Sunstone

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Sunstone

OCTAVIO PAZ
1957

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
POEM SUMMARY
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

Sunstone, an epic poem (or lengthy narrative poem) by Mexican writer Octavio Paz, is Paz's most famous poetic work. Inspired by the Aztec reverence for the planet Venus, Paz wrote Sunstone to be 584 lines long, a structure that reflects Venus's 584-day synodic orbit—the amount of time it takes for the celestial object to return to its original position relative to the sun. The title also evokes the famous Aztec sacrificial altar stone recovered in Mexico City in the eighteenth century.

In the poem, Paz writes about his loneliness, seeks understanding of human existence, and discovers solace and companionship in loving other people. The gods, distinctly Aztec in their bloodthirsty characterization, are omnipresent but, as the narrator of the poem learns, do not give human beings salvation. Humans must find salvation within each other, the poem concludes.

When Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, the Swedish Academy declared Sunstone to be "one of the high points of Paz's poetry." Originally published as a stand-alone piece titled Piedra de sol in Spanish in 1957, Sunstone was first translated into English by the bilingual poet Muriel Rukeyser and published in 1962. An updated translation is available from Eliot Weinberger in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 (1987).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Octavio Paz was born on March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico, to parents Octavio and Josefina. His father was an assistant to the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, tying the Paz family to the political and cultural elite of Mexico; however, they were also impoverished during Paz's childhood by these radical associations. As a teenager, Paz began publishing his short stories and poems. His first book of poetry, Luna silvestre (Sylvan Moon), was published in 1933 when he was only nineteen years old.

Paz studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1932 to 1937. He corresponded with Pablo Neruda, the famous Chilean poet and diplomat, who encouraged Paz as a writer and liberal thinker. Paz spent time fighting in Spain against the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, and after the war he earned money as a journalist and translator while working on his graduate degree. He married the writer Elena Garro in 1937; they divorced in 1959. In 1946, Paz took a diplomatic position with the Mexican government as cultural attaché to France, where he was exposed to surrealism. This job gave Paz the opportunity to write, and during the next two decades he published ten volumes of poetry as well as many other books and new editions.

Paz was an established literary figure by the 1950s, when many of his famous works were published. El labertino de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), a collection of essays about Mexico published in 1950, is Paz's most highly regarded book of nonfiction. Piedra de sol (Sunstone) was published in 1957 as a stand-alone piece and is considered to be Paz's finest poetic work.

Paz was posted to India in 1962, where he met Marie-José Tramini. They married in 1964 and had one daughter together. Paz quit his diplomatic position in 1968 to object to the Mexican government's repression of student protest in Mexico City. Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, the first Mexican to receive this honor, in recognition of his tremendous contributions to world literature. He continued to be an active literary and political voice, publishing volumes of verse and prose, until his death; at age eighty-four, Paz died from spinal cancer on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City.

POEM SUMMARY

Sunstone is an exploration of the meaning of existence. Humans are alone, lonely, but able to come together through love and community. Based on the Aztec reverence for the morning and evening star, the poem mimics the 584-day synodic cycle of Venus. A synodic cycle is the amount of time it takes for an object in the sky to return to the position it originally held relative to the sun. In the original Spanish, Piedra de sol comprises 584 eleven-syllable lines (with half-lines visually combining to make full eleven-syllable lines). The final six lines of the poem, which are not part of the 584-line count, repeat the first six lines to make a cyclical whole. Eliot Weinberger's English translation, Sunstone, is 586 lines long, including the six-line repetition at the end.

In Aztec mythology, the planet Venus is symbolized by two fiery serpents merging into a single being: duality and unity. Venus is also known to many cultures as the morning star and evening star because it spends half of its orbit visible at dawn and the other half visible at sunset. Venus always travels close to the sun, which made it very important to the sun-worshipping Aztecs. In Sunstone, Venus is loosely represented by a sensual and terrifying goddess. Like the planet, she waxes and wanes and has a profound effect on the world of humans.

Stanza 1

Sunstone opens with motion: water, trees, and wind. In lines 1 through 6, the poet speaks of circularity, opening into the rest of this epic-length poem with a colon at the end of line 6. The circularity of time and nature is underlined in lines 7 to 14, where the poet evokes celestial movement and the renewal of nature. This stanza is a crescendo of emotion and symbolism that leads the rest of the poem.

Stanza 2

Darkness is introduced in lines 15 through 20, a vague threat of interruption in the perfect circle of life—not death but cessation. In line 20, as in line 10, the poet writes of prophecy, or the ability to tell the future. Prophecy is generally considered to be a mysterious, esoteric art, one highly regarded by the Aztecs.

Stanza 3

Lines 21 to 31 introduce a new persona, one described with grand and figurative language, bringing to mind the substance of a deity, made of light, stone, and clouds. In lines 32 through 38, the poet returns to movement, this time applied to himself as he moves through a metaphysical world.

Stanza 4

In lines 39 to 48, the poet speaks of moving across the body of the goddess described earlier. His words are reverential and intimate, likening the parts of her body to a sunlit plaza, a church, and a city assaulted by the sea.

Stanza 5

The poet's journey across the topography of the goddess continues in lines 49 to 56. The descriptions in this stanza are more abstract and intense, speaking of tigers' dreams and burning hummingbirds.

Stanza 6

The goddess accepts the worship of the poet in lines 57 through 64. She finally touches him in return. The poet describes her touch as being like water, which roots in his chest.

Stanza 7

In lines 65 to 71, the poet is again traveling the body of his goddess, but she turns from him, shattering his shadow, which is a metaphor for his soul. Broken but not completely destroyed, the poet limps away. The poet cannot forever be companion to this goddess, who is not human and does not have human needs.

Stanza 8

In this stanza, the poet is alone again and turns to his memories. He reaches for warmth and companionship only to find emptiness and silent images.

Stanza 9

In lines 80 through 85, the poet searches for understanding of his life, lashed by nature's storms and darkness.

Stanza 10

The poet's search for the meaning of life is fruitless in lines 86 to 93. He falls into loneliness as he delves ever deeper into his shadow—his soul—for insight.

Stanza 11

In lines 94 through 103, the poet settles on an image of a sunny afternoon. He sees young women leaving their school, and one catches his eye. Her skin in the afternoon light is described as golden and transparent, reminiscent of the goddess in stanzas 3 to 7.

Stanza 12

This young woman has since blended, in lines 104 to 116, with the names and faces of other women and other goddesses the poet has known. Line 112 begins a list of metaphors that describe this girl-as-all-women: she is cloud, star, sword, ivy, and more.

Stanza 13

In lines 117 through 134, the list of metaphors continues, lush and naturalistic, grand and powerful. Lists of metaphors are a common feature of epic poetry, drawn from mnemonic (or memory-aiding) devices of the oral tradition. These metaphors describe the girl as a figure of life, death, and renewal—the small and large, the precious and mundane that make up the world.

Stanza 14

The poet dwells on faces in lines 135 to 145—a circular blending of individual faces into a single set of eyes.

Stanza 15

In lines 146 to 153, a moment remembered from a dream distracts the poet from his life, which, he feels, is being circumscribed by an unhappy reality: dull demands on his time and encroaching mortality.

Stanza 16

In lines 154 to 161, the poet is losing his grip on this world. He forgets the names of things and his body slows, aging.

Stanza 17

A moment this poet has captured swells to fill his world in lines 162 through 178, becoming so momentous that it attracts death's attention and takes over the poet's body, creating a microcosmic shadow world.

