); he appears to no longer wish to acknowledge this part of himself that has crossed over into the element of water (141). The reaction of the poet's inner state to the elements of the outside world is similar to the nearly chemical reaction in "Crear fiestas" (XXVIII), in which party revelers perceive a chillingly mortal affinity between their flesh and the dampness of the earth. In the latter poem, Ortega detected a trace of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who held that some elements that compose each substance are shared by every other substance in the world, creating a mutual understanding and sympathy among all things, as well as all beings: "Así, en el hombre hay agua, tierra, fuego y aire e infinitas otras materias" (351). The water of the fountain brings out a lucidity and longing already present but dormant in the narrator of "Fue una clara tarde," in the form of a feminine spirit held in check by a solitary and nomadic male point of view. When the narrator leaves behind the feminine voice he cannot bear to hear, he leaves behind the solace of the waters that assuaged his thirst in that earlier time. Given the gender of the fountain, it would not be overextending the image to see in the "linfa" once kissed by the poet a faint reference to the sustenance of mother's milk. Upon leaving this life-giving source of solace behind, he finds himself alone amidst "el silencio de la tarde muerta." While this maternal aspect of the fountain is secondary here to the more accessible sub-meanings of feminine-voiced Other, muse, and metapoetic commentator, we shall find it closer to the surface in other texts.

The feminine voice of Machado's poetics privileges changelessness and cohesion. In effect, the fountain's outpouring of monotony negates the passage of time; time passes and the world changes only in the eyes of the male subject. The afternoon of the poet's visit is identical, for the fountain, to the distant afternoon to which they both refer with differing meanings. The dialogue between poet and fountain acknowledges the multiplicity of voices with which Machado writes. At least one of those voices, although not the one more closely identified with the author, is concerned with what remains the same. The more recognizably human and masculine voice is the one that wanders through the world, is affected by the passage of time, and would silence the fountain's perfect recall. When the feminine Other dispels the male narrator's unfounded nostalgia, she must be suppressed, but this results in the silence and sense of death that seal the poem. The male subject may find solitude preferable to the maddening loquacity of this nonstop truth-teller. Still, there is no denying who is right, and when the poet uses his key to lock the nagging presence out of his consciousness, the sense of closure is not at all complete. Sister-fountain leaks out of confinement in the garden and into a score of other poems in Soledades, often washing off the debris that had covered half-buried truths. This runs parallel to the semiotic impulse itself that seeks through the overgrowth of associations of the poetic image to compensate for loss or absence of the object of love.

The next most memorable fountain in Machado displays traits of femininity that together make of it a feminine Other, but it has less of a speaking part and is less autonomous in role. "El limonero lánguido suspende" (VII) brings out the passive side of the fountain as recipient and reservoir (a secondary aspect in "Fue una clara tarde"). In contrast to the talkative Other of sister fountain, this is more of a nurturing mother who is not altogether present, harmonizing with the overall tone of pleasant nostalgia troubled by a note of uncertainty in this text. Lapesa found that there are only a few constants in Machado's use of water imagery: the opposition of thirst to quenching water and the representation of the flow of time and therefore of life (394). "El limonero lánguido" has a fountain that is not only vital flow but source of life, bringing out the denotation of fuente that is more of a figurative sense in English. The poet feels warm and in familiar surroundings; he sees golden fruit dreaming at the bottom of a crystaline fountain basin, and remembers sinking his hands in to grasp the enchanted fruit as a child, the same fruit he now sees at the bottom. The maternal presence is felt through semes that achieve prominence in image chains: the warmth of the afternoon, the rustle of a gown, a virginal fragrance that is absent, and another, delicious fragrance that is present in memory. The latter emanates from his mother's potted plants, repeating the original image of uterine containment found in the fountain basin. Unlike the womb, however, the fountain basin makes its fruit clearer and more visible ("la fuente limpia . . . los frutos de oro") than the fruit that remains outside of its reach on the dusty branch. If sister fountain was the feminine Other of "Fue una clara tarde," mother fountain inhabits "El limonero lánguido suspende" just as powerfully though less tangibly. Both images elucidate past and forgotten feelings for the male narrator. Mother fountain does not speak directly to the poet; hence the air is pervaded by traces of her rather than her actual presence:

En el ambiente de la tarde flota 

ese aroma de ausencia, 

que dice al alma luminosa: nunca, 

y al corazón: espera. (433)

It may be useless to await the return of the lost Thing, but the fountain enables the poet to remember when possession of it was still possible:

Que tú me viste hundir mis manos puras 

en el agua serena, 

para alcanzar los frutos encantados 

que hoy en el fondo de la fuente sueñan.... (433)

Not only the site of poetic genesis, the fountain as transparent womb makes it possible to break the water in reverse and return to some semblance of the harmony of the mother-child bond. Even if the lost Thing cannot be regained and perhaps was never possessed in the first place, invoking it through the fountain leads to the comforting recognition that time has not changed the serenity, plenitude, and purity of stored maternal memory.

Several other motivations probably add to the vividness of these two fountains. The Machado family rented a dwelling for several years during Antonio's early childhood in the Palacio de las Dueñas in Sevilla: the rooms let out onto an exemplary Andalusian patio replete with fountain and plants. The esthetic sensibility developed by the adult poet shapes the childhood memory of idealized maternal love into an archetype of lost paradise, as Herrero has affirmed regarding "El limonero lánguido suspende": the fountain is artistry itself working to perfect and poeticize the otherwise murky raw materials of reminiscence (567). One step removed from the feelings that inspired the poem, artistry in the form of the fountain can also cascade with laughter over the poet's suffering, as it does in "Fue una clara tarde." We see the connection between the fountain, blissful closeness to the mother; and poetic craft even more clearly in "Si yo fuera un poeta" (LXVII), in which the poet wishes he could appropriate the fountain's voice to write a poem dedicated to his beloved. The imagined fountain-voiced poem would express how much she reminds him of the happiness he felf when viewing the world from his mother's arms.

Criticism has also discerned an influential intertextual relation between these two poems and Verlaine's "Après trois ans," from Poèmes saturniens. Similar associations arise here among the memory, an enclosed city park, a fountain, and a statue. The fountain sounds as an inarticulate voice of continuity, although the ending of the poem subverts the changelessness with images of decay: "Nothing has changed. I have seen it all again....The spurt of water still makes its silvery murmur." Machado clearly activates the potentiality of this intertext by making the fountain a living form of otherness, and assigning it to an enclosed corner of his own consciousness. His is the fountain of the Andalusian inner patio rather than that of the Parisian city street. Not only was there was no way for Verlaine to lock the door behind him when leaving; his park fountain is less charged with remembrances of the childhood home. This may partially account for the way that his barely articulate fountain does not quite metamorphose into the feminine Other of Machado's poetry.

As part of an Andalusia family home, the fountain also bears strong connections to oasis elements in Hispano-Arabic architecture. Where Verlaine evokes harem scenes from more of an external, Orientalist perspective, Machado need only invoke the multicultural heritage that existed in his childhood environment. The Arabic echoes in Machado's fountains are heard clearly in "Era una mañana y abril sonreía" (XLIII). The poet opens his windows at dawn and the fragrance of an orchard wafts inside:

Como sonreía la rosa mañana 

al sol del oriente abrí mi ventana; 

y en mi triste alcoba penetró el oriente 

en canto de alondras, en risa de fuente 

y en suave perfume de flora temprana. (458)

At the conclusion of the poem, we find once again that the poet does not share in the fountain's laughter; in fact, here he feels mocked by it. He asks whether all this refreshing beauty means that happiness is approaching his house, and the morning itself responds, "la alegría . . . pasó por tu puerta. Dos veces no pasa." While it is true that the East is where the sun rises and hence the only logical point on the compass to be addressed in a poem about the morning, other elements enhance the connection between the East and Hispano-Arabic Orientalism. There is something of the Generalife in this fragrant garden that invades the poet's room from the East. The un-collected but contemporaneous "Cenit" (S. III) has a talking "Oriental" fountain that warns the poet to listen carefully so that he will remember its refreshing laughter "en los tristes jardines de Occidente" (743). Once again there is the temporal dimension of the East as morning and the West as afternoon or dusk, but the relation between the fountain and Hispano-Moorish architecture is still unmistakable. This fountain also verbalizes the connection between its symbolism and that of the other most prominent image, the road: "Yo soy la eterna risa del camino." The Eastern or Hispano-Arabic association is strengthened by other poems with Andalusian referents. In "Fantasía de una noche de abril" (LII), the poet wanders, led more by the wine he has imbibed than by his own sense of direction, down disorienting Moorish streets in a city that is either Sevilla or Granada (he is not sure himself). Eventually he is drawn to a beautiful woman held captive behind a window grate, and he woos her with assurances that he possesses "la copla más suave, más dulce y más sabia / que evoca las claras estrellas de Arabia / y aromas de un moro jardín andaluz." Of course, this scene turns out to be a dream from which the poet awakens, only to find,

Ya muerta la luna, mi sueño volvía 

por la retorcida, moruna calleja. 

