One of the key obsessions (tiempo) of Antonio Machado is reflected in the contrast/interplay of two elements signaled as key to his (and all) poetry: esencialidad y temporalidad. This apparently contradictory pair is what Machado attempts to reconcile in his poetics; when he defines poetry as “palabra esencial en el tiempo”, la esencia refers to the immutable, ahistorical, objective while lo temporal might be described as the personal subjective experiences of the poet in his specific lived time. No matter if the poet wishes his poetry could exist outside of time, there are external constraints which make this impossible. I think that Machado is also saying that his subjective feelings that he tries to express in his poetry (a step back towards Romanticism and Bécquer) are also objective, universal feelings that many or all people have felt at one time or another: melancholy, happiness, nostalgia, loss, and the sureness of no matter what we do, she (Death) awaits us all. He achieves this expression of personal/objective feelings, I think, by creating his own symbolic range: la tarde, las aguas, los fuentes, el camino, el viajero, las estaciones del año. The apparent simplicity of his poetry belies a depth that allows the reader to access the poet’s feelings, sympathize with them, and also later in his works to read into the noventayochesco element in his Campos de Castilla and the later explicitly historically contextualized and propagandistic poems during La Guerra Civil.
It is important to stress Machado’s self-conscious split with much of the modernists’ poetic tropes, although he does express admiration and friendship with those such as Rubén Darío. In the first poem,“Retrato”, from the book Campos de Castilla, 1907-1917, Machado expresses his poetic split: “Adoro la hermosura, y en la moderna estética/corté las viejas rosas del huerto de Ronsard;/mas no amo los afeites de la actual cosmética, ni soy un ave de esas del nuevo gay-trinar.” The poet explicitly repudiates the modernist influence on his poetics and places himself within a more romantic space (Pierre de Ronsard was a medieval French poet who was praised by the Romantics for among other things his expression of melancholy and play with medieval forms). Machado also makes apparent his deviation from the modernists in his prologue to his 1907 version of Soledades, galerías, y otros poemas. “Por aquellos años (1899-1902), Rubén Darío…era el ídolo de una selecta minoría. Yo también admiraba al autor de Prosas profanas, el maestro incomparable de la forma y de la sensación, que más tarde nos reveló la hondura de su alma…Pero yo pretendí…seguir camino bien distinto. Pensaba yo que el elemento poético no era la palabra por su valor fónico, ni el color, ni la línea, ni un complejo de sensaciones, sino una honda palpitación del espíritu.” This explanation not only sheds light on how Machado read Darío, but also his self-reflective tendency in his prose as well as his lyric. What is paradoxical about such an intimate knowledge of his poetics, at least when it is expressed within his poems, is that the very fact that his works are meta-poetic is a characteristic of modernism. This is also evident in his first poem of Galerías, LXI “Introducción”: “El alma del poeta/se orienta hacia el misterio./Sólo el poeta puede/mirar lo que está lejos/dentro del alma”. Machado defends a rather Romantic perspective of poetry within his poetry, a modernist gesture. It is romantic in the sense that the poet is enthralled with mystery, that which lies outside of logic (a modernist idea as well), but the emphasis on expressing interiority, of the soul and galleries of personal memories without end no less, de-emphasizes the focus on the other poetic elements like the musicality and sensuality of the poem. Machado, especially in Soledades, wants to navigate the expression of personal and objective experiences.
One poem in particular that I wanted to focus on was “Recuerdo infantil”. Monotony, melancholy and a lack of nostalgia permeate the poem. Some poems express a desire to recuperate experiences past, but here the memory isn’t pleasant; it is not an idyllic vision of juventud. Machado achieves monotony by ending the poem with the same first stanza, as well as the monotonous singing of their lesson by the chorus of children: “mil veces ciento, cien mil;/ mil veces mil, un millón.” Enjambement and the image of rain pelting the windows contributes to the poem’s feeling that the passage of time is slow. The adjectives used to describe the tarde, parda y fría, reflects the interior feelings felt by the subject remembering this experience. The image of Cain and Abel, one brother slayed and lying dead in a puddle of blood while the other flees, creates an uneasy feeling. Is this a reflection on the state of Spain and the past civil wars? It would be hard to make that argument regarding Soledades, but as we see later on in both Campos de Castilla and his later poems promoting the liberal war effort, Machado moves into a poetry that not only reflects his subjective experiences and comments on the decay of Spain (hence, the depiction by many as a late noventayochentista) represented by the state of Castilla in, for example, XCVIII “Orillas del Duero”: “Castilla miserable, ayer dominadora”. The poet laments the contemporary situation of Castilla (Spain) and its once illustrious past (referencing El Cid). In his poems concerning war, Machado very explicitly unveils his alliance with the Republic, calling out for help to the Soviets, Mexico, decrying the murder of Federico García Lorca in his own Granada!, calling to alert the youth of Spain to fight, and his last verse, “estos días azules y este sol de la infancia”. His nationalism, implicit to a certain extent in Campos, comes through vividly in these final works.