Stanza 18

In this short stanza, the poet misses the life he has lived and enjoyed but acknowledges that time flows by like water—both unheeding of where it has been and unceasing in its course.

Stanza 19

In lines 184 to 207, the next moment finally arrives, and it is an intense though figurative ritual awash with blood and fire, both sacred to the Aztec god of the morning star (the planet Venus), Quetzalcoatl. The poet feels abandoned by his girl, who is all women and representative of the goddess. This goddess has turned from lover to executioner, all stone and dust. Her axe is made of light from the sun—and is honed by words, those objects so sacred to a poet. By this she tries to destroy him.

Stanza 20

The poet is deeply wounded in lines 208 through 231, emptied of all sense of himself. He sees a girl, his goddess, whom he names Melusina (the name of a European mythic figure much like a mermaid, associated with fresh water), waken and fall to her demise. He is alone again, old and ill, with fragments of meaning, of memory.

Stanza 21

In lines 232 through 249, the poet returns to the image of eyes, describing relationships between mothers, sons, daughters, and fathers as they look to each other and see the past and future stretching in all directions. The poet wonders whether eyes are a conduit toward death or life and becomes ecstatic at the possibility of living another life. In lines 250 to 278, the poet's memories suddenly become very specific as he thinks back a decade, remembering Phyllis on Christopher Street, then Carmen on Paseo de la Reforma, women he has known. These vivid memories boil down to the essentials of names, streets, and generic images of people moving through their lives.

Stanza 22

In lines 279 to 299, the next memory goes back to 1937, in Spain, where a quiet residential street is blown apart by warfare. Amidst the turmoil, two people make love to preserve a sense of humanity and history. Lines 300 through 327 describe another scene of domesticity, this one gradually overtaken by the green of nature, of life, which becomes its own kind of timelessness. Lines 326 and 327 describe a tree of life, which the poet encourages everyone to eat and drink from. This tree, a prickly pear, symbolizes the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue and grows in the middle of a river. Its fruit represents the human heart.

Stanza 23

The transformation described in lines 328 to 357 is the rebirth of the world as envisioned by an Aztec mythos. All the things that make up the world, good and bad, collapse. Unity is lost.

Stanza 24

In lines 358 through 387, the poet sees salvation for humanity in the love between two people. It begins with a kiss, and from this the rest of the world becomes more real, becomes solid again. He exhorts people toward carnal love, suggesting that matrimony be left behind in favor of the fulfillment of pure physical desires because sex is the way to avoid becoming a ghost and thus keep the rest of the world from fading away.

Stanza 25

The poet scrutinizes chastity as well in lines 388 through 400, describing it as a kind of marriage and a way to be closer to the source some would call God.

Stanza 26

The poet returns to the motif of movement in lines 401 through 427. He moves through time and space as he searches the streets for his goddess. She returns—as a river, a squirrel, a star. He anticipates that their lovemaking will change the world.

Stanza 27

In lines 428 to 462, the goddess is reserved, says nothing, does nothing. In the space of her eyes blinking, the evil of the world comes to the surface, evils the poet enumerates in this stanza. The world is aflame in lines 463 to 472, in a fire of change. The world is turning over from one era to the next. Following this fire is the silence of death and transition.

Stanza 28

The poet dwells on this momentous transition in lines 478 to 494, where he describes the fixed death of everything.

Stanza 29

In lines 495 through 517, the poet contemplates how life is not something people can own because it is shared between all, an inherent unity.

Stanza 30

He calls to his goddess in lines 518 to 549, naming her now after famous women of Western mythology and history. He wishes to see her face in order that he may awaken to be born. The poet writes of falling, just as Melusina fell earlier in lines 108 and 217. The fall is a kind of burial in which the poet finds peace and transformation. The goddess orchestrates the beginning of new life—for the world, for the poet, for all of humankind.

Stanza 31

The poet is ecstatic for this new world to begin in lines 550 to 557. Everything will be changed, and all people will be mingled, shuffled into new names and faces.

Stanza 32

In lines 558 through 566, the poet describes this transformation as the development and revelation of new faces. There is also a fountain where all faces can return to the source, dissolving in the presence of divinity. This is not only a new world but moreover a renewed world.

Stanza 33

In the final lines of Sunstone, the poet admits defeat—he cannot capture it all with mere words. He is torn apart by ecstatic, spiritual communion with the sun and returns to nature, awakening to the new world as the cycle of this epic returns to its beginning, to the movements of trees, water, and wind. Lines 581 through 586 in the English translation repeat the first six lines of the poem, creating a cyclical whole. The final punctuation of the last line is a colon, marking the beginning of the next age.

THEMES

Unity

Paz explores the unity and disunity of humankind in his long poem Sunstone. The narrator of the poem seeks meaning for his existence and finds it in the visceral connection he feels with the land as well as in relationships between people. The connection he speaks of experiencing with other people is romantic love with women—women who have blended together in his mind to form a single radiant goddess. Near the beginning of the poem, this goddess is first manifest to him as a spirit of the land, whom he traverses and comes to know intimately. Thereafter he seeks this goddess, seeks the union of soul, body, and earth that he once knew when he knew her, but she is elusive. He learns to find her in the faces of other women and through these women rediscovers the balm for his loneliness, the companionship of other people. He also learns that his goddess, the spirit of the land, which supports his life and the lives of his neighbors, is dual natured. She must be fed as well as loved, and so she sacrifices him in a rite of blood and fire. The experience changes the narrator, and he gradually comes to realize that deliverance from his mortality or from this existence is not possible. His mind is then opened to the greater realization of the unity among humankind: that all people are the same person, just with different visages from one lifetime to the next. The narrator understands then that people are inseparable from each other. To abandon one another is to abandon oneself.

Unity was an important theme to Paz throughout his life, in both his poetry and his nonfiction writing. He was a worldly man, working as a diplomat for the Mexican government in France, Spain, and India, but he also kept his roots in Mexico, writing extensively about Mexican history and anthropology. Sunstone is Paz's seminal work on this theme.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Write a poem emulating Paz's style, with its rich imagery, surrealism, and references to history and mythology. Critique and edit your poems in small groups, and then present them to the class.
Write a brief report about Venus, including a description of where Venus currently is in its sidereal—or star-relative—and synodic orbits. What would this current positioning mean to the Aztecs, who believed the planet Venus to be a manifestation of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl?
Paz was influenced by the French surrealists during his various stays in France from the 1940s through the 1960s. Research the history of French surrealism, choosing one or two authors to focus on. What characterizes surrealism? How has surrealism affected world literature? In what forms has surrealism survived to the present day? Assemble your research into a paper and include an argument either for or against Paz as a surrealist.
Paz was frequently more popular with North American readers for his essays than for his poetry, with his most famous book of essays being The Labyrinth of Solitude. Divide the essays among your classmates. Read your assigned essay and prepare a short response paper based on your reactions. Do you like Paz's poetry or nonfiction better?

The Power of Nature

The natural world has its own voice in Paz's poem. It does not use words recognizable in Spanish or English but rather speaks through the movement of rivers, wind, trees, birds, and other elements of the natural world. The narrator of this poem sees and feels power in the determined, uninterrupted cycle of nature. It is the original cyclical calendar: spring, summer, fall, and winter—as well as birth, life, death, and incubation. These cycles drive and organize all life on earth. The Aztecs were deeply concerned with balance, maintaining their ritual calendar so that all gods were appeased in turn. Paz's poem is full of movement, echoing the actions of the natural world because nature is constantly moving, changing phases. As a part of the natural world, humans are also ever-changing and yet intrinsically remain the same—head, heart, and spirit.

