Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer Seven Poems from 'Rimas' Introduction & Notes by Michael Smith

Bécquer's life, like that of Keats, whom Bécquer resembles in some ways, was a brief one. Born on February 17, 1836, in Seville, Bécquer was one of eight sons. His father, Don José Domínguez Bécquer, was an established if not overly successful genre-painter in Seville, who died when the poet was five. The poet's mother, Doña Joaquina, died when he was nine-and-a-half years old. The young orphaned Bécquer family was fortunate to be rescued from indigence by an old uncle, Don Juan Vargas, who had no children of his own.

Bécquer first attended the College of San Antonio Abad. Later, his uncle managed to have him admitted to the College of San Telmo, founded in 1681, supported by the government and admitting only 'poor and orphaned boys of noble extraction'. In truth, Bécquer qualified for admission since his family, originally from Flanders, had settled in Seville at the end of the 16th century and was among the most distinguished in the city.

Bécquer's Sevillian background is of great importance to his writings, both to his prose tales (Leyendas) and to his poetry (Rimas). Seville was an ancient city, once magnificent in Moorish and Gothic splendour, now gradually falling into ruin (an intriguing comparison to pursue and develop would be with James Clarence Mangan's Dublin). It was a city haunted by the ghosts of a fabulous past. Bécquer's special schoolfriend at San Telmo. Narciso Campillo, recalled their school days: 'Our childhood friendship was strengthened by our life in common, wearing as we did the same uniform, eating at the same table, and sleeping in an immense hall whose arches, columns and melancholy lamps, suspended at intervals, I can see before me still.'

Bécquer's close friend and earliest editor, Ramón Rodríguez, writes: 'His artistic soul, nurtured in the illustrious school of Seville and developed amid Gothic cathedrals, lacy Moorish and stain-glassed windows, was at ease only in the field of tradition. He felt at home in a complete civilisation, like that of the Middle Ages, and his artistic-political ideas and his fear of the ignorant mob made him regard with marked predilection all that was aristocratic and historic.'

After his matriculation, the College of San Telmo was closed by royal decree and Bécquer had to try to make his way in the world. This time his godmother, Doña Manuela Monchay, a kind and intelligent woman, took him into her home. The Monchay house had a fine library (Chateaubriand, Balzac, Byron, Musset, Hugo, Hoffman, Espronceda, etc.), which Bécquer made good use of.

After a couple of years in the painting school of Santa Isabel de Hungría (founded by Murillo), Bécquer entered the studio of his uncle, Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer, an established Seville artist. Although this uncle recognised his nephew's talent for drawing, he realised also that Gustavo was better suited to a literary career, and he encouraged him in this. But there was trouble at home for Bécquer. Doña Manuela, who intended to settle her estate on her godson, was growing impatient with his bohemian life. She demanded that he settle down to a solid commercial job, something for which Bécquer had neither the ability nor the temperament. Like many before and after him in a similar situation, Bécquer left home and set off for Madrid to seek fame and fortune as a writer.

In Madrid, however, the young man was to suffer the customary disappointments and poverty. Nonetheless, he managed somehow to keep himself going with occasional literary journalism and uncongenial work as a copyist. 'Is this Madrid?' Bécquer wrote at the time. 'Is this the paradise I dreamt of in my home town? My God! How horrible the disenchantment!'

In his early years in Madrid, Bécquer fell in love with Julia Espín, the lovely and vivacious daughter of the director of the orchestra in the Teatro Real. At this young lady's home, musicians, artists and writers gathered for recitals and readings. But the shy Bécquer did not declare his love for Julia, which was probably just as well; for the young woman did not in fact love the poet.

The other lady who features as a possible source of inspiration for Bécquer's love-poetry is Elisa Guillén, of whom little or nothing is known. This affair seems to have caused Bécquer a great deal of emotional grief and it ended as abruptly has it had begun. Later, in 1861, Bécquer married Casta Esteban Navarro. Some have argued that this marriage was a reaction to the cruelty of Elisa Guillén. At any rate, the marriage was not ultimately a happy one and in time the couple separated, though not before the had produced two children, two boys whom Bécquer loved dearly to the end of his life.

In 1858 Bécquer had begun working for the newspaper El Contemporáneo. In its pages he published most of his prose tales as well as his extraordinary letters, Desde mi Celda ('From my Cell'). In 1862 Bécquer's brother Valeriano, a painter, whose marriage had fared badly, came up to Madrid. When Bécquer's health, never very strong (some think he was tubercular), collapsed, the two brothers set off for healthy country air and settled for a year on the Moncayo, a mountain in northern Spain (it was during this period that he met and married Casta Esteban Navarro). There they supported themselves, Bécquer by his writings, Valeriano by his artwork.

At the end of the year the two brothers returned to Madrid. Now Bécquer experienced some good fortune. Luis González Bravo, a man of literary pretensions who was Prime Minister under Isabel II, became interested in the writings of Bécquer. Learning of the poet's financial difficulties, Bravo found him a lucrative sinecure as Government Censor of novels. Bécquer used his new-found leisure to realise the long-cherished ambition of collecting his scattered poems, adding to them and making a book. When Bravo saw the finished work, he was so pleased that he decided to write a prologue for it and to have the book printed at his own expense. Political events, however, intervened. The Revolution of 1868 took place, Isabel II was dethroned and Bravo had to flee to the French frontier. In the ensuing conflict, the manuscript of Bécquer's Rimas, the only surviving one, was lost. With extraordinary determination and tenacity of purpose Bécquer set about recalling and rewriting the poems. Unfortunately he did not live to see their publication.

