Cosmology and the Poem: Damaso Alonso's "Sueno de las dos ciervas"

Abstract

than those that preceded it.3 In the poetry of Alonso the motif of the exploding universe achieves its most interesting incarnations when it is used figuratively. By virtue of the kind of universe they depict, relativistic 3 Suefo de las dos ciervas was written previous to 1936, before the bulk of the poems included in Hijos de la ira and Oscura noticia (see PE, p. 199). 149 This content downloaded from 40.77.167.74 on Mon, 10 Oct 2016 04:17:04 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Gustavo Perez Firmat models conform well to the world-view espoused in collections like Hijos de la ira and Oscura noticia and, therefore, provide a fertile source for metaphor and symbol. To begin at this point, however, would involve skipping over an important logical step. The ideation of a trope like rosy-fingered dawn presupposes a previous awareness (though not necessarily a previous experience) of rosy fingers. That is to say, the vehicle of the metaphor must already in some sense form part of the poet's mental ambience. With the motif of the exploding universe this awareness takes the shape of an insistence on what I will call the cosmic perspective. Throughout the poetry of Alonso, man is repeatedly situated not only among other men, in a particular city or country, but also in a larger cosmic setting. Iie is seen not only as a madrileilo, a Spaniard, a member of the human race, but also as suibdito del modesto sistema planetario de nuestro viejo sol, or as minimo ciudadano de la gran Via Lactea (PE, p. 161). Technically, this entails a radical distancing of the narrator from the narrated material. His post of observation must be remote enough to encompass large chunks of the universe, if not the universe entire. Although poems that are given in the third person accomplish this distancing smoothly, in those cases where speaker and protagonist are one it results in an abrupt desdoblamiento of the narrator into agent and abserver. In La obsesion, for example, the speaker's exasperation at the continuous presence of a green hornet culminates in the following complaint: Duro, hiriente, me golpeas una vez y otra vez, extremo diamantino de vengador venablo, de poderosa lanza. I Quien te arroja o te blande? Que inmensa voluntad de sombra asi se obstina contra un solo y pequeiio (iy tierno!) punto vivo de los espacios cosmicos No, ya no mas, no mas, acaba, acaba.