The planet Venus is Paz's main motif from nature. He structured his 584-line poem after Venus's 584-day synodic cycle. In lines 184 to 207, Paz's Venus is a passionate, bloodthirsty goddess reminiscent of the Aztec god associated with that planet, Quetzalcoatl; his Venus shows another face in lines 21 though 64, where she is a beautiful young maiden who inspires love and desire, like the classic Roman goddess Venus (whom the Greeks called Aphrodite). As a deity, she is always present because she is part of the air he breathes and the soil he walks on; however, she is not easily accessible. His ecstatic encounter, after all, was paired with being a sacrificial victim.

In Sunstone, Paz combines Aztec and Christian mythologies. For the Aztecs, nature is animist, or imbued with spirits who reside in all objects. Aztecs see their gods in the actions of nature—trees falling, storms raging, rivers roiling, and planets rising and setting. Christians do not see their god directly manifest in nature but rather see nature's beauty and complexity as evidence of God's power. These two perspectives on nature, sometimes conflicting, coexist within the beauty and turmoil of Paz's verse.

STYLE

Motif of Fire

A motif is a unifying idea representing a theme that appears repeatedly throughout a story or poem. Motif is similar to theme but distinct because motif is specifically tied to an image or idea. Paz generously employs nature imagery throughout Sunstone, which ties the natural world and its processes and elements (trees, fire, water) to Paz's themes of unity and isolation. One of Paz's prominent motifs in this poem is fire. Paz uses fire imagery sparingly but with purpose, with references concentrated near the beginning and end of the long poem. Fire is representative of the planet Venus and its associated god, Quetzalcoatl, who also appears as a feathered and fiery serpent in mythology. Fiery rain is the means of destruction of the third era, and fire is a medium of the god ruling the fifth age, the sun god Tonatiuh. In Christian creed, fire is associated with Lucifer and with Hell. Paz does not personify a demon like Lucifer in Sunstone, but the fear of pain, death, and change is present in a similar way. Fire is also a cleansing agent, consuming everything, including itself. What is known of Aztec rituals often involves blood, fire, and human sacrifice, as this was how they fed their gods to maintain the balance in nature that they perceived. The primary function of fire in Sunstone is transformation. It may be painful, ugly, deadly, but it is transformative and irrevocable. Fire, then, as a motif, represents the theme of transformation.

Hendecasyllable Lines

Paz composed Sunstone as 584 hendecasyllable, or eleven-syllable, lines. His use of hendecasyllable lines was a conscious, classical poetic choice. Hendecasyllable lines constitute a common meter in Italian and Spanish poetry and are often associated with sonnets, the preferred form for love poems. Hendecasyllable lines were popularized in Spanish poetry by the sixteenth-century poet and Renaissance man Garcilaso de la Vega, who wrote his sonnets with such lines. Paz's choice of the hendecasyllable line both grounds him in the tradition of his poetic predecessors and ties Sunstone to a theme of love.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Mexico in the 1950s

Mexico in the 1950s was under the rule of liberal presidents belonging to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Miguel Alemán Valdés, president of Mexico from 1946 to 1952, formed strong alliances with big businesses and brought about the development of highways, railroads, schools, and farms. Alemán's administration, however, was known for its corruption. His successor, Adolfo Ruiz Contines, by contrast, is considered to have been one of Mexico's most honest presidents. He focused his attention while in office on stabilizing the economy and lowering the cost of living. He also gave women the right to vote in federal elections as well as the right to be elected to political office.

During this decade, Paz was traveling abroad as a diplomat for the Mexican government. His civic work took him to New Delhi, India; Tokyo, Japan; Geneva, Switzerland; and Paris, France. He returned to Mexico in 1954 when he wrote his epic poem Sunstone. It was during this period that Paz chose to deviate from the leftist political views of many of his colleagues, like the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Radical Communist leaders such as Joseph Stalin were seducing intellectuals with their utopian visions, but Paz morally disagreed with any form of totalitarianism. In the years before Stalin's crimes against humanity were revealed, Paz was abandoned by many of his friends and colleagues for his comparatively unusual views.

Aztec Calendar

Paz drew on his ancestral Aztec background in composing Sunstone. The Aztecs were very concerned with balance between their quarrelsome gods and kept a ritual calendar called the tonalpohualli to make sure all gods were appeased in their turn. The ritual calendar consists of a 260-day cycle made up of 20 weeks of 13 days each. There are 20 different day-signs, each associated with a different god. It thus takes 260 days to get through every combination of the 20 day-signs and the numbers 1 through 13. A second, solar calendar, named xiuhpohualli, is 365 days long and runs concurrent to the sacred calendar. The solar calendar tracks the agricultural seasons. It takes 52 years for both calendars to cycle through until they finish at the same time. This 52-year cycle is referred to as the calendar round.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1950s: Much of Latin America experiences an economic upturn and a resurgent interest in the arts. Popular authors of this decade include the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, and the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier.
Today: Latin America is famous for the literary genre of magical realism, which peaked in the 1980s and 1990s. Popular contemporary authors who first became famous for magical realism include the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, and Fuentes.
1950s: The United States, Soviet Union, and other industrialized nations rush to build nuclear weapons. It is the beginning of the "Atomic Age," when people first envision the possibility that human weapons could destroy life on earth. This potential destruction is not dissimilar to what the Aztecs envisioned happening at the end of an age.
Today: Nuclear arms are controlled by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As of 2007, only four nations worldwide are not signatories: North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel. North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003 and tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006.
1950s: "All Summer in a Day," by Ray Bradbury, is a famous short story published in 1954 about a colony on Venus with lush vegetation. In the colony, it rains constantly, and the sun only appears for one hour every seven years.
Today: Venus (2000) is a novel by Ben Bova that avoids the midcentury popular fantasy of Venus as a tropical planet. Bova describes the planet with scientific accuracy in his tale of a mission to recover the body of a missing man.

On a grander scale are the ages of Aztec mythology. Each age is ruled by a different god and ends in a different destructive way. The first age was ruled by Tezcatlipoca, an ancient god of creation, and this world was destroyed by jaguars; the second age was ruled by the feathered serpent and morning star Quetzalcoatl and was destroyed by a hurricane; the third age was ruled by Tlaloc, god of rain and fertility, and was destroyed by fiery rain; and the fourth age was ruled by the water goddess (and Tlaloc's wife) Chalchihuitlicue and was destroyed in a flood. The current age, the fifth age, began in 3114 B.C.E. and is ruled by the sun god Tonatiuh. Modern calculations say that this age will end on December 21, 2012; the myths say that it will end with massive earthquakes and that there cannot be a sixth age unless humans examine

themselves and change bad behaviors to deserve renewal.

