NIGHT MUSIC: LUIS CERNUDA'S "LAS RUINAS"

Cernuda habla de su poesia como "algo cuya causa, a manera de fugacisima luz entre tinieblas eternas o sombra subita entre la luz agobiadora, permanece escondida." Se estudia "Las ruinas" como paradigma del proceso poetico en Cernuda, buscando ver la relacion entre su estetica y su etica. Sentido del tema de las ruinas en la poesia del baroco: ejemplo de la vanidad de la vida terrestre, escarmiento que eleva el pensamiento a Dios. Inversion de esta en Cernuda: alegoria de la vida humana, algo que tiene una dimension tragica pero tambien apoteosis puramente terrestre. Sentido de la belleza de "obras humanas que no duran," "delirio acaso hermoso cuando es corto y es leve." Esto implicara un modo de vivir que tiene su finalidad en la temporalidad, en la lucha del reino de este mundo, un humanismo "lirico." JB

sonnets "A Roma sepultada en sus minas" and "Miré los muros de Ia patria mía." These are poems built on Quevedo's vision of the political and moral decadence of his country and the ideological concomittant of this, the severe metaphysics of the Counter Reformation which entailed a disjunctíon between human desire and divine entelechy. From such a point of view, the meditation on ruins contained at once a confirmation of the vanity of history and a flight away from the disintegration of the present towards an attitude of stoic detachment. For Quevedo, the ruin was simply a metaphor for the way in which the fullness human beings strive to achieve in time breaks apart, is twisted distorted, stained. Ris consolations are therefore the reactionary image of an imaginary Castilian GoIden Age and the irnagined future redemption prornised in Christian eschatology; that is, something that neve r was and something that neve r will be in the time of human consciousness.
"Las minas", perhaps self-consciously, is the inversion of this characteristic treatment of the theme of the mino Cernuda feels the terror of history just as intimately . as the author of the Sueiios: the civil war, the defeat of the Spanish socialist movement he had sympathized with, his consequent exile, the titanic conflagration of the World War. Like Quevedo's sonnets, his poem is meant to force the reader to contemplate a series of Objects that depict the extinction of life ("y no hallé cosa en que poner los ojos / que no 281 fuese recuerdo de Ia muerte,"). But the lesson derived from this contemplation is a different one, one in which the end points of ascetic despair and consolation are noticeably absent.
What is involved is the appropriation of a new aesthetic of the ruin as a poetic artefact. Jean Starobinski observes that in the Italian vedute landscapes of the eighteenth century the ruins becomes "a minar form of idyll: a new union of man and nature, through the intermediary of man's resignation to death." He goes on to say that in ruins nature has used man's work of art as the material for its own creation, just as art had previously taken nature as its raw material. .. A balance is achieved in which the opposing forces of nature and culture are reconciled as man moves on, when the traces of human effort are fading away and the natural wilderness is regaining its lost ground, when the material forms which bear witness to the greatness of an age have not given way completely to ageless confusion.! Cernuda is not given, as is Jorge Guillén for example, to a language that expresses those moments of perception when the senses and the imagination joyously overflow, lifting consciousness to a sense of its transcendent participation in the world and in life. His poetry represents rather a constantly repeated choice to dwell on the most melancholy of lyric themes, those which concern the reduction ar extinction of consciousness in time. He would agree with Quevedo's anguíshed "solamente 10 fugitivo permanece y dura." But because he ís a materialist poet, because he believes that the ground of human life has to be found within life itself, his point is to make an ethics out of this aesthetics of melancholy. Quevedo flees frorn the ruin into his self; Cernuda's strategy ís to materialize the ruin, to explore its peculiar beauty which has its being only as something which is momentary and fugi tive -"obras humanas que no duran" -, to fold it into the self. It ís this unique poignancy which he can then counterpose against the abstract utopia of a "golden age" or a divine being that lies outside of real history: "Importa como eterno gozar de nuestro instante."? "Las ruinas" divides into two major sections. (The text presented at the end of this article is from the third edition of La realidad y el deseo. Tenzontle: México, 1958). The first síx stanzas are a twilight evocation of the ruins. What concerns Cernuda here is the perception of something that is disintegrating both in time and in light, but which still persists, retains substance and being, suggests the human gestures and presence of its extinct population. The subsequent five stanzas develop a meditation on the meaning of the ruins. The concluding stanza returns to the descriptive mode -night is falling over the scene, removing it from sight -but incorporates in this moment of extinction the victory of consciousness arrived at in the previous dialogue with finitude.
