Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Romanticism and the Rimas

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and His *Rimas*

We are confronted by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's *Rimas*, written during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the era of Realism, but his rhymes belong to the Romanticism movement. They are a model of romance, and he is considered a late Romantic. The mid-century poetry is marked by the intimate melancholy of Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro. Lengthy narrative poems of the Romantics were abandoned for shorter compositions, following the style of German ballads. The legend versified prose replaces. In the *Legends* of Bécquer (*Maese Pérez, the Organist*, *The Miserere*, *El Monte de las Ánimas*, etc.), the narrator acts as a correspondent or columnist for prodigious and mysterious events, creating the illusion of being told by oral tradition.

Characteristics of Romanticism

Romanticism is characterized by the pursuit of political, social, and moral freedom, which advocates individual liberty, with the predominance of feeling over reason. It is also characterized by self-centeredness, that is, the exaltation of the self against the environment. This personal view of the world leads to an individualism that leads to pure and noble sentiments. Another feature is subjectivism, where art is displayed as an expression of the artist's subjectivity. There is a sense of failure that leads existential writers to suicide, and there is a predilection for marginalized characters like pirates, criminals, or any other marginal characters, since they are free spirits, independent, and because they are not able to find their place in this society and are unable to comply with its rules. It also appears the exaltation of nationalism, patriotism, and local color against the foreigner through the conservation of national and local customs, defense of the language, like the legends, stories, and customs, etc. Finally, it is characterized by irrationality and avoidance, in space, to a distant and exotic geography, in which the romantic lives personal experiences or places the issues of his literary works, and in space, where the imagination travels back especially to the Middle Ages, and into himself, to take refuge in dreams in an atmosphere conducive to fantasy.

Themes and Style of Bécquer's *Rimas*

In the 79 *Rimas*, Bécquer tackles varied and contradictory themes: poetry, hope, heartbreak, and death. This order was adopted by subsequent editors and was transformed in the manuscript of the *Book of Sparrows*. Bécquer complains about the limits of language, unable to express feelings. His poems give us the love and despair of the presence of death. He also eliminates the rhetoric, seeking authenticity and naked expression of feeling.

Poetic Techniques in the *Rimas*

The preferred combination of verses will be heptasyllable and pentameter, although the meters are very varied. They are essential to the suggestion and promptly bring stylistic lyrical intensity. This takes Bécquer of folk poetry and the influence of German Romantic poets (Schiller, Heine). In the poetic syntax, parallels are frequent, and other resources to repeat as anaphora and antithesis or adversative constructions, reflecting the essential contradiction between the poetic front and you the beloved. The punctuation marks are motivated by emotion, featuring strongly in the rhyme and pithy phrases to complete the compositions. Filled with images, especially those related to light and movement.

The Ideal Woman and Structure of the *Rimas*

The ideal woman is unattainable, and instead, we see a real woman, cruel and unfeeling. The structure of *Rimas* can be expressed as:

• Rhymes I-XI: Reflections on poetry.
• Rhymes XII-XXIX: Exaltation of love.
• Rhymes XXX-LI: Disappointment.
• Rhymes LII-LXXIX: Feelings of pain and anguish of the human condition, questions about death and immortality.