The Aztec Sun Stone is a circular slab of basalt measuring 12 feet in diameter and 3 feet thick. It was carved around 1479 C.E. and is dedicated to the sun god Tonatiuh. Found in Mexico City in 1790, the Sun Stone sculpture is housed at the National Museum of Anthropology. Although many people, perhaps including Paz, have considered the Sun Stone to be a visual representation of the Aztec ritual calendar, it is actually a sacrificial altar depicting the destruction of the four ages that have already passed. The face in the center is the sun god Tonatiuh, who rules the fifth age.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Octavio Paz was an established and successful poet in the Spanish-speaking world by the time the first major English translation of his work was published in 1964. In a New York Times Book Review critique of the Selected Poems of Octavio Paz, the critic Dudley Fitts expresses elation that Paz's work has finally been made available to American audiences. Fitts writes, "It is important poetry, impassioned, wide-ranging, most handsomely and attentively constructed." In a 1971 New York Times Book Review examination of Paz's Configurations, Robert Bly admits to being put off by the idea that "romantic loving can solve a lot of things." Bly contends that "Paz is a puzzle, a man of great intelligence and feeling, who in a rich poetic tradition has become not deeper, but more shallow." Calvin Bedient, more favorably reviewing Paz's Selected Poems in a 1984 New York Times Book Review article, writes, "Mr. Paz does not hold back anything from language….How unlike our own hesitant, flickering poets are these Latin Americans with their continual heroics of imagination." Thus, Bedient acknowledges the difference in expression that so offends Bly without decrying it as faulty or immature.

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 was reviewed by Roberto González Echevarría in 1988, also for the New York Times Book Review. In the article, Echevarría describes Sunstone as a "superb" and "powerful" poem, and he says of Paz, "This poet lives in and through the desire, the nostalgia sometimes, for sacredness, a sacredness briefly revealed in the ruins of ancient religions or in quivering bodies moved by always-present love." Echevarría also claims that Paz's long poems are the best ones, as well as the most difficult to translate. Helen Vendler, critiquing the same book for the New Yorker, finds many small faults with the accuracy of the translation but is enchanted with the breadth and depth of Paz's work. In another review of the Collected Poems, J. D. McClatchy, writing in Poetry magazine, confesses that he prefers Paz's essays to his poetry—not an uncommon occurrence among American reviewers. McClatchy nevertheless declares, "I finished this book convinced that Paz stands out like a ziggurat in the literary landscape of Mexico." Manuel Durán, a friend of Paz's and also a scholar of Paz's work, sums up the poet's impact in a 1991 article for World Literature Today: "Paz is a great Mexican poet whose poetry transcends the barriers of nationalism and can be effective even outside his language area, since it deals with feelings, intuitions, ideas, and sensations that can be called truly universal."

CRITICISM

Carol Ullmann

Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she examines the motif of transformation in Paz's epic poem Sunstone, arguing that the motif is found not only in the message of the poem's content but also in the poem's structure, inspiration, and place in the canon of Paz's work.

Octavio Paz's Sunstone is a poem concerned with transformation—a complete change in appearance or form. Transformation is a motif, or dominant idea, threaded throughout the epic poem, constituting part of the poem's cyclical structure, its inspiration from Aztec sources, its theme, its content, and its historical context. The writing of Sunstone also had a transformative effect on its author.

Sunstone is named after an intricately carved, highly symbolic Aztec sculpture dated to the fifteenth century. When the Sun Stone was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, it was believed to be an iconic representation of the Aztec ritual calendar. In the late twentieth century, scholars determined that the Sun Stone represents the destruction of the four ages past, with the hungry mouth of the sun god Tonatiuh, ruler of the fifth and current age, at the center. Thus it was deduced that the Sun Stone was a sacrificial altar. Although Paz would not have known this at the time Sunstone was written, the Sun Stone as altar is still fitting symbolism for his poem. The Sun Stone is also not completely unrelated to the Aztec calendar because the calendar's purpose is to mark the days to the end of the age and the beginning of the next. Paz's poem, like the meshed cogs of the Aztec calendar, is concerned with a cyclical, slowly developing movement through time, punctuated by the transformation of the world and its creatures as the calendar reaches the point at which it must start over. By modern calculations, an Aztec age takes 5,125 years to pass. The start of each age begins with the destruction of the previous world. In Sunstone, Paz represents this transformation of the world as both terrifying and majestic.

Inspired by the Aztec mythology of his Mexican heritage, Paz also made the sacred planet Venus one of his central motifs. Sunstone has a structure of 584 eleven-syllable lines in the original Spanish, to echo the 584-day synodic orbit of Venus. When it is closest to the Earth, Venus is the third-brightest object in the sky, after the sun and the moon. It is always seen close to the sun and thus is known as the morning and evening star. During its orbit, Venus undergoes a dramatic transformation that is thought by the Aztecs to represent the life, death, and resurrection of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl. Starting off as a dim evening star—a human child—it grows brighter and brighter over the course of 263 days of its orbit until it suddenly disappears, or dies, at its brightest—the prime of his life. Venus is gone for eight days while it passes in front of the sun and cannot be seen from Earth, and then it suddenly reappears as an equally bright morning star. The reappearance is when Quetzalcoatl is resurrected as a god. During the next 263 days, Venus grows dimmer as its orbit takes it farther from Earth. Upon reaching its dimmest point to observers on Earth, Venus disappears behind the sun for fifty days, and at this time Quetzalcoatl returns to the womb. He repeats this cycle when the dim evening star reemerges and he is reborn. This measurable and distinct transformation fascinated many civilizations, including the Aztecs, who based their 260-day ritual calendar on Venus's orbital phases.

Sunstone opens with the same six lines that it closes with. The first word of the first line is not capitalized, giving the sense that the text has picked up in the middle. In composing Sunstone, Paz used every ordinary punctuation mark except a period, making the poem one long sentence that has no beginning (with no capital letter to indicate a new sentence) or ending. Exclamation points and question marks are read as interjections because there are no capital letters following them, and therefore there are no new sentences. The terminal punctuation of the entire poem is a colon, not a period, which transmits an idea of continuance and anticipation, rather than finality or closure. Like the Aztec calendar, and like the circular shape of the Sun Stone, Paz's poem is cyclical.

Sunstone is narrated by a writer who undergoes a personal transformation in addition to being witness and party to the transformation of his world at the hands of the gods. The narrator is seeking to understand his loneliness and thus the meaning of his existence. He consorts with a goddess but ultimately realizes that he will not find understanding from her, that she is not his to use. He is, instead, her tool. Her purpose is larger than he is, and she will destroy him—not out of spite or evil, but because she has a larger role to fulfill. Thus does the narrator learn to seek salvation and redemption in other people and not from the gods, who are mysterious, beautiful, terrifying, and incomprehensible.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

The Old Gringo (1985; Gringo viejo), by Carlos Fuentes, was the first American bestseller by a Mexican author. Fuentes was a friend and colleague to Paz, but the two had a falling out in the late 1980s and never reconciled.
The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (1962; El laberinto de la soledad) is one of Paz's most famous and beloved works. It is a nonfiction collection of essays about Mexican culture and identity, covering cross-curriculum topics from anthropology to history.
The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1946; Alturas de Macchu Picchu), by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, is an epic-length poem that examines human solidarity through the lens of Latin American history and mythology.
Nadja (1928), by André Breton, is a French surrealist novel about a romantic relationship between the author/narrator and a young woman named Nadja. Breton was one of the founders of the surrealist movement, which significantly influenced Paz during his time in Paris.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a seventeenth-century Mexican poet who was famous in her lifetime and continued to influence Mexican writers into the twentieth century. Sor Juana's Love Poems (1997) provides a sample of her exemplary verse.
Like Water for Chocolate (1989; Como agua para chocolate), by Laura Esquivel, is a novel set in nineteenth-century Mexico. Esquivel's romantic themes and luxuriant imagery are characteristic of Latin American magical realism.