El sol en Oriente reía 

su risa más vieja. (467)

Thanks to the network of associations among these texts with "Eastern" influences, we see that the Moorish presence can inhabit either the fountain or the sun, and that it casts an omniscient glance, not unlike that of an ironic bystander, on the melancholy of the speaking subject. The cultural Other within Spain, the often denied persistence of Islamic elements in a culture supposedly returned to Christian homogeneity centuries ago, is another voice that haunts the recesses of Machado's consciousness and speaks through the fountain. Whether feminized or Islamicized, the image maintains strong ties to the Andalucía of Machado's youth, contrary to the claim that his writing soon became thoroughly Castilianized to the exclusion of Southern elements (Peers 30). In fact, two poems burlesque or bemoan the false adoption of Southern signifiers by Castilians. On passing by a florist shop in "A un naranjo y a un limonero"(LIII), he sympathizes with a potted orange tree and lemon tree, both sadly out-of-place in the capital: "¿quién os trajo a esta castellana tierra . . . hijos de los campos de la tierra mía?" (467). The poetic voice strikes an unusual note of personal animosity in "Jardín" (LI), apparently provoked by the sight of pretentious Andalusin kitsch. As usual, however, the fountain has the last laugh:

¡Malhaya tu jardín! . . . Hoy me parece 

la obra de un peluquero, 

con esa pobre palmerilla enana, 

y ese cuadro de mirtos recortados.... 

y el naranjito en su tonel.... El agua 

de la fuente de piedra 

no cesa de reír sobre la concha blanca. (464)

Thus the Hispano-Arabic fountain is linked to the feminine Other that speaks through other fountains. Both are examples of cultural Others that cannot be wholly suppressed and find an outlet equated with timelessness and distance (at times, ironic distance) from the male subject. The Hispano-Arabic fountain is also embedded in the theme of the captive woman who may at any time beckon to the male wanderer from her home or harem. The Islamicized fountain, like the feminine one, is to be found in a garden or oasis that hints at a lost paradise. Its pleasing musicality or transparency gives voice to what had previously been hidden, denied, or forgotten.

The fountain as wellspring of divinity may seem a very different symbol; its literary antecedents are distinct and profound. However, it shares an element with the female-voiced fountain because of the cultural connection between femininity and spirituality, which had become more pronounced by the end of the nineteenth century. Male and female spheres of activity had become polarized: the male was the public and secular one, while the female sphere was to be devoted not only to the home but to the cultivation of the soul. As Western culture became more markedly secular in the century leading up to Machado's writing, the spiritual turned into a form of cultural otherness that receded from the center of patriarchy and hence became aligned with the feminine. It makes sense, then, that Machado's restless spiritual quest should take the form of fountain imagery for his relation of the fountain to the feminine as well as for the traditional alliance in scripture and other religious writings between the fountain and spirituality.

"Anoche cuando dormía" (LIX) exhibits a clear intertextual dialogue with mystical uses of fountain imagery by both Santa Teresa de Jesús and San Juan de la Cruz; they in turn find their roots in the Bible. McDermott calls attention to the enigmatic tone of this intertextuality: "The absence of the hidden or dead God/Christ is made more poignant by the echoes of the ghost voices of the religious and mystic poets of the past" (4). In a deconstructionist study, Cardwell traces the enigma to the impossibility of anchoring oneself to any sort of metaphysics by means of the artistic word, since words produce meaning only by difference or deferral and not by direct correspondence (33). Whether the cause of the poet's uncertainty is linguistic or not, the fountain is again the vehicle for the otherness repressed within himself, and signifies a desire for what has been lost or what was never possessed:

Anoche cuando dormía 

soñé, ¡bendita ilusión!, 

que una fontana fluía 

dentro de mi corazón. 

Di, ¿por qué acequia escondida, 

agua, vienes hasta mí, 

manantial de nueva vida 

en donde nunca bebí? (471)

Unlike the feminized and Islamicized fountains, the divine wellspring strikes the speaker as unfamiliar, and he admits never having tasted of it. Along with the beehive, the sun, and the Godhead that follow, it is defined as an illusion, one fervently to be hoped for but definitely out of waking grasp. Still, the quest is so imperative that the poet appears willing to pursue it no matter how dim the prospect of success. The modern poet (unlike some of his postmodern readers) has not resigned himself to the schism between signifiers and significance; he would rather peer into the abyss that they have created and await any new images that might materialize from it. What separates Machado's fountain from the mystical font of San Juan de la Cruz, in addition to the former's less tangible existence, is that it is a more complex image, tied in with the associations that have arisen in one text after another. San Juan's nocturnal font, like much of his imagery, has the raw semiotic pulsation of the sacred and the erotic intermingled. Machado writes already with the self-conscious excess and entanglements of modernity. The abulia noventayochista of his poetic temperament robs him of the drive to transform the fountain into a gushing forth of the sensual and the divine.

Elsewhere in Soledades we are likely to see the fountain that pours out sheer provincial monotony ("En medio de la plaza y sobre tosca piedra" [XCIV]), or one that symbolizes an extinguished love ("¿Mi amor? . . . ¿Recuerdas, dime?" [XXXIII]), an eerie twilight ("El sol es un globo de fuego" [XXIV]) or death itself ("Las ascuas de un crepúsculo morado"[XXXII]). In the uncollected "La fuente" (S. I), Machado meditates self-consciously about what the image means to him. The conclusion emphasizes rumination and stagnation, and the poet's wish to lose himself in the fountain water:

Hay amores extraños en la historia 

de mi largo camino sin amores, 

y el mayor es la fuente, 

cuyo dolor anubla mis dolores, 

cuyo lánguido espejo sonriente 

me desarma de brumas y rencores 

*** 

Y en ti soñar y meditar querría 

libre ya del rencor y la tristeza, 

hasta sentir, sobre la piedra fría, 

que se cubre de musgo mi cabeza. (742)

The loss of self in the fountain implies more of a death drive than an erotic fusion of self and world. There is no avoiding the thanatopsis in some of Machado's duskier and more decayed fountains. Water stagnating in marble basins, symbolizing life-giving force held captive, is present in several of these darker poems (Albornoz 9). While this may stand in contrast to the mother fountain and divine wellspring, finding the feminine associated with death is actually the complement in patriarchy to the feminine as cradle of mankind. As Beauvoir noted, the origin and the end of man's existence are often intermingled in the significance assigned the feminine by a male-centered worldview. The funerary fountain, no longer the metapoetic voice of creativity, is conspicuously silent in "Hoy buscarás en vano" (LXIX):

Está la fuente muda, 

y está marchito el huerto. 