With the fall of Bravo and the loss of his sinecure, Bécquer was forced once more to earn is living by literary journalism. His most regular work was as literary editor of a local periodical, La Ilustración de Madrid, to which Valeriano contributed illustrations. But the work was poorly paid and the two brothers suffered considerable hardship. Valeriano's health collapsed first and he died in his brother's arms on September 23, 1870. Gustavo did not last long after Valeriano's death.

Bécquer's friend, Ramón Rodríguez, described the end as follows: 'A strange illness and an even stranger manner of death! Without any precise symptoms, what was diagnosed as pneumonia turned to hepatitis which became in turn pericarditis. Meanwhile the patient with his brain as clear as ever and his natural gentleness undiminished, went on submitting himself to every experiment, accepting every medicine, and dying inch by inch.' Bécquer died on December 22, during the bitter winter of 1870.

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Until the appearance of Bécquer, romanticism in Spanish literature did not amount to much. After Espronceda's effort there came the work of Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873), Antonio Arnao (1828-1889) and Ventura Aguillera (1820-1881). These were unknown outside Spain in their own lifetimes and they are no pleasure to read now. Their successors, Rivas and Zorilla, reacted to the romantic despair of Espronceda as a threat to traditional faith and values.

Bécquer's two main contemporaries, Ramón de Campoamor (1817-1901) and Gaspar Núñez de Arce (1832-1903), failed to liberate themselves from Spanish conservatism. Their failure is to some extent due to their refusal or inability to look outside Spain for stimulation.

Not surprisingly, then, the renewal of Spanish poetry, when it came, was initiated by outside influence. A minor writer, Eulogio Florentino Sanz, who had been in Berlin on a diplomatic mission, came back to Madrid in 1856. He brought with him some translations he had made of poems by Heine, and he had these published in an important Madrid periodical in 1857. In the same year more translations of poems by Heine were made by other translators and published in Spain. Of these other translators, Augusto Ferrán, an intimate friend of Bécquer, is significant in the literary history of Spain. Ferrán, like Bécquer, came from Seville and was influenced by Andalusian cantares, folk poetry that is characteristically brief and redolent of southern Spain. It was this blend of popular poetry and Heine's Lieder that Ferrán passed on to Bécquer. In addition, one might consider the possible influence of a collection of popular coplas made by Fernán Caballero in Seville and published in 1859.

To the Spanish modernists such as Jiménez and Machado, suffocating under a weight of dead poetic conventions, Bécquer's appeal was his patent ability to handle personal emotional experience with a directness that was at the same time graceful and stylish.

As in an open book
I read in the depths of your eyes.
What use that your lips form smiles
your eyes belie?
Cry! Don't be ashamed
to confess you loved me a little.
Cry! No one is watching us.
You see, I'm a man ... and I cry too.

(Rima XLIV)

In the context of a national poetry, the revolution Bécquer achieved bears some comparison with that of Wordsworth's: in both, the orientation is towards a return to the speech of living people experiencing emotion. Bécquer's task, however, was easier than Wordsworth's because Spanish poetry, unlike English poetry, always drew sustenance, even at its most literary as in the Siglo de oro, from an incredibly rich tradition of popular poetry. Bécquer's achievement was to use this poetry's plain diction, its directness of statement and its predilection for sequential symmetry, determined in large measure by the exigencies of accompanying tunes and aural memory.

Sighs are of air and go to the air!
Tears are of water and go to the sea!
Tell me, woman, when love is forgotten,
do you know whither it goes?

(Rima XXXVIII)

Above all, Bécquer is a great love poet. He is that, however, not because of his concentration on love as a theme, and the poignant and elegant treatment he gives it; rather, as for Keats, love is the material in which Bécquer explored and sadly discovered the human condition of helpless longing for an unattainable happiness of sense and spirit, of the brevity of union with the loved one and the inconsolable anguish of consciousness.

We are born as a flash of lightning,
brilliant still when we die:
so short is life.
The fame and love we chase
are shadows of a dream we pursue:
to awake is to die.

(Rima LXIX)

Bécquer's was a restless spirit. He was haunted by the transience of the human measured against the permanence of his spiritual ideals. In his work, the physical is constantly and wierdly dissolving into mists and shadows. A sense of unreality predominates. Memories of past experience invade the present and undermine all delight in it. Only longing, as change for Heraclitus, persists, not possession.

When again we evoke
the fleeting hours of the past,
a tear about to slip, trembling,
glistens in her black eyelashes.
And at last it slips and falls
like a drop of dew, at the thought
that tomorrow we shall both sigh for today
as today we sigh for yesterday.

(Rima LIV)

Keats's nightingale has an extraordinary counterpart in Bécquer's golondrinas (Rima LIII), and Bécquer's poem is as famous in the Spanish-speaking world as Keats's Ode is in the English. For Keats, the nightingale represented some kind of ideal immortality of the physical; but for Bécquer, even though the swallows return, they are not the same swallows of last year. Both they and the world have changed.

What is quintessentially Spanish in Bécquer is the disturbing proximity in which life and death are held in his work. The Spanish obsession with death is not morbidity, for which it is often mistaken by non-Spaniards, but a kind of super-realism. With Shakespeare, the Spaniard reasons that 'all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity': life is not an end in itself but derives significance, as the great Don tried to prove to a sceptical world, from that which transcends it. It is the constant pressure of that idealism that gives Bécquer's best work its poignancy and its humanity. Thus Rima XXXVII begin, 'I shall die the first ...' to close with the stanza:

There where the closed sepulchre
opens up an eternity ...
All that we have both left unsaid
we shall speak out at last.