The narrator then turns to other people, in whom he sees glimmers of his goddess. The idea that there is a part of the gods in all people is reminiscent of Quetzalcoatl, who is born a man, dies at the height of his life, and is resurrected as a god. All humans are gods waiting to be transformed. The narrator ponders whether or not death is an end, whether it could be another birth, a transformation from one life to the next. He feels both the weight of finality death brings and the freedom it inspires. The cycle of human life is as closed as the calendar of the gods—one ends so the next may begin. Through this cycle, he sees that all people are one, as if trading places from one life to the next. Time is irrevocable as well as unending. The narrator finds all of this both startling and comforting. Thus does he realize he has nothing to fear about the transformation of his world, not even death, because death is only another portal, another opportunity at life, or possibly a means to becoming a deity. The narrator finds in other people his salvation and the answer to his question about the meaning of life, which, he concludes, is love.

The natural world is built on an infinite series of transformations. Some of these transformations involve seasons, catastrophes, maturation, and evolution. Some are more easily observed than others. Some transformations are cyclical, and some are irrevocable. Paz's narrator calls on the four elements of the natural world as agents of transformation: earth, air, water, and fire. Earth is the quiet tomb or womb to which the narrator retreats to await renewal. Air is the realm of the gods, touching everything, always present, always moving. Fire is the agent of violent change, evoking the power of the sun, which is the power of Tonatiuh, the ruling god of the fifth age. Water is the conduit of time, flowing, flowing, recycling, unceasing. These elements are recognized by the Aztecs as the underpinnings of the world's structure.

For human beings, transformations may occur in the mental and spiritual realms. Sunstone, in part, is about spiritual transformation for the narrator. At the end of the poem, he writes of the sun erupting from his head, which is symbolic of being touched by the gods, perhaps the almighty sun god Tonatiuh. This touch indicates that the narrator is now connected to the gods, as he declares himself free of his inferior existence. To reach this dramatic change, the narrator had to let go of his ego, his sense of himself.

Paz also invokes the transformative power of poetry itself in Sunstone. He sees the human condition as fundamentally isolated, lonely. With this poem, he hopes to bring people together. His message is one of love—brotherly love, romantic love, and sexual love. In Sunstone, he is shouting to the world: Embrace change! Love one another!

Source: Carol Ullmann, Critical Essay on Sunstone, in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Edward Hirsch

In the following excerpt, Hirsch examines Paz's search for the "eternal moment" in his poetry.

Octavio Paz practiced poetry like a secret religion. He dwelt in its mysteries, he invoked its sacraments, he read its entrails, he inscribed its revelations. Writing was for him a primordial act, and he stared down at the blank page like an abyss until it sent him reeling over the brink of language. The poems he brought back are filled with ancient wonder and strangeness, hermetic wisdom, a dizzying sense of the sacred. They are magically—sometimes violently—uprooted from silence. They are drawn from a deep well.

… Paz started writing poems as a teenager and never let up until the end of his life. Lyric poetry was for him a core activity, at the root of being, and for nearly seventy years he was driven by invisible demons to try to connect to himself and to others through the sensuality—the rhythmic fervor—of words. Inspiration was for him not a static entity, but a forward thrust, an aspiration, the act of "going beyond ourselves to the encounter of ourselves." Paz wrote poetry with a sharp awareness of being oneself and, simultaneously, someone or something else. He called this "the other voice." He experienced the merging of voices as a submersion, a type of flooding. "We still keep alive the sensation of some minutes so full they were time overflowing, a high tide that broke the dikes of temporal succession," he writes in The Bow and the Lyre, a sustained defense of poetry Shelley himself might have cherished. "For the poem is a means of access to pure time, an immersion in the original waters of existence." He also defined the poetic experience as "an opening up of the wellsprings of being. An instant and never. An instant and forever."

Paz was—and in his work he remains—a seeker, and the quest for a moment to abolish linear or successive time is one of the driving forces of his aesthetic, a defining feature of his pilgrimage. Poetry is a wayward siren song calling him to a perpetual present, to an erotic consecration of instants, and to a superabundance of time and being. "Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present," he says in his Nobel lecture, "In Search of the Present."

The fixed present, the endless instant, the eternal moment—the experience is for Paz something to be attained, like reality, like being itself. "Door of being, dawn and wake me," he prays near the conclusion of his circular masterpiece Sunstone.

… If you can get to the present, there are presences, Paz suggests, and he trusts poetry's capacity to deliver those presences through images incarnated in words, through words flowing in rhythm. "The instant dissolves in the succession of other nameless instants. In order to save it we must convert it into a rhythm," he writes in Alternating Current, where he also defines rhythm as "the reincarnation of the instant." Rhythm serves the poet as a means of access—a reliable guide—to originary or pure time.

Paz needed lyric poetry as a primary mode of crossing, of rendering the self diaphanous, of becoming "a wind that stops / turns on itself and is gone" ("The Face and the Wind"). The words themselves become a way of seeking others that also links him back to the spaces opening up inside himself. "Between now and now, / between I am and you are, / the word bridge," he declares in his short poem "The Bridge."

… Language becomes a form of practical magic as the word becomes a bridge, a juncture, a span of connection. "Everything is a door / everything a bridge," he proclaims in "Sleepless Night." Words are transfiguring and have a threshold power. They are portals to the other side. "Words are bridges," he writes in a refrain that reverberates through his poetic cantata, "Letter of Testimony." They are a form of a linkage, a way of reaching out, reaching across, that is also a means of reaching in:

Let yourself be carried by these words

toward yourself.
 

("Letter of Testimony")

The words become the only way for him of attaining himself, attaining a truer identity than social identity—a shadowy, psychic truth, a mode of being. "I'm not finished with myself yet," he declares in his prose poem "The Besieged." "I am the shadow my words cast," he concludes in "A Draft of Shadows." It's as if he doesn't have that real self, that hidden or shadow identity without the word, the syllable, the poetic act. The word bridge, the wordbridge, becomes the site of a poetic crossing into true being.

… I'm struck by how many of Paz's poems seem to unfold and take place in liminal spaces, in pauses and intervals, odd crossings, interrupted movements. He is poetically empowered not just by bridging, but also by moments when bridges go up, by disconnection. He finds a poetic space opening up in gaps and ruptures ("Poetry is the crack / the space / between one word and another," he announces in "Letter to León Felipe"), in the transitional realm of the betwixt and the between.

… Paz is trying to nail down the cleft and interstice, the fissure in temporal process, the brilliant weightlessness of what Wordsworth calls "those fleeting moods / Of shadowy exultation."

It seems crucial to Paz to keep affirming that the real self is achieved in such intervals, luminous moments, fluid states. These states are utterly essential: they are perceptions of reality, modes of transparency. Moreover, it's as if we all exist most fully in these spacious intervals, these widening gaps and eternal pauses, which are perceived as a true condition of the world itself. What seems like a struggle attained in bridging over the self in some lyrics becomes a canny reconnaissance about the world in others. Such a perception seems to inhere in the poem "Between Going and Staying."