"Silencio y soledad nutren Ia hierba": the poem begins by evoking a feeling of desolation and wildness -"Ia golondrina con grito enajenado" -and a sort of trembling of all nature in the gathering twilight. The "luz incierta" of the moon reveals the ruins as ethereal constructions, insubstantial as music, completed only in the inner imagination of dream and desire. "Esto es el hombre" the poet exclaims enigmatically. There is a general panorama of the streets and central square of the city viewed against a backgraund of hills (stanza three). The visual path rests for a moment on the remains of an acqueduct through which water still flows, then turns to a series of interiors of mausoleums, tombs an d the "relieves delicados" of the dead inhabitants (stanza five). It opens out again to a second panorama of the city, now noting individual "mornents" of architectural detail: "Ias piedras que los pies vivos rozaron;" "Ias co1umnas en Ia p1aza, testigos de luchas políticas." The carefully ordered descriptive movement seems to oscillate between dissonance ("grito" and fragile sensuality ("roce"). Note the lovely curve of the invocation -"Silencio y soledad nutren Ia hierba / Creciendo oscura y fuerte entre ruinas" -or the delicacy of the rendering of light and darkness in the second stanza. Throughout Cemuda works to "inhabit" the empty streets and buildings, to capture the flux of life they once contained. Ris descriptions resonate with the intimacy of sexual desire: "los muros que e1p1acer de 10s cuerpos recataban", "el talisman irónico de un sexo poderoso", "pomos ya sin perfume". Nature, mediated in the silent activity of the ruins, becomes a series of anthropomorphic signs. The 1eaves of spectral trees "tiemb1an vagas / Como e1 roce de cuerpos invisib1es", the moonlight is a "paz amiga", the water in the crumbling acqueduct is like a mirror for a Narcissus "con enigmática elocuencia / de su hermosura que venció a Ia muerte." The meaning of the Ecce homo motto begins to unfold: the lingering presence of the ruins in the twilight contains and repeats the gestures, acts, faces, passions, objects which once lived within it. Human life is like this music of light and shadow, form and forrnlessness, absence and presence.
The twilight makes the impossib1e possib1e; everything the city once was seems to be present. But this is illusion: "tan solo ellos no están"; the city seems to wait for their return. The seventh stanza marks a transition form description to meditation. The 1yrical caress of the images suddenly yie1ds to a disillusioned recognition of reality, the contemp1ative, a1most erotic, rapture falls away into se1f-consciousness and the1anguageof the Baroque conceit: Mas los hornbres, hechos de esa materia fragmentaria Con que se nutre el tiempo, aunque sean Aptos para crear 10 que resiste ai tiempo, Ellos en cuya mente 10 eterno se concibe, Como en el fruto el hueso encíerran muerte.
Cernuda is drawn from this to protest a God who has given life a "sed de eternidad" yet compe1s everything to die "como villanos que deshace un soplo". Then, in reserve and very soft1y (stanza nine), he tums to deny the existence and power of this presence he has summoned up. Contemplating the ruins, Cernuda fee1s at the moment of greatest rapture the onrush of a sense of injustice in that the being "en cuya mente 10 eterno se concibe" should be made of death. Ris impulse is to first posit, then challenge that which is seen as abso1ute cause and finality. Within and then against this reaction (stanza eight), however, he mediates the terms of his despair and protest and moves forward to conc1ude that it. is "God" and not life that is a fiction: "Eres tan sólo e1 nombre / Que da e1 hombre a su miedo y impotencia." What is real instead is "estas ruinas bellas en su abandono." This is a material possibility of perception, something that turns horror into intimacy, not the empty abstraction we ourse1ves have ma de of something beyond our presence in time, our acts of making.
