Miguel Hernández: Life, Death, and Poetry's Dualism

The Life and Death in the Poetry of Miguel Hernández

The life and work of Miguel Hernández are inseparable. His biography is a determining factor in his lyrical creation. His poetry goes through phases, beginning with a carefree life, whose destiny is configured by tragedy. His existence is marked by the dualism of life and death, a division mixed in Songbook of Ballads and Absences.

According to Jesús Christ Riquelme in his book, Miguel Hernández, life and death are joined in two ways:

• The existentialism of the philosopher Heidegger
• The sense of solidarity of the death-seed.

The poems of his teens have a natural optimism, where the poet sees things as if they were alive, "the stone threat." In this period, he identifies death with the arrival of sunsets and expresses his love for nature, exalting the insignificant. Airs of eclogues are found, imitating his teachers. Life is life, and interest in death is fictional until it reaches the people nearby.

Despite the exaltation of nature, melancholy comes in Expert in Moons. This book contains a touch of death, but death as a part of life has not yet fully appeared.

From 1934 until his death, his poetry contains suffering, whether from love, war, or separation from his loved ones. Blood as a symbol becomes a main motif in his work. Hernández's wounds of life, love, and death begin to emerge in The Ray That Never Ends. Real death becomes a poetic and tragic affair.

In Winds of the People, death is part of the struggle and life. As the war progresses, the hope of victory fades. He symbolizes death lurking, a train moving in a dreadful silence of the night without stopping at a station, which is a symbolic picture of human life dragged to death.

When the war ends, prison, disease, and despair take over, and the poems and romances of Songbook of Absences darken. The death of his nine-month-old son, Monolillo, is experienced as a drama from which he may never recover.

The poet's voice is filled with hope and speaks to the living child in the "Onion Lullaby," to his wife and son in the poem "Of Light and Shadow," which reveals his love. In the final stage, his beloved son is constantly present. Juan Cano Ballesta states that in the poetry of Miguel Hernández, the problem of death remains unresolved. The poet manages to overcome death with conjugal love and the child.

Duality appears inseparable: love and death, with the symbols of the bull and the blood. To these two symbols are joined by sharp images such as a sword, knife, lightning, daggers... instruments of pain. Other expressions are expressed by the sentence, sinking, dying... and regenerating bone of life appear and rain. In recent poems, death gives life and flourishes.

The war is over, and Miguel is arrested at the Portuguese border. From there begins a complicated ordeal for him, complicated by severe pneumonia. After going to various Spanish prisons, he was transferred to Alicante, where he died at age 32. His last lines are written on the wall: "Farewell, brothers, comrades, friends / Say goodbye to me from the sun and the wheat."