… The lyric exploration is for Paz always epiphanic, always precarious. Such key or luminous moments (it is "Within a Moment: A Pulsation of the Artery," Blake writes, "When the Poets Work is Done") are by definition sudden, unexpected, revelatory, unconscious. They are dangerous breakthrough experiences. Such "Moments of Being" (the phrase is Virginia Woolf's) are also transitory and difficult to pin down. They usurp the social realm and create their own sense of eternity. They also create ruptures in ordinary experience, pockets of emptiness, holes in time. They defy time-bound narratives. Think, for example, of the playful, paradoxical, quasi-philosophical way that Paz traces the struggle between temporal process and the atemporal instant in "Into the Matter":

it's not time now

now it's now

now it's time to get rid of time

now it's not time

it's time and not now

time eats the now

Paz structures and arranges his poems in such a way—in a non-narrative manner—to create disjunctions that deliver how epiphanies derange and rupture chronological time. I'm thinking of the spatial arrangements in his poems, the length of his lines and minimal use of punctuation, the associative drift of his surrealist attention, the sonorousness of his Spanish, his trust in circularities (Sunstone) and white spaces ("Blanco"), in presences that defy narrative closure. They are structured for immediacy, to approach and hold a moment. And they try to create a space in which "the present is motionless" ("Wind from all Compass Points"). Like Joseph Cornell boxes, they become "monuments to every moment" and "cages for infinity" ("Objects and Apparitions").

Paz was a restless innovator, and he was continually seeking forms that would create a house for being, consecrating a stillness. That stillness was something he desperately sought, something he spiritually needed, and as a result he was willing, even eager, to cross thresholds and risk an annihilation he could embody in poems. At times he seems cut off from the moment itself, lost in a dire, chaotic, threatening form of inner exile. His lyric access produces a kind of terror. I suspect that's why so many of his poems are filled with shadowy tunnels and traps, elemental passageways, vertiginous heights. They move through endless "corridors terraces stairways" ("A Wind from all Compass Points"). "I crossed through arches and over bridges," he writes at a key moment in "Coming and Going": "I was alive in search of life." But the restless search for life also becomes, paradoxically, a search for death. "The sun of the high plains eats my remains," he concludes: "I was alive and went in search of death." Life and death are held together in a single weightless moment beyond time.

Paz's poems are filled with moments of bewildering quest, with a lost searching. He could at times "engrave vertigo" ("Tomb"). He vacillates between isolation and connection, solitude and communion, doubt and rapture.

… What made Paz such a deep initiate of connection was the psychic truth that so much of his poetry was elaborated out of a radical sense of human estrangement and exile, a feeling of unreality. He considered the experience of being born "a wound that never heals"—it is "a fall into an alien land"—and he sought through poetry to reunite with others, a way back toward the maternal Other. "I am living / at the center / of a wound still fresh," he writes in "Dawn." Always he was seeking to heal a human cleft, an irreparable sense of division, a fissure in being. He universalized the experience ("The consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual history," he said), but it was a generalization experienced on his pulse, in his own body, which is why it motivated, both consciously and unconsciously, so much of his poetic production.

The same lyric practice that gives us moments of annihilation also gives us moments of ecstatic union, fusion with the glorious Other. They salvage and deliver back to us the enormous moment when we glimpse "the unity that we lost" and recall "the forgotten astonishment of being alive" (Sunstone). Paz had a skeptical intelligence, but he was never really a cerebral poet, as has often been suggested. Rather, his poems are driven by a sometimes anguished, sometimes joyous eroticism. Most of his poems seem shadowed by the obscure absence or presence of the beloved. When the beloved is absent from the poem he feels acutely cut off from nature and from himself, delivered back to his own estranging desires, and to the linear flow of time. But when the beloved visits the poem he feels the overflowing circularity of time, the dance of being, the affirmation of an eternal moment. Poetry becomes a means of attainment, the reconciliation of opposites, a way of participating in an abundant universe. It becomes a form of creative love that moves beyond the duality of subject and object, annulling the temporal world, offering up the mysteries of carnation. Here the moment widens into eternity.

… I am moved by Paz's suggestion that love, like poetry, "is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is."

Paz's poetry of attainment fulfills the Sufi or mystical maxim, "The Beloved and I are One." He defines—he defends—the creative moment when two people merge and thereby protect their share of the eternal, our ration of paradise.

To love:

to open the forbidden door,

the passageway

that takes us to the other side of time.

The moment:

the opposite of death,

our fragile eternity.
 

("Letter of Testimony")

"The poet endeavors to make the world sacred," Octavio Paz declared (The Siren and the Seashell), and in his restless search for the present, the contemporaneous, he never lost sight of poetry's irrational power and sacred mystery, its archaic roots, its spiritual audacity. "Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment," he declares at the outset of The Bow and the Lyre. He treated lyric poetry as a revolutionary emotional activity, a spiritual exercise, a means of interior liberation, a quest for transfiguration. His poems inscribe a quest and an attainment as they hold together what he calls "life and death in a single instant of incandescence." Here is a poetry that seeks to return us—to restore us—to the totality of being. It is a living poetry that leaps over time and delivers inscriptions of timelessness, time without limit or measure, the emptiness and plenitude of a moment "forever arriving."

Source: Edward Hirsch, "Octavio Paz: In Search of a Moment," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, March-April 2000, pp. 49-51.

José Quiroga

In the following excerpt, Quiroga explains his belief that "Sunstone" is Paz's best poem.

… After Paz's return to Mexico in 1954 he became an active figure in Mexican literary circles, collaborating in the Revista Mexicana de Literatura, directed by Carlos Fuentes and Emmanuel Carballo. But this was a difficult period for the reception of Paz's work. According to Pacheco, Paz's Semillas para un himno and ¿Aguila o sol? were not well received by critics; as mentioned earlier, "surrealism" had become anathema to many Mexican intellectuals, a "dead" movement that had little to offer the nation's literary life. In fact, Paz was seen at the time as a kind of "boy wonder" who had been "corrupted" by his stay in Europe. Sunstone, Pacheco recalls, renewed faith in Octavio Paz. In Pacheco's own words, people thought that Paz had finally listened to a sensible inner voice and had renounced the incomprehensible and hermetic poetics of surrealism, in order to return to the mode and style of his early youth ("Descripción" 182). Paz published Sunstone in 1957, and has closed the poems of Libertad bajo palabra with that poem ever since its second edition. It is clear that he conceives this text as a kind of summing-up of his work up till then: in one of the notes added to the latter Blanco (1967) Paz states that Sunstone closes off the first period of his poetic oeuvre.

Critics that read Sunstone at that time correctly perceived it as a kind of "return," while they corroborated Paz's later understanding that the poem was not merely a return but also a point of closure. From the beginning Sunstone was seen, then, as a liminal text: a text of beginnings and endings, a poem that was placed at a threshold. As with all thresholds, it is important to examine in what manner it concludes the previous "cycle" of Paz's career, and what is it that the text initiates. Pacheco has anticipated Sunstone back to a number of Paz's poems: "Arcos," "Elegía interrumpida," "Cuarto de hotel," "La vida sencilla," and "Máscaras del alba." Of these, "Arcos" which appears in Libertad bajo palabra under "Asueto" (1939-1944) is the clearest precursor, not only in terms of form (hendecasyllables) but also in terms of content. From its first lines "Arcos" traces a journey that takes the poet out of himself in order to propitiate a self-encounter: "¿Quién canta en las orillas del papel? / Inclinado, de pechos sobre el río / de imágenes, me veo, lento y solo, de mi mismo alejarme." (Who sings in the margins of paper? / Inclined, chest over the river / of images, I see myself, slow and alone, distancing myself from myself.) It is clear that the poem bears little relation to the other texts from La estación violenta. Gone are the violent juxtapositions of "Himno entre ruinas" with its interplay of time and space in italics, or those of "Repaso nocturno," that can be traced back to ¿Aguila o Sol? Perhaps only in "El río" or in "Mutra" might we find a suitable point of reference for the sense of flow that the reader experiences in Sunstone, but those two poems express an agony and despair that stands in marked contrast to the melancholic tone of Sunstone. "Mascaras del alba" might provide a suitable point of comparison, but only in terms of its use of hendecasyllables and, perhaps, in the idea of recurrent time displayed in the text. It is in the latter part of The Bow and the Lyre, as well as in some of the poems collected in Poemas under the section Dias hábiles (1958-1961) where we find a style that resembles the serene transparencies that flow in Sunstone.