Hoy sólo quedan lágrimas 

para llorar. No hay que llorar, ¡silencio! (478)

The fountain as funerary architecture is one extreme along the spectrum in which the image works as a keeper of time, a Bergsonian durée clock that detains the minutes at will, while vitality seems to rush out of the prematurely aged poet. He equates his spent youth with the shedding of tears, which he relates in turn to the dripping of a fountain ("Coplas mundanas" [XCV]). More explicitly, he introduces the clepsydra or water clock in "Daba el reloj las doce" (XXI), and something of this temporal dimension lies latent in every Machado fountain. In this text silence speaks paradoxically to the anxious poet to calm his fear of death: his hour has not yet come, and when it does he will not see the last drop fall from the water clock. Instead, he will merely wake up refreshed one day on the opposite shore. Thus the sea as symbol of death, a debt he acknowledges to Manrique ("Nuestras vidas son los ríos" [LVIII]), fits into the semiotics of water as the fountain does. When the two appear together, the seme of mortality rises to the surface in both, and the fountain's role as keeper of time whose existence is unaffected by time (a condition shared by sister fountain) is foremost.

Running water is ideally suited to encode the passage of time as Machado conceives of it. His adherence to Bergsonian philosophy has a profound influence on his poetics, as several critics have explained. For Bergson, only intuition could capture the deepest truths of life in their perpetual process of transpiring or becoming. Machado adopted this intuition as the sense that offers us "una 'íntima revelación de la vida' y asigna a la lírica la misión paralela de captar la existencia y el tiempo en su perpetuo fluir" (Cano Ballesta 80). Therefore the fountain merits a privileged place as literary symbol, because it opposes the coursing spiritual essence of water to the petrified spirit of the material world, the marble or stone that shapes and is sculpted by the current ("Los árboles conservan" [XC]). The fountain as measure of the flow of time can also be adapted to measure the expending of energy, as occurs in "La noria" (XLVI), in which a mule with blinders turns the water wheel interminably and in time to the water's couplets. The Bergsonian idea of duration is emphasized in this workaday fountain by the never-ending circle the mule must trudge around it. The text also contains a spark of the poet's incipient concern for the oppressed in the face of indifference. Here it is divine indifference, but later this develops into the indifference of other social classes toward the oppressed. God the divine poet seems to have set the water wheel in motion ingeniously, but takes no further interest in it.

As mentioned before, Kristeva lists prosody and the polyvalent sign as two of the three most important techniques for making the poetic artifice transcend mourning for the lost Thing and achieve a sense of permanence. Certainly, poetic form and polysemia not only function in each poem of Soledades, but each influences the other in such a fundamental way that it is hard to distinguish which one is primary. Observing some of the pairings of prosody and type of fountain is therefore instructive. Most of the more ironic or somber examples we have been examining emanate from hendecasyllabic forms (although the hexasyllables of "La noria" and the octosyllables of "Anoche cuando dormía" are exceptions). If we turn to the lively cuarletas of "Yo escucho los cantos" (VIII), a different facet of the image arises. Here, rhythmic hexasyllables that imitate children's jingles combine with the theme of childhood lore as perpetuator of a collective unconscious that repeats vague stories of vivid sadness. A parallel is developed between the children singing poorly remembered ballads and the fountain telling its own unintelligible story over and over, in apparent solidarity with human emotion:

Jugando, a la sombra 

de una plaza vieja, 

los niños cantaban....

La fuente de piedra 

vertía su eterno 

cristal de leyenda. (434)

Thus the singsong rhythms of "Yo escucho los cantos" accompany or create the formation of yet another identity: the fountain as voice of childhood and hence of a half-vanished oral culture. Like that of the feminine Other, this voice seems to reside in the recesses of the male subject's consciousness. It is also associated with what is changeless and cohesive in human existence and so lies outside of the domain of time. The connection to Machado's poetics is as evident as it is in "El limonero lánguido suspende," for here the fountain represents pure feelings devoid of surrounding circumstance or anecdote (Ribbans 26). The fountain water washes away the sediment of fact so that only truth (the emotion to be conveyed) remains. The form itself, with its many truncated verses, staccato rhythms, and echoing rhymes, blends the prosodic qualities of children's voices with those of gurgling water. Similarly, in "¡Verdes jardinillos!" (XIX), the fountain in hexasyllabic form is more dynamic than in longer verse forms: a place where chance encounters with young women, who are usually confined to their homes and domestic tasks, may take place. The algae on this buoyant fountain join other images of fertility on an early autumn afternoon. Nostalgia for the past ways of men and women, inhabiting largely segregated spaces and mingling only at certain approved spots, motivates this poem. It includes a sidelong glance at the communal fountain as a public place affording relative freedom to women whose movements were otherwise circumscribed.

Despite the variety of significances to which the fountain is attached, I hope to have demonstrated in a comprehensive way that there are a few constants that link the image from one text to another. These interrelated associative meanings had not hitherto been thoroughly studied, but understanding of them enhances interpretation of Soledades. They include the fountain as feminine counterdis-course in dialogue with the male subject, calling his attention to what lies hidden in the recesses of his mind. The male discourse of wandering, dreamy solitude in Soledades is contrasted with a feminine counterdiscourse that not only provides company but emphasizes commonalities that link the poet to the rest of humanity, not the least of which are time, mortality, a hoped-for divinity, the mother / child bond, and the communication made possible by poetry as the purest and most transparent form of language.

In this role, the fountain may speak as a teasing sister or it may evoke the memory of maternal nurture. The feminine Other exists outside of the constraints of time but lacks the mobility of the male subject. From what is known about ego formation thanks to theorists like Kristeva, I believe that the image evolved out of the internalization of an idealized memory of the mother, which was then projected outward in the process of visualization of thought for which Machado is well known. The fountain of the childhood home is also associated with the Andalusian fountain with pronounced Hispano-Arabic connotations; on a collective level this fountain brings a cultural Other into the mainstream of consciousness. The Eastern fountain is an ironic onlooker and laughing companion along the roads of life. The fountain unites the feminine with the spiritual in the image of the divine well-spring, a less concrete artifice that can only be dreamed or imagined. The funerary fountain is related to the dripping water clock, the first symbolizing entropy or stagnation and the second Bergsonian flow of time. We have seen how the fountain aligned with the origin of life (the maternal body) is not far in terms of cultural logic from the fountain signifying death. The fountain that speaks with the voice of children incites awareness of an Other, like the feminine one, that has been internalized but is normally repressed. In giving voice to what the male subject usually perceives as inaccessible, these fountains broaden the range of essential emotions that the poet may reveal in his writing. For this reason, the fountain symbolizes the poetic craft itself in many poems, and engages the narrator in metapoetic dialogue that hints at writing as the key to solace for the subject immersed in suffering and loneliness.

Source: Elizabeth Scarlett, "Antonio Machado's Fountains: Archeology of an Image," in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 113, 1998, pp. 305–23.

Susan J. Joly

In the following essay, Joly employs the theories of Freud and Jung to explore the role that dream, imagination, and the unconscious play in Machado's poetry and one's understanding of it.

Marcel Brion, speaking about the dream in the poetry of Novalis [the pen name of the German poet Friedrich Leopold (1772–1801), who influenced later exponents of European romanticism] said, "El sueño se mueve en dimensiones diferentes; es contemplación mística, intuición profética y revelación de verdades sublimes que no podrían ser enunciadas ni comunicadas en estado de vigilia" (Cerezo27). ["Vigilia" refers here to a state of complete consciousness.] The same statement could easily apply to Machado's poems. Within them, contemplation, intuition (which Jung incidentally has called "perception via the unconscious" (Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 282) and the revelation of the unconscious provide the depth for which his verse is known.

Indeed, fundamental to the prevalent element of mystery in Machado's works is the dream, into whose depths the poet journeys, eager to tap the knowledge hidden within. Many of Machado's poems can be traced back to this basic dreamlike quality, explaining why he has been called the "poeta en sueños." Note, for example, the oneiric quality of the approaching twilight in the following verses: "Blancos fantasmas lares / van encendiendo estrellas. / Abre el balcón. La hora / de una ilusión se acerca.... La tarde se ha dormido / y las campanas sueñan" (Alvar 105).