The meditation conc1udes with a gloss of Calderón's image oflife as the roses which open at dawn and close in the evening: "cuna y sepulcro en un botón hallaron." Cemuda's version is " i, Tu vida, 10 mismo que Ia flor, es menos bella acaso / Porque crezca y se abra en brazos de Ia muerte?". This is the final stage of Cernuda's anti-Baroque. The point is to reverse the didactic force of Calderón's conceit, to turn it back to life. For Cernuda, the meaning of the flower ís bound up with its very temporal presumption, its vanitas; the poignance it thus achieves offsets the fact of its extinction, or rather, the fact of extinction -"polvo será" -sets of the glory of its being. Cernuda repeats the Ecce homo motto. Its meaning is now extended by the poet's achievement of a sense that life without God ís not a nothingness but something like the reverie the ruins had inspired: "Delírio de Ia luz ya sereno a Ia noche, / Delirio acaso hermoso cuando es corto y es leve." (Not, that ís, "en Ia noche" but "a Ia noche," against darkness.) In the final stanza Cernuda can therefore invoke the coming of night which is death and oblivion without terror and even with a certain intimancy that before had been associated with the moonlight: "Dulce como una mano amiga que acaricia." The finality of his humanism welcomes in the night its sacrament and mystery, seeking in it a maternal presence which holds both the repose of the dead inhabitants of the ruins and the birth of new life and formo Cernuda's meditation is complete: from the wildness and uncertainty of the opening verses he has come full circ1e to the conc1uding "contemplar sereno el campo y Ias ruínas." If one of Cernuda's reference points in "Las ruínas" is the Baroque ascetic conceit, turned "on its head", the inner analogue of the poem is c1early John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Um." In both poems, there is a contemplation of the artefacts of a vanished civilization and an effort, through this contemplation, to fix the meaning of human presence in time; in both, there is a rejection of an otherworldly apotheosis, implicit in the "Ode", explicit in "Las ruínas", and the assumption, instead, of a tone of "sweet melancholy" which recognizes the transitory nature of life but finds pleasure in the play of human presence and absence in time. Finally, in both the aesthetic mediation of the theme of death comes to represent in itself the quality and possibility of a purely human hope for persistence in time, a hope that joins "realidad y deseo." For Keats this hope is the ete -nalization of human action in art, figured in the frozen gestures of the lovers on the urn; for Cemuda, it is the perception of the flickering presence of life among "obras humanas que no duran." The object contemplated in both poems fuses implicit1y with the act of contemplation itself. Like the crepuscular vision of the ruins which it describes, like the mediated sense of human finality it arrives at, "Las ruínas" is itself "delirio acaso hermoso cuando es corto y es leve." With the "Ode on a Grecian Um" it shares the strength and moral beauty of those works of art which are mirrors of themselves.
A note on prosody Cernuda maintains a very c1ear texture even in the difficult conceptismo ofthe last half of the poem. There is little here of that extreme hermeticism and ellipsis which characterizes, for example, Valéry's elegaic poem on the maritime cemetery. Rather Cernuda, aprofessedneo-Romantic, has managed to preserve, paradoxically, something of the c1assicism of a Quevedo: everything ís measured, balanced and meticulously disposed in controlled rhetorical periods. The meter varies throughout the poem between eleven an d fifteen syllables yet it suggests, especially in Cernuda's handling of the various possiblities of internal stress points in the line, the stately but at the same time supple progressions of the Renaissance hendecasyllable. While there is no definite rhyme scheme, one senses the suggestion of an asonant pattern (an abundance of endings i-a, for example) and several isolated consonants (in stanza six "rozaron" of the first verse with "esperaron" of the last). The expert poetic sensibility of Cernuda reveals itself especially weil here, as these fragile approximations of rhyme function expressively very well to describe the fugi tive, "luz incierta" of the ruins. Cernuda speaks of his poems as: "algo cuya causa, a manera de fugacísima luz entra tinieblas eternas o sombra súbita entre Ia luz agobiadora, permanece escondida.?" NOTES 1 Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Freedom (Skira: Geneva, 1964), pp. 179-8l. 2 To put this another way, the Cernuda of "Las ruinas" is closer to the texture of a poem like Rodrigo Carc's "Canción a Ias ruinas de Itálica" or Góngora's brief elegy in the Soledad primera , that is, to use Wallace Steven's phrase, to a "poetry of earth."
Esto es el hombre. Mira La avenida de tumbas y cipreses, y Ias calles Llevando ai corazón de Ia gran plaza Abierta a un horizonte de colinas: Todo está igual, aunque una sombra sea De 10 que fue hace siglos, mas sin gente.