What is clear in terms of the overall construction and elaboration of Paz's work is that Sunstone inaugurates an enormous revisionary process in the poet's work. Sunstone's fascination with form, where the poem slowly moves as if enamoured of its own reflection, is one of the threads that joins it to the other great long poem of the Mexican tradition: José Gorostiza's Muerte sin fin (1929). Like Gorostiza, Paz's situates the reader not in Eliot's "unreal city" but in an unreal climate where nature transparently reflects upon itself. But the idea of endlessness, so prevalent in Paz's precursor, is transformed in Sunstone into a philosophical time of creative echoes where repetition entails the possibility of creation.

It is hard to do justice to a poem as impressive as Sunstone (1957). It is perhaps Paz's most astounding piece, mixing eros and history, pain, solitude, and melancholy, over a broken landscape of time whose sense of plenitude is as deeply felt as one long epiphany conveyed in a cosmic dance. Its memorable lines flow with the ease with which only ageless truths can be said; its most hidden references are touched by a rare illumination, as if this truly were the poem of a being possessed by an inner clarity, who reviews a life seen as moving panoramas, and writes his text in transparent ink over a pliable surface. Tomás Segovia has justly termed it a masterpiece in the classical sense of the word, stressing an obvious truth that nevertheless accounts for the poem's essential strangeness: modern poets rarely attempt to unveil their desires for a masterpiece in so open a fashion, and then succeed. And then, underlying the poetic construction, what seems like a profoundly classic attempt to fuse poetic writing with a hidden code that is nevertheless explained by the writer himself, with no attempt at hiding the writing under the veil of obscurity: Sunstone's perfect 584 free verse hendecasyllabic lines correspond or repeat the revolution of the planet Venus. Sunstone, thus, is literally a poetic feat. If Paz during his years in Paris attempted to fuse poetics and politics, the singular life with that of his fellow human beings, in Sunstone the poetic revolution has come full circle: poetry repeats the movement of the planets and the stars; it is intrinsically related to the universe. This relation accounts for its apparent timelessness; the poem surprises precisely by its unreal landscape, as if it had been an archaeological form lost at some previous century and then unearthed in its full perfection.

Sunstone is a profoundly revolutionary poem, a profoundly modern poem, but its modernity is found not in its style or in its rhetoric. Its movement is like that of a trance meditation; the tone is one of melancholia, if not regret. The poetic voice manages to undo the effect of its own perfection, and its seamless construction is so inadvertent that the poem seems to have been written in what the Romantics called the language of ordinary passion, to the extent that the poetic voice never seems insincere. Paz's rigorous sense of form is subsumed to a particular content, and Venus is never named directly in the poem; rather its movement is presented as something that incarnates within the poem itself. To Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Roberto González Echevarría, Paz mentions that "pleasure" here is one of the axes of the poetic discourse (PC 24). He also states, in the same interview, that Sunstone is a linear poem that endlessly goes back over itself (21). He succinctly recounts not only the numerical structure upon which the text is based, but also what the text meant for him:

The number of lines is exactly that of the number of days of the revolution of the planet Venus. The conjunction between Venus and the Sun is realized after a circular run of 584 days, and that of the poem with itself after 584 lines…. What I mean to say is, that over the circular time of myth, the unrepeatable history of one man that belongs to one generation, to one country and one era is inserted … Time may be cyclical, and thus inmortal … But man is finite and unrepeatable. What is repeated is the experience of finitude: all men know they will die … These experiences are historical: they happen and they happen to us. At the same time, they are not historical: they are repeated.

I have quoted Paz's statements almost in their entirety as they are a succinct articulation of the poem's form. Indeed, to Sunstone Paz adds a long note that fundamentally explains what appears in the first paragraph of the previous quote, although in that note Paz underscored the particularly Mexican aspect of this operation, rendering both dates and times in their Aztec equivalents. Tomas Segovia, in his short but concise essay on Sunstone, implicitly clarifies what this form means for the author: it reveals the poem as the product of a will, while at the same time it also allows the poet to forfeit the very will responsible for its creation. In other words, authorial intention also resigns itself for the sake of a higher purpose, and the form of the poem—its 584 hendecasyllables—allows the author to withdraw his self for the benefit of the text. Sunstone can be seen, then, not only as a poem of control but also as one that entails a surrender to an inmutable principle.

In The Bow and the Lyre (published in 1956, preceding Sunstone by a year) and in "Los signos en rotación," Paz explains that modern man has lost the idea of the natural, and that the Aristotelian notion of mimesis needs to be reexamined in the modern word. In Sunstone, the mimetic act of the poem vis-à-vis Venus's revolution is part of an avant-garde gesture that denied mimesis and claimed that the poet did not have to imitate external reality, but rather operate like it. Sunstone does not imitate rotation or revolution; Venus is not named in the poem; the repetition at the beginning and at the end are meant to correspond to cyclical time. This repetition allows for a structural relation to be posited between Venus and Sunstone—a relationship apprehended by works of art such as the famous pre-Columbian Sunstone calendar in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico that we now endow with archaeological value. Segovia, once again, implicitly allows for a point of comparison to Mallarmé's Un coup de dés, although Paz's homage to Mallarmé's great poem is to be explored to a fuller extent in Paz's Blanco. Sunstone is a throw of the dice, an immense risk for a poet to undertake. It is the precipitous act of a poet that hurls himself toward an abyss.

Paz's control of form and surrender to it is a surrealist gesture. But aside from the belief in love as a force of salvation, Sunstone's much vaunted surrealism can be found in Paz's poetical attitude toward the universe. Paz opposes cyclical recurrence to the linear, unrepeatable history of a single individual. The poet and his particular discourse—his memories, his very sense of contingency—enter within the cyclical flow of time without altering or interrupting it, but giving themselves to it. The poem's sense of surrender has been commented upon by its myriad critics. What has not been sufficiently stressed is Paz's use of the descriptive term "machine" or the analogous "machinery" in order to describe it—concretely, the poem as historical and antihistorical machine. The poet, as contingent creature, enters the repetitive flow of time by virtue of the singularity of his experience. Once that singularity has been registered in writing, the act of reading the poem returns that same, singular experience into an act of reading eternally reproduced. By insisting on his very singularity, within a cycle, the poet opens up that circularity to eternal recurrence. It is in this sense that the poem becomes a machine, positing itself as a copy of the universe, in order to then turn back and deny itself as the copy that it pretended to be. In a latter essay on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass Paz states:

In the first stage of the process, he translated the mythical elements into mechanical terms, and therefore denies them; in the second, he transfers the mechanical elements into a mythical context, and denies them again. He uses the myth to deny the criticism and criticism to deny the myth. This double negation produces an affirmation which is never conclusive and which exists in perpetual equilibrium over the void.