In this paper I will examine the dream within Machado's verse, first by defining the dream in accordance with the poet's own vision of it. I will then justify my reasons for using psychoanalytical theories of analysis, referring to the two thinkers most famous for their views on dream interpretation. After giving a background on these theories, I will justify my own approach, as it relates to the dream within Machado's poetry. In addition to studying the role of the dream, I will also focus on the role the imagination plays (with its related element of fantasy) in the revelation of the poet's unconscious.

Dreams

It is essential that one note from the outset the nature of the dream to which Machado refers. Rather than being merely the action of a passive sleeper, the poet's dream is usually, instead, that of an awake, reflective, vigilant person, as illustrated in the following selections from Proverbios y cantares (in Alvar's edition): "Despertad, cantores; / acaben los ecos, / empiecen las voces" (XXIX 293). "Si vivir es bueno, / es mejor soñar, y mejor que todo / madre, despertar" (CLXI 303). "Tras el vivir y el soñar, / está lo que más importa: / despertar" (LIII 298). "Tres palabras suenan / al fin de tres sueños / y las tres desvelan" (437).

Christopher Caudwell, in Illusion and Reality, differentiates the dream from the daydream, saying that the daydream contains more reality and more possibility. It also lacks "the wild extravagances or abrupt transitions of the dream" (209). Moreover, Caudwell continues, in the daydream man adapts himself to reality rather than the other way around, as in the dream (209).

Carl Cobb defines Machado's dream as a purposeful daydream or "state of intense reverie" (49), often involving the faculty of memory. He states that "for Machado, to be 'en sueños' is a mental state the poet pursued and achieved in his most inspirational waking hours" (49). Machado himself believed that the dream of sleep has never produced anything of significance. For him, "los poemas de nuestra vigilia, aun los menos logrados, son más originales y más bellos y, a las veces, más disparatados que los de nuestros sueños" (Obras, poesia y prosa 394). Whether occurring during actual hours of sleep or during the waking hours as in a reverie, the dream is, notwithstanding, one of the most important ways to learn about the unconscious processes. Hence psychoanalytic theories regarding the dream may be used as a tool toward better comprehension of the poet's verses containing reverie.

Although this study involves a psychoanalytical perspective, one cannot say that Machado himself intentionally approaches his dreams from a psychological vantage point. However, this being said, it does not follow that the reader cannot utilize psychoanalytical studies on the dream in order to achieve an original and different interpretation of Machado's dreams, as well as of his "modus operandi." These theories may also help answer the question: "What else could this dream represent that the poet may not have openly stated or admitted?"

Of course, one cannot discuss the dream from a psychological point of view without mentioning the two psychoanalysts renowned for their theories on the dream—Jung and Freud. Although both agreed on several points regarding dream interpretation, it is their differences of opinion which remain prominent. Both believe there is an area of the psyche in which elements are stored, hidden from the conscious. Thoughts or wishes which may be repressed are then manifested through symbols and images. As Jung says in Man and His Symbols, "Thus far, nobody can say anything against Freud's theory of repression and wish fulfillment as apparent causes of dream symbolism" (27). Where Jung disagrees is in the content of the repression. Freud believed the cause of the repression lay in sexual trauma. Jung told Freud of numerous cases of neurosis in his practice in which motives other than sexuality were the prime influence. To Jung's chagrin, Freud continued to find sexuality as the only cause.

Another salient point of difference is Jung's rejection of Freud's dream-interpretation method known as "free association"—whereby the patient is allowed to discuss anything that enters his/her mind, in order to bring to light those repressed elements. Freud views the dream mostly as a means of determining one's "complexes," that is, "repressed emotional themes that can cause constant psychological disturbances or even, in many cases, the symptoms of a neurosis" (Man and His Symbols 27). Jung, however, believes that the complexes could be determined just as well by other means, i.e. contemplation of a crystal ball, an abstract painting, an inkblot test, or even during seemingly trivial conversation. Jung determined, therefore, that the dream must have some deeper significance than Freud had attributed to it.

According to Jung, the problem with Freud's method is that the dream is not given the importance it merits. In fact, instead of confronting the dream's contents, attempts are made to escape them. With Freud's free association, the dream for its own sake becomes subordinate to complexes, thus leading one away from the much more significant content of the dream. In Jung's The Symbolic Life he says of Freud's method:

I no longer followed associations that led far afield and away from the manifest dream-statement. I concentrated rather on the actual dream-text as the thing which was intended by the unconscious, and I began to circumambulate the dream itself, never letting it out of my sight, or as one turns an unknown object round and round in one's hands to absorb every detail of it.... It is chiefly and above all fear of the unexpected and unknown that makes people eager to use free association as a means of escape. (190, 192)

With regard to Machado's use of the dream, I find a Jungian approach to be more plausible than a Freudian one for several reasons. The first reason for the Jungian approach stems from his belief that a dream is not necessarily reducible to negative components. Surely the unconscious contains more than elements of sexual repression or fantasy, more than resentments, or harmful aggressions and instincts. Gregory Zilboorg in Sigmund Freud: His Exploration of the Mind of Man says of Freud's concept of the unconscious: "It is a repository of volcanic forces and dammed-up, twisted psychological energies" (20). These forces are primarily seen as negative, harmful or unhealthy ones.

Jung, in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, contends that Freud almost wants to see the weakness in everyone, the flaw, "the unadmitted wish, the hidden resentment, the secret, illegitimate fulfillment of a wish distorted by the 'censor'" (45–6). Jung finds that by concentrating only on the weak spots, individuation and healing are prevented. In Freud, the unconscious is not treated as a potentially salubrious mechanism but rather as something which hinders one's psychological well-being: "Every position is undermined by a psychological critique that reduces everything to its unfavourable or ambiguous elements, or at least makes one suspect that such elements exist" (45–6).

Jung's unconscious, in contrast, involves much more than destructive instinctual energies, extending itself to include all perceptions, intuitions, thoughts, deductions and inductions. It not only contains the past, such as distant memories, but also that which is new and original.

Obviously, the matter of creativity, hardly a destructive force, is relevant and inherent to the study of any poet. The dream can thus also become a source of positive inspiration for poetry, and give fresh ideas and insights to other aspects of life. An example of the latter is found in organic chemistry, in which Friedrich Kekulé's (1829–1896) dream (described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica) of the serpent grabbing its tail led him to the discovery of the cyclic nature of aromatic compounds such as benzene (748–49). This chemist's belief in the power of the vigilant dream, or daydream, parallels Machado's. Kekulé comments: "Let us learn to dream, gentlemen; then perhaps we shall find the truth. But let us be aware of publishing our dreams till they have been tested by the waking understanding" (Pine 6).

A second reason for favoring Jung is the mentioned attempt of Freud to escape or reduce the actual dream images to habitual complexes instead of utilizing these symbols, in Jung's terms, "to know and understand the psychic life-process of an individual's whole personality" (Man and His Symbols 28–29). A key word here is "whole," since, as mentioned numerous times, balance between the unconscious and conscious is of utmost importance in joining the fragments of the personality. Jung finds Freud to be one-sided in his view of the unconscious, calling him "blind toward the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the unconscious" (Memories, Dreams, Reflections 152). Everything in the unconscious consists of two parts; thus Freud only deals with one half of the whole.

For Jung, central to dream analysis is what William James terms "the fringe of consciousness," which Jung defines as "the almost invisible roots of conscious contents, i.e., their subliminal aspects" (The Symbolic Life 209). This "fringe" acts as an intermediary between the conscious and unconscious, closing the gap between them. A chasm that is too wide may result in neurosis or "lead to an artificial life far removed from healthy instincts, nature, and truth" (209). Jung then believes that dreams are a manner of re-establishing balance between the conscious and unconscious, as in the individuation process. Machado's vigilant dream likewise is a balance between the conscious and unconscious, its contents rising from the unconscious although the dreamer is aware, awake and vigilant.

