Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) by Rubén Darío Read Free Book Online Page A

fragrances and by love:
America of the great Moctezuma and Inca,
America redolent of Christopher Columbus,
Catholic America and Spanish America,
the place where once long ago the noble Cuátemoc said,
“I’m not on a bed of roses!” Yes, that America,
trembling from its hurricanes and surviving on its Love . . .
It lives with you, with your Saxon eyes and barbaric souls.
And dreams. And loves, and vibrates; it’s the daughter of the Sun.
Be careful. Spanish America is alive and well!
There are myriad loose cubs now from the Spanish Lion.
Roosevelt, you’d need to be transfigured by God himself
into the dire Rifleman and the powerful Hunter
to finally capture us in your talons of iron.
     
    This, clearly, is a defiant ideological poem. But it also strikes a religious chord, for Darío ends it by telling Roosevelt: “And you think you have it all, but one thing is missing: God!” In this sense it showcases a view of the United States that is nearsighted: the Nicaraguan sees Latin America as a site where faith is essential, unlike its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, which he portrays, mistakenly, as less devout. Did Darío not understand the principal puritan beliefs? Significantly, his North American idols, as stated before, are Whitman and Poe. But what about Emerson and even Hawthorne? Was it his troubled Catholicism that made it impossible for him to connect with a core Protestant constituency north of the Rio Grande?
    In 1848, almost half a century before the Spanish-American War, the United States, by signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acquired a large portion of Mexico’s territory—largely what today is known as the Southwestern states. What were Darío’s views on the Mexican population in places like Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico? He ignored it. And yet, in “To Roosevelt,” he announced that Spanish America, in spite of American imperialism, is alive and well. And in the poem “The Swans,” he reiterates this view but also foresees, tangentially, the growth of a Latino community within the United States. His view is not comforting, though. Should this demographic transformation be applauded or condemned, he wonders? Herein two crucial stanzas:
     
    Hispanic America and Spain as a whole country
are fixed on the origin of their fatal destiny.
I am questioning the Sphinx about what it can foresee
with the question mark of your neck, asking the air for me.
     
    Are we to be overrun by the cruel barbarian?
Is it our fate that millions of us will speak in English?
Are there no fierce shining knights, no valiant noblemen?
Shall we keep our silence now, to weep later in anguish?
     
    Seen from another perspective, this poem, also part of Cantos de vida y esperanza, brings Darío back to his enduring symbol, the swan, made famous in Azul . . . What tigers and mirrors are to Borges, what houses and the ocean are to Neruda, the swan is to Darío. But in 1905 the poet’s act of return makes the bird less a chimera and an artifact of fairy tales than an outright symbol, though, at this stage in his life, the swan is a symbol infused with a political pathos. Darío announces: “What sign do you form, oh, Swan, with the curve of your neck’s shape / when the wandering dreamers who are filled with grief pass by? / Why is it you are silent, white, lovely in this landscape, / a tyrant to these waters, heartless to these flowers? Why?”
    However, Cantos de vida y esperanza also includes the poem “Poets! Towers of God!”, in which Darío establishes, once and for all, his Pythagorean approach to poetry and poets:
     
    Poets! Towers of God!
You bear storms that are infernal
like a jagged mountain range,
like a heavenly lighting rod,
breakwaters of the eternal,
high summits that will never change!
     
    The rest of the stanzas emphasize Darío’s opinion that “while on one side a poet leans toward nature, and in that he approaches the estate of the plastic artist, on the other side, he is of the race of priests,