Although these are later statements, they are an apt analogy to Paz's metaphysical ground in Sunstone, where the clarity of the universe is affirmed by its juxtaposition to the linear singularity of an individual life that is then returned to the realm of the circular by the act of reading.

Even if we did not have Paz's explanatory note linking the number of lines in the poem to Venus, Sunstone should still surprise us: lines seem to be there for the sheer fact of adding number, of counting, of filling up space— "caminas como un árbol, como un río / caminas y me hablas como un río" ("you walk like a tree, you walk like a river, / and talk to me like the course of a river" or, for example, in the following section, where Woman's body turns into stone.

… I search for water

in your eyes there's no water, they're made
of stone

and your breasts, your belly, your hips are
stone

your mouth tastes of dust, you [sic] mouth
tastes

like a poisoned time, your body tastes

like a well that's been sealed.

The poem's analogy to the Venusian revolution, in essence, turns the whole poem into an image of its own process of composition. It is, in this sense, pure discourse, absolute irreality: "tiempo total donde no pasa nada / sino su propio transcurrír dichoso" ("total time where nothing / happens but its own, easy crossing"). The equivalence of the poem's lines to the Venusian year turns the whole poem into a supplement; it empties the poem of meaning so that it becomes pure form. No line is excessive, because all lines are redundant.

Paz's note, like the one he writes for the latter Blanco, reveals an enigma: Does structure precede the text, or is the text an effect of its own structure? To what extent is the composition dependent upon the mutual relationship between structure and content? It is relatively well known that Paz's work in Blanco follows a structural system that forms an underlying layer on the text, and that Paz is interested in figures like the American composer John Cage, who used chance and the I Ching as amode of surrendering the will of the poet to another, more impersonal will. Nevertheless, Sunstone does not seem to have been structured a priori, in order to conform its number of verses to the astronomical number: there are actually no references to the Aztec solar calendar within the poem. Venus, we should recall, is merely a cultural referent; the planet itself, regardless of its name, is a celestial fact. From the point of view of the observer, names reveal an underlying structural equivalence between myths, as Paz explains in Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo (1967). That Mexican—or, more properly, Aztec—cultural signifiers of the poem are found at the margins of the text (but also as their underlying sense of foundation) is also related to the displacement of the writer in the text; Sunstone speaks not only of the poet as a singular individual but also of the poet as an entity, as a principle that repeats itself over time.

Whether for the sake of making the poem fit with the Venusian revolution in the Aztec calendar, or for underscoring to what extent Man and Woman are singular but also universal principles, Sunstone's major trope is that of repetition. The first lines of the poem display a number of elements that will be repeated at the end of the poem.

a crystal willow, a poplar of water,

a tall fountain the wind arches over,

a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still,

a course of a river that turns, moves on,

doubles back, and comes full circle,

forever arriving:

The poem insists on the singularity of these objects, it repeats "un" as if it were a mantra, one that has the virtue of emptying the objects of their very singularity while at the same time insisting upon it. The objects are, furthermore, unreal, subject to the particular deformation of language; the willow becomes a crystal willow; it is rooted on the ground although it moves with the wind; the river's route is circuitous.

Sunstone is an ecstatic poem, one that needs to be read at one sitting. Perhaps the best account of the poem is the one offered by José Emilio Pacheco in his "Descripción de Piedra de sol." That the poem invites description is interesting in itself; this belies the sense of transparency given in Paz's poetry.

For Pacheco, the first and last five lines of Sunstone introduce the very notion of mobility: there are no endpoints in the poem, but rather colons, semicolons and commas, underscoring the text's fluidity. Pacheco sees a first movement of the poem geared toward the future, an impersonal gesture broken up by the appearance of the second person singular tú, which is the woman addressed in the poem, almost immediately followed by the poet's "I," Woman and World become one body that is then traversed by this "I," who abandons himself in order to undertake a search or mythical quest. This searching "I" evokes a Mexican childhood—the past tense, as Pacheco points out, is here employed for the first time—and thus begins the poem's second movement. Here, the poem speaks in the mode of remembrance, as memory awakens thoughts of love along with other historical events of the poet's life. Woman incarnates in at least five names, all of which are in turn cultural referents: Melusina, Laura, Isabel, Persé fona, María. María refers to the Catholic Virgin; Laura and Isabel are not only common names in Spanish, but may also be seen as refer[r]ing to the two great sources of Western poetry: Petrarch's Laura and Garcilaso de la Vega's Isabel. Melusine is a mythic name that refers back to hermetic lore; she is also alluded to in one of the sonnets in Nerval's Les chimères, from which Sunstone's epigraph is taken. According to Pacheco, Melusyne is a naiad married to a mortal (Raymondin de Poitiers) who discovered her secret: Melusyne was condemned to turn into a serpent every Saturday, from her hips down to her feet, in penance for having jailed her father in a mountain. Finally, Persephone rules as the Queen of Hades. Pacheco brings out these names and others mentioned or at least alluded [to] in the text (Astarté, Istar, Venus herself as well as Quetzalcóatl, who is transfigured into Venus) in order to explore the mystical background of eros that underlies Sunstone.

If on the one hand, the poet's quest entails recuperating the past through love, this love can only redeem a history that is always lived as an interplay between the private and the col[l]ective. Paz mentions concrete experiences of his life, streets in New York and in Mexico; he returns to his experiences in republican Spain, when placid time is suddenly ruptured by sirens, screams, and bombs. The world is full of chimerical monsters, ruling society with an implacable grip out of which human beings' only defense is love. The experience of solitude and alienation that is part and parcel of modern man's expulsion from the garden of innocence leads to a sense of solidarity where historical figures are images, and singular men and women bond with each other in order to survive. The poet reads himself as he reads history, and finally invokes the doors of perception that will allow him to escape. But no escape is possible, and the poem ends with a sense of acquiescence or surrender. As all doors and walls are rent, the poet is hurled out of himself into the time of all beginnings, as the sun once again revives the poem's initial lines, the timeless landscape of memory, the labyrinthine meandering of the world and of individual conscience.

Source: José Quiroga, "Libertad bajo palabra," in Understanding Octavio Paz, University of South Carolina Press, 1999, pp. 10-56.

SOURCES

Bedient, Calvin, "Heroics of Imagination," Review of Selected Poems, by Octavio Paz, in New York Times Book Review, August 19, 1984, p. 13.

Bly, Robert, Review of Configurations, in New York Times Book Review, April 18, 1971, pp. 6, 20.

Durán, Manuel, "Octavio Paz: Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1990," in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 1, Winter 1991, pp. 5-7.

Echevarría, Roberto González, "Cosmic Connections and Erotic Salvation," Review of The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz and Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, by Octavio Paz, in New York Times Book Review, May 15, 1988, p. 24.

Fitts, Dudley, "Music in Running Lines," Review of Selected Poems of Octavio Paz, in New York Times Book Review, January 26, 1964, p. 22.

McClatchy, J. D., "Masks and Passions," in Poetry, Vol. 154, No. 1, April 1989, p. 48.

Paz, Octavio, Sunstone, in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987, edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 1991, pp. 3-35.

Swedish Academy, "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1990: Octavio Paz," Press Release, October 11, 1990, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/press.html.

Vendler, Helen, "To Be a Sun Again," Review of The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987, in New Yorker, Vol. 64, No. 7, April 4, 1988, pp. 97-101.