Thus Jung's method of dream analysis, because of its direct confrontation with topics clearly contained within the dream, entails an undeviating, more inquisitive approach to the unknown than free association can offer. This Jungian approach is quite relevant to a study of Machado, since it is in fact the new or unknown side of his inner being which the poet himself confronts. He is in search of truth which will bring about wholeness and well-being and it is this desire of his that I wish to explore.

Machado's use of the dream is significant for several reasons. One is the role the dream plays in allowing the individual to explore the mysteries of the universe, a world which Machado describes saying, "Una neblina opaca confunde toda cosa" (Alvar 413).

Another role of the dream is to allow one to explore the hidden mysteries lying within one's self, in order to yield inner or self-knowledge. Just as the analyst examines the dreams of the analysand, Machado, too, achieves self-knowledge upon descent into a cryptic world. Jung says each male individual must encounter his anima (the female element in the male psyche linking him to the unconscious); the anima may manifest itself symbolically through a man's dream in the form of an "initiator and guardian," such as the Indian guru guiding man to an inner world (Man and His Symbols 196). The illuminating anima is suggested in poem LXIV of "Galerías," in which a female figure invites the poet to explore the soul:

Era la buena voz, la voz querida. 

—Dime: ¿vendrás conmigo a ver el alma? . . . 

Llegó a mi corazón una caricia. 

. . . .Y avancé en mi sueño 

por una larga, escueta galeria, 

sintiendo el roce de la veste pura 

y el palpitar suave de la mano amiga. 

(Alvar 134)

In another poem Machado, addressing himself to what seems to be the image of a guide in his dream, finds illusive mysteries and contradictions he cannot comprehend:

Arde en tus ojos un misterio, virgen 

esquiva y compañera. 

No sé si es odio o es amor la lumbre 

inagotable de tu aljaba negra. 

Conmigo irás mientras proyecte sombra 

mi cuerpo.... 

—¿Eres la sed o el agua en mi camino? 

Dime, virgen esquiva y compañera. (XXIX 107)

He does not know whether to fear her or welcome her. This ambiguous quality of the anima is emphasized by Jung.

The truth contained in the dream is just waiting to spring forth: "Es una flor que quiere echar su aroma al viento" ("Galerías" LXI 132). But the act of facing the unknown often entails some fear, what anthropologists call "misoneism." The modern poet echoes the fear experienced by primitive man when faced with shocking novelty: "he visto en el prufundo / espejo de mis sueños / que una verdad divina / temblando está de miedo" ("Galerías" LXI 132). In poem LXIII of "Galerías" the devil / angel of his dream urges him to explore the "honda cripta del alma" (134): "¿Vendrás conmigo?—No, jamás; las tumbas / y los muertos me espantan" (134). This figure seems closer to the Jungian shadow than to the anima figure; the psychoanalyst discusses mankind's insecurity in confronting the "formidable" shadow. The shadow seems threatening since it represents that which has been rejected or ignored by the conscious self, or ego. (Unlike the anima, the shadow is personified in the dream by someone of the same sex as the dreamer.)

However, the shadow is not frightening merely because it may represent the unfavorable elements of the personality. Also contained within the shadow are creative impulses and other positive qualities, according to Jung. Thus the shadow need not necessarily contain solely the negative aspects of the personality, just as the ego (or conscious self) does not possess purely positive traits. Jung believes, however, that many parts of the shadow which may be helpful to the personality become like demons when they are repressed. The ego is not then superior to the shadow but rather the shadow and ego are interdependent, much as thought and feeling are connected. Jung uses the phrase "the battle for deliverance" to describe the continual conflict between the shadow and the ego. This idea is important to Machado's dream in that one witnesses a journey into the poet's inner being, but not without a certain amount of pain or apprehension.

The dream in Machado's work can also be partially understood as an image of the soul-searching viajero, or traveler, agonized by a sense of "El viajero," in which the poet (or traveler) prepares to dream during the lazy afternoon hours when even nature reclines:

En el ambiente de la tarde flota 

ese aroma de ausencia, 

.... 

Sí, te recuerdo, tarde alegre y clara, 

.... 

. . . .cuando me traías 

el buen perfume de la hierbabuena, 

y de la buena albahaca, 

que tenía mi madre en sus macetas. 

(Alvar 92)

The traveler wanders through the paths of his dreams, with Machado characterizing the viajero as having "caminos," "senderos," "parques," "criptas," and "escaleras":

Sobre la tierra amarga, 

caminos tiene el sueño 

laberínticos, sendas tortuosas, 

parques en flor y en sombra y en silencio; 

criptas hondas, escalas sobre estrellas; 

retablos de esperanzas y recuerdos. (XXII 104)

"El sueño" and "el camino" (the latter image lending a sort of active nature to the dream) are once again linked: "Yo voy soñando caminos / de la tarde. ¡Las colinas / doradas, los verdes pinos, / las polvorientas encinas! . . . / ¿Adónde el camino irá?"(95). Thus begins the traveler's quest for that which is he lacking, be it love or the recapturing of a happier past, as will later be illustrated.

This archetype of the traveler, seeking to fill a void and learning to distance himself, has yet another function. Jolande Jacobi, a member of Jung's "Zurich circle," notes that the process of individuation is often depicted in terms of a "voyage of discovery," as in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Dante's Divina Commedia (Man and His Symbols 277). Certainly this is true for the traveler in Machado's poems, who learns to discern inner secrets and the voice of his unconscious.

For his bravery in confronting the mysterious, the traveler resembles a character in a myth much discussed by Jung—the myth of the hero. Typically, in this myth the hero must battle the monster or dragon. In psychological terms, the ego fights against the shadow, personified by the monster. Joseph L. Henderson in Man and His Symbols says, "The hero . . . must realize that the shadow exists and that he can draw strength from it . . . before the ego can triumph, it must master and assimilate the shadow" (121–22). In Machado's case also, the feared "monster" is the shadow, the unknown, or the unconscious. Nevertheless, the poet proceeds traveling through his dream, pursuing self-knowledge. Thus the poet = the traveler = the dreamer. All three embark on a journey towards the discovery of mystery, of the hidden or secret; all are set apart because of their desire to explore these secrets, despite any misgivings they may have. As Machado writes in "Coplas elegíacas": "Ay del noble peregrino / que se para a meditar, / después de largo camino / en el horror de llegar!" (Alvar 113)

Poem LXIII of "Galerías" is a good example of a Jungian combat between monster and hero. Machado's horrific images parallel the potential "demons" of his irrational nature: "Y avancé en mi sueño / cegado por la roja luminaria./ Y en la cripta sentí sonar cadenas, / y rebullir de fieras enjauladas" (134). Once again the struggle with the shadow is suggested in the image of the dreamer, bravely dueling within the depths of the crypt.

In Machado's poetry the dreams, or journeys into one's unconscious depths, usually occur during the afternoon, twilight, or night hours. For example, in the following poem note the equating of an afternoon of solitude with a time for reflective soul-searching: "Recuerdo que una tarde de soledad y hastío / ¡o tarde como tantas!, el alma mía era" (XLIX "Elegía de un madrigal" 122). In poem LXX of "Galerías" Machado writes: "Tú sabes las secretas galerías / del alma, los caminos de los sueños, / y la tarde tranquila" (137).

In poem VII of "El viajero" once again afternoon becomes synonymous with a time for reverie, when the traveler yearns to enter his unconscious state, in search of memories or illusions: "Es una tarde clara, / . . . / y estoy solo, en el patio silencioso, / buscando una ilusión cándida y vieja: / alguna sombra sobre el blanco muro, / algún recuerdo . . ." (92). The poet later reflects on this distant afternoon when he was able to achieve his goals of soul-searching: "Que tú me viste hundir mis manos puras / en el agua serena, para alcanzar los frutos encantados / que hoy en el fondo de la fuente sueñan . . ." (93).

