Sobre los angeles

Sobre los ángeles marks a transitional phase in Rafael Alberti’s poetry between his more popular/neopopular innocent poetry books (beginning with Marinero en tierra) to socially engaged verse. This interaction with the modern world and criticism of it can also be seen in the third and final section of Sobre los ángeles. Alberti is politically active by the start of the 1930s decade, has joined the PCE, writes socially engaged poetry and is eventually exiled after the end of the Civil War, not to return to Spain until after the death of Franco.

There are many ways of reading this book, as it is hard to pin down; one can read it as a crisis of religious faith, a crisis resulting from a love lost, an aesthetic crisis. It is an extremely depressing, disillusioned and very fragmented poetic yo that leaves his body and descends into the depths of hell, himself. The angst that the poetic yo feels is profound; there is a feeling of loss, nostalgia. This journey to the core of a person finds the poetic yo experiencing and encountering various angels, many of them evil, bad, ugly, rusting, lying; why angels? The connection with Bécquer’s verse that is repeated (“Huésped de las nieblas”) needs to be explored. In this verse from Bécquer’s Rima LXXV, in which Alberti believes that Bécquer suffers from insomnia because he never sleeps. When he falls asleep, his soul leaves his body to go explore other regions, and to meet others. I think Alberti was fascinated and obsessed with this idea, and this book of poems reflects a similar journey, yet this journey is also an encounter with himself and his various demons. However, he does not name them as such, but rather angels, an important distinction. The fact that the first poem is titled “Paraíso perdido” evokes the epic poem by John Milton which details the battle between Satan and God for the Heavens, his subsequent defeat and banishment. The Romantics began to read Milton’s epic poem in a new light, empathizing with the character of Satan, rebellious, knowledgeable, independent, and ultimately not divine. I see parallels between this story and the symbols used by Alberti; for example, ‘la rebelión de las sombras’ is a rebellion of man or of the humanized angels who know have shadows (since an angel is divine and not human, he cannot have a shadow like in El Angel Angel ‘nunca escribió su sombra la figura de un hombre’). There is an aesthetic interaction with Bécquer, his clouds, the story of rebellion against god and extreme loss of hope. The stage has been set, as the world we are entering is nebulous, not of our comprehension, and it is depressing, hope has been lost, paradise has been lost, and the final words of the first section emphasize this disillusionment: “yo, sin luz para siempre.”

I think that from the very opening lines Alberti is using a religious language and symbolism that he is familiar with, being raised in a Jesuit school, and that a majority of his readers would be familiar with. For example, the metaphor of the body as a house that is uninhabited as the body is without the soul. But rather than having a personal religious struggle with faith, this language gives him the ability to speak of other things. Also, it can be seen as a parallel of the state of the sacred and profane as it stands in these poems. Just as the sacred is being profaned, the sacred language has been profaned. Is Alberti really talking about the battle in the heavens between St. Michael and Lucifer in his poem Los dos ángeles? Is this Biblical battle what truly preoccupies his soul? Especially once the reader enters into the third section, the poetic yo takes on a prophetic tone, an enunciator tone, of what seems to be the coming Apocalypse. The short verses of the first two sections are cast aside for much longer verses, and the vosotros tense becomes prominent. The poet is calling attention to the problems in society, calling out the ‘hombres de cinc, alquitrán y plomo’, who are the ángeles de las ruinas. He includes himself in those who have forgotten about the Edenic era, a pre-time, pre-name, pre-body existence when the soul was alive; here the return to the human and rejection of a dehumanized verse seems to be evident. And the profanation of religious language and symbols is evident as well; for example, the final stanza in los ángeles de las ruinas:

“Y nadie espera ya la llegada del expreso,

La visita oficial de la luz a los mares necesitados,

La resurrección de las voces en los ecos que se

calcinan.”

The blending of images of the Express train arriving at a station and the ‘official’ visit of the Light (Holy Spirit, Jesús) with the resurrection, and using the term resurrection, but not to detail the return of Jesus but the calcified voices/echoes. This language also brings us into a modern world, of trains, rust, crashes, and revolvers and bullets.

“No os acerquéis/….Os he dicho que no acerquéis./Os he pedido un poco de distancia:/ la mínima para comprender un sueño/y un hastío sin rumbo haga estallar las flores y las/calderas.” (Los ángeles de las ruinas)

I think these lines are possibly a wink from Alberti at how to read his book of poems; with a little bit of distance, understand a dream, the explosion of flowers and boilers (beauty and modern Apocalypse). Hope is still weak in the final poem, ‘El ángel superviviente’. Images of death, disillusion, disintegration abound, but the verse “La derrota del cielo, un amigo.” drives in the nail of despair into the reader. In the end, one angel with broken wings survives, as all the others have died. This personal crisis of Alberti (fragmented yo, “yo era…”, “yo era…”, the quote of his about having published 5 books and still having to live off of his parents’ money, ?Qué era yo? Ni bachiller, what’s his purpose as a poet) has been answered in this final section. It is to be a socially engaged poet, one who returns to the human, no matter how profane it may be, and fight, rebel with the other shadows, and take on perceived evils of the modern world (“hombres de cinc, alquitrán y plomo”).