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

and in that he rises toward the divine.” For this reason, the poem is a manifesto: an elegy to poetry as the seeker of harmony. It is also a hymn to elitism.
     
    Darío was quite productive in his last decade of life. At just the moment he was unsuccessfully trying, from his post as a diplomat in Spain, to annul his marriage to Rosario Murillo and, as Francisca was giving birth to Rubén Darío Sánchez, nicknamed Guicho, Darío himself was publishing, in 1907, El canto errante . This is a volume in which Darío comes to terms with his own mortality, a subject that is part of the poem “Lo fatal” (Destined to Die) but that increasingly permeates all his work as he approaches his end. By our standards, he was still young. But unhealthy habits (alcohol, visits to prostitutes) got the best of him. Not surprisingly, though, his physical decline encouraged his poetic ambition. His next collection, Poema de otoño y otros poemas (Autumn Poem and Other Poems), released in 1910, includes pieces about death and eternal peace. For instance, the poem “Vesperal” includes these lines:
    Now that the siesta’s done,
now that the twilight hour is drawing near
and the tropical sun
     
    that charred this coast has almost disappeared,
there’s a gentle, cool zephyr breathing here
through the western sky’s trees of illusion
lit by purple flames in the atmosphere.
     
    Darío seems to ask: Might I claim for myself a place in Western civilization as a whole? The answer in his view was inconclusive, yet he did not give up his quest. He recognized at that point his enormous influence over Spanish-language poetry, the way he had brought fresh life into a culture known, until him, for its allergy to innovation. Symbolically, the image of Jesus Christ is solidly present in his poetry of the period. His poem “To Columbus,” included in El canto errante, was written some years earlier to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the Genoese admiral’s voyage across the Atlantic. He portrays the navigator as a bringer of misery to the Americas, and he indicts him for the abuses. But he also sees Columbus’s messianic ghost wandering the continent, a witness of his own atrocities:
     
    The cross you brought us never seems to diminish.
When will corruption in revolutions be shown?
Not in the works of women who will demolish
the keen language of Cervantes and Calderón.
     
    Christ is wandering through the streets, diseased and lean.
Barrabas has slaves, military distinction.
The lands of Chibcha, Cuzco, Palenque have seen
their panthers tamed, beribboned, brought to extinction.
     
    The horror, the wars, the constant malarias
are doomed paths from which our luck has not recovered:
Poor Admiral, yes, you, Christopher Columbus,
pray to God for the world you discovered!
     
    A couple of years later Darío brought out Alfonso XIII and El viaje a Nicaragua e Intermezzo tropical (Voyage to Nicaragua and Tropical Intermezzo), after which he released his collection Poema del otoño y otros poemas (Autumn Poems and Other Poems). His health deteriorated rapidly in the years following World War I. It is no secret that he was drinking heavily. His alcoholism often spiraled out of control and got the better of him. Finally his cirrhosis became public knowledge. His last volume of poetry, Canto a la Argentina y otros poemas (Song to Argentina and Other Poems), was released in 1914. The title poem—the longest in a long career—was written in 1910 and includes material that deals with the social and commercial changes occurring in Latin America in the early part of the twentieth century, especially the dramatic changes Argentina had undergone in order to become modern. For instance, Darío refers to the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had arrived in Argentina and settled in communes in the province of Entre Ríos and elsewhere. Overall, this is a panoramic piece about freedom and independence. It includes these stanzas:
     
    Commerce, the