The afternoon reverie may then also be a time for nostalgia, as in LXXIV. During the tranquility of the hour, the poet desires to return to the days of his youth: "para ser joven, para haberlo sido / cuando Dios quiso, para / tener algunas alegrías . . . lejos, / y poder dulcemente recordarlas" (138–39). In poem V Machado walks during the summer sunset, comparing the redness of the sky to the nostalgia of a lost love: "Roja nostalgia el corazón sentía, / sueños bermejos, que en el alma brotan / de lo inmenso inconsciente, / cual de región caótico y sombría" (396).

In "La tarde en el jardín" the garden is the scene for the recapturing of lost time. The mood is somber as "las fuentes melancólicas cantaban" (399). Along the garden's still paths, a thousand dreams from ages gone by are resuscitated and the soul is made eternal. Finally in poem VII a March afternoon has an "aroma de ausencia" floating about it, "que evoca los fantasmas / de las fragancias virgenes y muertas" (92). Youth, with its innocence, has passed.

Other poems occur during the tenebrous hours following "la tarde." Facing and conquering one's doubts and fears has its rewards and is sometimes expressed in symbolic terms of light and darkness. Such chiaroscuro may be seen in those poems having a twilight or night setting. Jung notes that a dark scene often indicates a dimming of the conscious, a time when the inner self emerges (Man and His Symbols 215), as exemplified in poem XXXVII of "Del camino." Here, as in other poems, one even witnesses a familiarity between dreamer and night, the night customarily lending ear to the dreamer's cries like an old friend: "Yo me asomo a las almas cuando lloran y escucho su hondo rezo" (Alvar 110).

Joseph Campbell, whose writings seem to reflect some of Jung's philosophy, believes that the deeper one goes into the dark abyss, the closer one comes to achieving tranquility and salvation. He says: "The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light" (The Power of Myth 46). Machado similarly speaks of darkness, followed by a light deep within:

Yo he visto mi alma en sueños, 

como un estrecho y largo 

corredor tenebroso, 

de fondo iluminado.... 

Acaso mi alma tenga 

risueña luz de campo, 

y sus aromas lleguen 

de allá, del fondo claro.... 

(Alvar 406)

Another example of chiaroscuro occurs in poem LXIII of "Galerías," in which darkness and light battle in the symbolic forms of an angel and a devil: "Y era el demonio de mi sueño, el ángel / más hermoso. Brillaban / como aceros los ojos victoriosos, / y las sangrientas llamas / de su antorcha alumbraron / la honda cripta del alma" (133–34). Once again, from the darkness comes light, a voice of salvation, resulting in a new understanding and truth. Initial fear leads to an inner serenity.

Indeed, Machado frequently evokes a simultaneously peaceful yet haunting dream world in which the unconscious flows freely, leaving behind ambiguous forms which must be confronted and deciphered. For instance, in poem XCIV's depiction of a man preparing to enter the dark recesses of his unconscious state, Machado describes a plaza containing a fountain. A tall cypress tree casts its shadow ("la mancha de su ramaje yerto") on the garden; in southern Europe, cypress trees often are planted around cemeteries. There is a peaceful atmosphere as the afternoon hours cast their own shadow. However, the dream itself does not appear to be equally tranquil and serene, as nightmarish images such as skulls emerge and the soul is likened to an "alma en pena:"

La tarde está cayendo frente a los caserones 

de la ancha plaza, en sueños. Relucen las vidrieras 

con ecos mortecinos de sol. En los balcones 

hay formas que parecen confusas calaveras. 

La calma es infinita en la desierta plaza, 

donde pasea el alma su traza de alma en pena. 

El agua brota y brota en la marmórea taza. 

En todo el aire en sombra no más que el agua 

suena. 

(Alvar 148)

One may view the continually flowing water symbolically as the unconscious, unbridled in its movement. There is a sense of quiet, of mystery and peace in its melodic stream but this water, nevertheless, also evokes a painful element. The shadow cast by the cypress on the garden together with the dying rays of sun creates an aura of impending darkness. The soul then enters into a dream state, in which confusing images surface. Confusion and fright are again the vital elements often inherent in confronting one's shadow.

Pertinent to a discussion of the ever-present dream in Machado's verse are Jung's comprehensive studies on the nature and significance of dreams. He divides them into two types: 1) the personal and 2) the archetypal-mythic containing images which survive, almost unconsciously, from generation to generation. Following Jung, we may interpret Machado's poetry, either through the personal unconscious, or through association with myth / archetypes—myth being society's dream.

Of the personal sort are those poems dealing with Machado's own nostalgia, pain, and with lost love or youth. Also included are those poems expressing hopes or wishes, like those in which the poet searches for a new recipient of his love or the rebirth of an old one. A source of much of his grief is the death of his wife Leonor. Prior to 1907 the timid Machado had not yet experienced any romantic relationships with women. Then during his employment as a professor of French at a school in Soria, he met Leonor Izquierdo in the boardinghouse where he was living.

Two years later, in July 1909, they were married, he 35 and she 16. In 1911 Machado received a fellowship to study in Paris, where, among other things, he attended various lectures by Henri Bergson. All was bliss during this happy and satisfying period of his life, until Leonor began hemorrhaging from tuberculosis. She was put in the hospital for a month but showed few signs of recovery, prompting Antonio to return to Soria with her. He stopped writing completely, dedicating himself to caring for her. Tragically, in spite of all efforts, Leonor never returned to health and died on August 1, 1912.

This experience left Machado unable to deal with Soria and all its cherished memories. Therefore he moved to the southern town of Baeza only eight days later. His pain and nostalgia are expressed in the following lines in which he bids farewell to Soria: "Adiós, campos de Soria, / . . . / Adiós, ya con vosotros / quedó la flor más dulce de la tierra. / Ya no puedo cantaros, / no os canta ya mi corazón, os reza . . ." (Alvar 411).

For a year Machado's mother came from Madrid to look after the practically incapacitated Antonio. The touching, inspirational words that he wrote to Juan Ramón Jiménez during this time prompts the reader to lament along with the poet:

Cuando perdí a mi mujer, pensé pegarme un tiro. El éxito de mi libro me salvó, y no por vanidad ¡bien lo sabe Dios! sino porque pensé, que si había en mí una fuerza útil, no tenía derecho de aniquilarla. Hoy quiero trabajar, humildemente, es cierto, pero con eficacia, con verdad. (Obras, poesía y prosa 904)

One can witness the death of the poet's spirit upon Leonor's death in the 1913 poem "A Xavier Valcarce;" here Machado admits to his friend that he has lost "la voz que tuve antaño" (Alvar 252). He continues dejectedly: "No sé, Valcarce, mas cantar no puedo; / se ha dormido la voz en mi garganta" (253).

Several poems refer directly to Leonor's death, while others are more subtle. In poem CXIX of Campos de Castilla Machado laments: "Señor, ya me arrancaste lo que yo más quería. / Oye otra vez, Dios mío, mi corazón clamar. / Tu voluntad se hizo, Señor, contra la mía. / Señor, ya estamos solos mi corazón y el mar" (212). In poem CXXIII of the same collection he says:

Una noche de verano 

—estaba abierto el balcón 

y la puerta de mi casa—

la muerte en mi casa entró. 

Se fue acercando a su lecho 

—ni siquiera me miró—, 

con unos dedos muy finos, 

algo muy tenue rompió. 

.... 

¡Ay, lo que la muerte ha roto 

era un hilo entre los dos! (213–14)

This is the background for Machado's frequent nostalgic reveries of a happier time, when all of nature seemed to share in his joy.

Unfulfilled wishes of having Leonor with him once again emerge in dreams, such as in poem CXXIV of Campos de Castilla. Here, amidst the green plain of April, new life and vitality abound:

y piensa el alma en una mariposa, 

atlas del mundo, y sueña.

Con el ciruelo en flor y el campo verde, 

.... 

con este dulce soplo 

que triunfa de la muerte y de la piedra. (214)

In poem CXXII the poet dreams that Leonor is leading him along a white path, amidst images of rebirth and rejuvenation, and a general feeling of hope. He envisions them hand in hand, her voice sweetly ringing in his ear: "como una campana nueva, / como una campana virgen / de un alba de primavera. / ¡Eran tu voz y tu mano, / en sueños, tan verdaderas! . . . / Vive, esperanza" (213).

