Miguel Hernández: Poetic Evolution Through Life, Love, and Loss

Miguel Hernández: A Poetic Journey Through Life and Loss

The poetry of Miguel Hernández begins as exultant, richly nuanced, chromatic, and Mediterranean, exuding a festive air. As his life progresses, his writing takes on a gray tint, becoming an invaluable document unmasking material and moral misery, suffering, and the tragic final denouement.

Early Vitalism and the Shadow of Loss

The tragic denouement was always present in his personal life: he experienced the deaths of three of his sisters as a child, followed by the loss of Sijé, Ramón Manuel (his firstborn), and then his poetic production for Ramón. His early Orihuela works, published in newspapers, reflected a carefree vitalism, an uncompromising freedom, and a sunny optimism, much like the landscape portrayed in his verses.

The death he just listed, however, is more melancholic, a sort of purely literary feeling. He would always be an expert in moons, even when the Huerta's sensuality of nature began to suffer a considerable shift. Everything ceases. "It's not worth loving" is the starting point of a tragic sense of history: death, love, death, as noted in his "Final Sonnet."

Love, Passion, and Platonic Ideals

Yet, the poet lives with love and passion: discovery (M. Mallo), tremulous intent ("The Calabacica"), or absence (J. Manresa), and Platonic love as distance (M. Cegarra). He is consumed by a life no longer seeking definitions, locked in confusion, doubt, and all that remains is pessimism.

Wounds caused deep by the hurricane, torments, knives, swords, and death rays form an inseparable tandem of uncertainties. Love, an inseparable tandem that causes piercing pain, friendship, and death also unite the best of the Castilian language. The "Elegy" expresses the Hernandian conception of life, which is nothing but toil, love, and death.

Resilience Amidst Conflict and Despair

However, he never gave up hope, even in those poetic moments when his voice is like wind, and people keep fighting. "Song of the Soldier Husband" is the paradigm of this sentiment. Now, death is life, and death is combative. He sings constantly of anonymous death, and in 1939, he publishes "Heroes."

In the shadow lurks where pessimism emerges before the human shadow. Humanity is seen as a despicable being, full of hate and resentment, curled against itself. Disappointment and despair seize the struggling spirit of the poet and initiate a shift towards a more introspective poetry. Intimate observation and the cruel violence of war lead him to understand death as a horrendous spectacle.

Imprisonment, Illness, and Enduring Love

Once the war ended, the period in jail, illness, and sadness began. His poems take on a dark tinge of disappointment and sadness. Poems of absence, romance of nudity, and a harsher truth appear. The death of his firstborn, his death sentence, the degrading work, and his treatment in prison, a poorly treated disease, loneliness, and family distance are a string of successive penalties that break his innate strength, his ability to track, leading to a dislocated resignation without rhetoric in his writing.

Yet, his thoughts return fondly to his wife and son, his loves, which set him free, for as the poet says: "Only he who loves flies, and having suffered beyond what remains, finds love and freedom."