Miguel Hernández: Exploring Poetic Style, Metaphors, and Symbols

The Poetic Style of Miguel Hernández

Metaphors, Images, and Symbols

A) Metaphors and Images

Miguel Hernández emphasizes the use of rhetorical devices throughout his poetry. The main ones include:

• In The Ray That Does Not Stop, plant metaphors, country, and metal images are used. Bleeding, sharks, bulls, islands, plows, knives, and daggers express dissatisfaction and internal imbalance.
• Wind and town evoke monsters, beasts, hyenas, hares, and hounds, representing man in general. The land is an image of nature and labor.

B) Symbols

• 1st Stage: Beginnings. Moon: Language of Nature. Gardens, roses, fig trees, lilies, and oranges symbolize the erotic. Bare fields, hawthorn, olive, wheat, and almonds signify purity.
• 2nd Stage: The Ray That Does Not Stop: Knives and daggers represent a tragic worldview concerning death, tragedy, and love. The lemon symbolizes passion and unfulfilled longing. The bull represents mourning, pain, manly strength, the indomitable and sincere, and loving punishment. Blood symbolizes overflowing vitality and germ destroyer.
• 3rd Stage: Wind People: The wind represents history and history destroyed. The bull is the personification of the motherland. The female womb symbolizes the love of life. The tiger and the beast's claw represent hatred and wars.
• 4th Stage: Songbook and Ballads of Absence: Day and night represent virile strength and female fertilization, wife and husband. Light and shadow, up and down, joy and hope over the tragic and fatal. The bird symbolizes freedom.

Symbols of Life and Death

These appear in almost all his works, irrespective of the stage. Love, life, and death create very personal metaphors and images for the poet: love as life, light, clarity, higher, perpetuating the species; love as destruction, death, darkness. The symbols that represent it are:

• Bones: A symbol of life and love, as the image of death as epic impulse, pushing the fighters, no erotic and romantic attraction.
• Rain: A symbol of death blooms, designating a natural reality. It also represents love and the beloved, the death of a loved one, effort, and work.

Metrics and Style

Regarding the metrics of his poetry, we find both cultured forms (stanzas, sonnets) and popular forms (songs and romances), along with free verse from the avant-garde of the Generation of '27.

The style evolves from the artifice of his early poems to a more simple and pure vocabulary.