Thus Machado's dream, seen on the personal level, mixes nostalgic reminiscences of Leonor with the hope that he will one day see her again. In fact, the above examples of hopes and distant memories seem to fit the poet's own description of the dream, which consists of "caminos laberínticos," winding paths, hidden places, etc.: "retablos de esperanzas y recuerdos / Figurillas que pasan y sonríen /—juguetes melancólicos de viejo—; / imá-genes amigas, / a la vuelta florida del sendero, / y quimera rosadas / que hacen camino . . . lejos . . ." (XXII 104). In an interview with Pascual Pla y Beltrán in August of 1937, Machado described his verses as "experiencias latentes, . . . precisamente por lo que tienen de testimonios de momentos que fueron, de sombras del pasado, nos llevan fatal-mente a la elegía" (Gullón and Phillips 45).

Indeed, many of his poems could be described as laments, mournful remembrances of things or people gone forever. Some memories involve Machado's youth or childhood, such as in "Las moscas." Even flies are capable of evoking recollections of his infancy: memories of them landing on his young head, flying through the rooms of his family's house and through his schoolroom. He addresses them as if they were his long-lost friends: "Moscas de todas las horas, / de infancia y adolescencia, de mi juventud dorada; / . . . / vosotras, amigas viejas, / me evocáis todas las cosas" (Alvar 122).

In "Acaso" Machado recalls the innocence and happiness of childhood, symbolized in the poem by a fairy who takes him to "la alegre fiesta / que en la plaza ardía" (134). She tenderly kisses his forehead and the poet reflects on the vitality and beauty of his life as a child when all seemed to fall at his feet: "Todos los rosales / daban sus aromas, / todos los amores / amor entreabría" (135). In poem LXXXV the poet stops to meditate on his youth, somewhat wasted without love: "Bajo ese almendro florido, / todo cargado de flor /—recordé—, yo he maldecido / mi juventud sin amor" (143).

Memories of a happy time generally serve as a contrast to Machado's present pathos. In each line of the following poem, for example, past and present are juxtaposed, timeworn objects of the present acting as a shocking reminder of the contrast between "ayer" and "hoy":

¡Tocados de otros días, 

mustios encajes y marchitas sedas;

salterios arrumbados, 

rincones de las salas polvorientas: 

.... 

cartas que amarillean; 

libracos no leídos 

que guardan grises florecitas secas; 

romanticismos muertos, 

cursilerías viejas, 

cosas de ayer que sois el alma, 

y cantos y cuentos de la abuela! .... (137–38)

The wind, too, in poem LXVIII brings a message of death saying that all the flowers of the garden where the poet once retreated have died. The petals have now withered and the fountains are weeping, melancholy like the poet (136–37). Poem LXIX once again contains a withered garden and Machado's hopes have turned to tears (137). In "El poeta," he addresses his soul in these lines which adequately summarize the poet's despair: "¡Alma, que en vano quisiste ser más joven cada día, / arranca tu flor, la humilde flor de la melancolía!" (101).

Such are the repressed memories of Machado's personal unconscious with which he has come to terms and reconciled himself. Although many choose to ignore their innermost anguish, preferring to lead a life of frivolity and shallowness, Machado sees this as self-deception. Only through confrontation with the unconscious can one attain the rewards of self-knowledge. The dream is one way in which Machado makes known his inner secrets.

In addition to the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious also manifests itself in Machado's "sueño," encompassing all that which lies outside of the dreamer's personal experience. It is composed of archetypes reflecting collective experience, those psychic contents which have been acquired from primitive man. For example, a dream of mythic or archetypal content is suggested by the following lines from poem XXXVII, when the night declares to the dreamer: "pero en las hondas bóvedas del alma / no sé si el llanto es una voz o un eco" (110). The night is uncertain whether the dreamer's cry belongs to the dreamer himself or whether it is merely an echo of his ancestors' or of society's similar cry. The echo, therefore, becomes a symbol for the timeless, collective unconscious, thus linking past and present.

The dreamer / poet, in turn, asks the night whether or not his tears are in fact his own. Maybe they are merely artistic recreations of his ancestors' cries, as suggested by the word "histrión." The word can mean either an actor in the theater or an affected person, both of whom purposefully pretend something, with hopes of making an impression on others. In the case of a poet, he or she may be expressing collective feelings or ideas, rather than merely personal ones, in order to evoke a specific feeling or action from the reader.

¡ .... 

dime, si sabes vieja amada, dime 

si son mías las lágrimas que vierto! 

Me respondió la noche: 

Jamás me revelaste tu secreto. 

Yo nunca supe, amado, 

si eras tú ese fantasma de tu sueño, 

ni averigüé si era su voz de la tuya, 

o era la voz de un histrión grotesco. 

(Alvar 110)

The collective or mythic unconscious is again visible, in this same dialogue between dreamer and "la fuente," in poem VI of Soledades. (Notice the images remarkably similar to those of poem XCIV mentioned earlier, such as a sleepy afternoon, an ivy-covered wall, a continually-flowing fountain, and the marble onto which the water gushes.) Once more, the water of the fountain may be seen as a symbol for the flowing of the unconscious (as was described in poem XCIV earlier); as the metaphorical water flows, the dreamer gradually drifts deeper into his inner self. He is aware that the contents of his inner whisperings are nothing new, merely archetypal, an echo of yesteryear. Thus today's message has its roots in an era long ago, modern man's voice once again a mere reverberation of his ancestors'.

Fue una clara tarde, triste y soñolienta 

tarde de verano. La hiedra asomaba 

al muro del parque, negra y polvorienta.... 

La fuente sonaba. 

.... 

En el solitario parque, la sonora 

copla borbollante del agua cantora 

me guió a la fuente. La fuente vertía 

sobre el blanco mármol su monotonía 

La fuente cantaba: ¿Te recuerda, hermano, 

un sueño lejano mi canto presente? 

Fue una tarde lenta del lento verano. 

Respondí a la fuente: 

No recuerdo, hermana, 

mas sé que tu copla presente es lejana. 

(Alvar 91)

Interestingly, the word copla is a type of popular song, that is, a song of the people. Thus personal "property" has given way here to collective property, and the poet does not always express purely literal occurrences of what he has experienced. It is not likely that Machado literally spent an afternoon in dialogue with a fountain. Instead, one may presume that the fountain is a symbol; in order to discover the commonly shared experience(s) suggested by the symbol we must interpret it. For instance, Machado's fountain might be viewed as the unconscious vessel, with the song being its contents.

The whole notion of the traveler on a journey, often a night journey, is an archetype of the individuation process. The shadow and anima mentioned earlier are further archetypes, elements of a mythical nature. The hero, too, is an ancient myth seen in Machado's verse as the poet who battles with his own self. The list of archetypes could go on but are beyond the scope of this paper.

The Imagination

Related to the dream is Machado's use of the imagination which, once again, he defines as a vigilant dream or reverie. In chapter XIV of Juan de Mairena he writes that only in moments of idleness should a poet interpret dreams (the passive dreams of sleep, that is), finding in them elements to use in poetry (Belitt 31). He continues saying that the oneiroscope has produced nothing of importance, relegating the passive dream to an inferior position in comparison with vigilance (31). One should dream while awake, via the imagination—the daydream or meditation:

Los poemas de nuestra vigilia, aun los menos logrados, son más originales y más bellos y, a las veces, más disparatados que los de nuestros sueños. Os lo dice quien pasó muchos años de su vida pensando lo contrario. Pero de sabios es mudar de consejo. (Obras, poesía y prosa 394)

Instead, it is essential to have one's eyes wide open in order to see things as they are, more open to see them other than what they are and, finally, even more open to see them better than they really are (394). "Yo os aconsejo la visión vigilante, porque vuestra misión es ver e imaginar despiertos, y que no pidáis al sueño sino reposo" (394).

Through acknowledgement of the imagination, one can explore the unconscious while in a vigilant state—a "vigilant vision." Regarding Machado's fusion of the conscious and unconscious aspects of the vigilant dream, Gullón says: "el ver en sueños es un ver imaginario, un ver con la zona del cerebro que permanece en vela mien-tras las demás descansan" (70).

Art, likewise, may simultaneously entail the unconscious and conscious as when the artist utilizes elements of a rational world, but by mixing them in unlikely combinations produces an irrational one. German art historian Herbert Kühn has differentiated two types of art works: the "sensory" and the "imaginative." The "sensory" involves a rational, direct imitation of the person, object, nature or universe, while the "imaginative" is a more irrational portrayal of the subject. In order to interpret this imaginative quality, so much a part of modern art, one must utilize the intellect, or rational mind to some extent (Man and His Symbols 246). For example, in Marc Chagall's painting "Time is a River without Banks," real images are used such as a fish, violin, clock and a pair of lovers. However, it is the mixture of these elements within the painting that creates the work's visual oddities. One sees a fish, perched on top of a clock, and playing the violin.

The irrational nature of much modern painting can be explained by the existence of what Jung calls the "subliminal aspects" of the conscious, or the "fringe of conciousness" discussed earlier. Once again, these terms represent those parts of the consciousness which have entered the unconscious. Jung states:

Our conscious impressions, in fact, quickly assume an element of unconscious meaning that is psychically significant for us, though we are not consciously aware of the existence of this subliminal meaning or of the way in which it both extends and confuses the conventional meaning. (Man and His Symbols 40)

Machado's dream via the imagination, while containing commonplace objects, also demands attention because of the deep-rooted, unconscious meaning behind the objects. This is the subliminal aspect of the surface or conscious meaning. Therefore, it is necessary to be somewhat vigilant in order to interpret these metaphorical representations of reality.

At the beginning of this paper, I stated that I wished to explore how the poet reveals his private, inner nature, his intimate experience, his own truth. A relevant question is then how does the imagination reveal Machado's inner truth, if the very word itself suggests that which is fiction, that which is not real? Are many of his writings merely the fictitious products of literary and creative games or do they accurately reflect the psyche of the poet? Basically the question becomes "what is fact and what is fiction"?

While it is true that one meaning of the phrase "product of the imagination" comprises that which is nonexistent or, at least, has not yet been experienced, this definition is incomplete. The imagination may also be the most adequate expression of the author's most implicit reality, masked though it may be. As Leon Edel points out in "Literature and Biography," unconscious art may reveal more truth about its creator than a conscious, detailed study of the author's life or an author's own conscious self-study (65). Such is the case in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, whose autobiographical elements were confirmed by O'Neill's second wife. However, interestingly enough, these same elements did not appear in the dramatist's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night, leading Edel to affirm:

I suspect that many autobiographies are less 'autobiographical' and candid than they pretend. They project a preferred self-image and often unconsciously (though sometimes deliberately) alter or omit parts of experience which we can discover reflected with great accuracy in the imagined creations. A work of art may thus be found to contain truths—and direct facts—which a biographer can hardly ignore. (65)

Through psychoanalysis, art can be seen as an instrument for viewing the writer's thoughts and truths which might otherwise go unsaid.

In the case of Machado, the imagination often has to do with love, or, better still, the absence of it. One clear example of Machado's use of imagination occurs in relation to the intriguing story of Guiomar. Such was the name he gave to a woman of his affection years after the death of his wife. He began to write love letters to a mysterious lady in Madrid, many of which have been collected and published in Concha Espina's De Antonio Machado a su grande y secreto amor. Although many thought Guiomar was merely imaginary, this belief was disproven when, in 1929, Machado wrote a letter to Unamuno saying, "A few days ago I sent to you with our Juan de Mañara the book Huerto Cerrado of Pilar Valderrama. This lady, whom I met in Segovia . . ." (Cobb 37). Pilar was in fact a poet who, though her poetry was generally unpopular, had much impressed Machado; in 1930 he expressed this admiration in an article. It is believed that they met around 1926 at the latest (37), during Machado's time as a professor in Segovia. He made several trips to see her in Madrid but the relationship was not meant to be. He mentions "la barrera que ha puesto la suerte entre nosotros" (108). Guiomar was married and never fully reciprocated his attentions.

In this hopeless situation, all he could do was dream and imagine, and imagine he did, as witnessed in a letter to Guiomar. In it he says love for him is almost like a mere game of the imagination, reality being of secondary importance: "Pienso yo que los amores, aun los más 'realistas,' se dan en tres cuartas partes en el retablo de nuestra imaginación" (Zubiría 138). He even confesses that he preferred to dream about her from afar in Segovia rather than to remain in Madrid with her.

In De un cancionero apócrifo Machado includes several poems concerning his love for Guiomar, such as his "Canciones a Guiomar," where he appears to have imagined her existing in a timeless world of illusion: "En un jardín te he soñado, / alto, Guiomar, sobre el río / jardín de un tiempo cerrado / con verjas de hierro frío" (Cobb 119). One can then conclude that he did not merely dream up or create an imaginary Guiomar, but rather that she exists in an imaginary world, where nothing can disturb it. Time has ceased and the world is protected by iron gratings. Nothing can intrude on their secret love. The existence of the love is not imagined, only the nature of the love, when a relationship was not meant to be.

Guiomar once wrote Machado a letter expressing jealousy, upon discovering that he had met with another woman. He responds, assuring her of his profound love and insisting that Guiomar (or his "diosa" as he often called her) is not imaginary:

A ti y a nadie más que a ti, en todos los sentidos—¡todos!—del amor, puedo yo querer. El secreto es sencillamente que yo no he tenido más amor que éste. Mis otros amores sólo han sido sueños, a través de los cuales vislumbraba yo la mujer real, la diosa. (Cobb 110)

Here we see how the poet distinguishes between the unreal woman of his dreams and the very real Guiomar of his imagination. Thus through the imagination, Machado ultimately arrives at the truth. Similarly, by observing the imagined world where time stands still and nothing can harm the two lovers, one may deduce the actual nature of Machado's reality—the preoccupation with his brief temporal existence.

Thus the dream, as well as the imagination, and their link with the memory and soul-searching, are a fusion of the conscious and unconscious. Both allow for the revelation of the unconscious in that they act as a bridge between the two parts of the psyche. Although many choose to ignore their innermost anguish, preferring to lead a life of frivolity and shallowness, Machado sees this as self-deception. Only through confrontation with the unconscious can one attain the rewards of self-knowledge.

Source: Susan J. Joly, "The Dream and the Imagination in Antonio Machado's Poetry," in Hispanofila, Vol. 117, May 1996, pp. 25–43.

Sources

Barnstone, Willis, Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet, Southern Illinois University Press, 1993, pp. 104, 107.

Machado, Antonio, Selected Poems, translated and with an introduction by Alan S. Trueblood, Harvard University Press, 1982, pp. 262–65.

Trueblood, Alan S., "Antonio Machado and the Lyric of Ideas," in Letter and Spirit in Hispanic Writers: Renaissance to Civil War, Tamesis Books Limited, 1986, p. 255.

Further Reading

Beevor, Antony, The Spanish Civil War, Penguin Books, 2001.

This is a thorough and up-to-date history of the Spanish Civil War.

Cobb, Carl W., Antonio Machado, Twayne Publishers, 1971.

This biography of Machado is an excellent introduction to the writer's life and works.

Edwards, Gwynne, Flamenco!, Thames and Hudson, 2000.

With its many vibrant photographs by Ken Haas, this visually exciting book is an entertaining and informative introduction to the art and history of flamenco song and dance.

Shaw, Donald Leslie, The Generation of 1898 in Spain, Barnes and Noble, 1975.

This book explores the concerns and motivations of the figures who are known as the Generation of '98, of which Machado is one.

Schreiner, Claus, ed., Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, Amadeus Press, 1996.

This is an excellent sourcebook for students interested in learning about flamenco, as its collection of essays (by different authors) addresses all aspects of the art form.