Tension and Poetic Imagery in Miguel Hernandez's "Cancionero y romancero de ausencias"

Abstract

The poems contained in Miguel Hernandez's Cancionero y romancero de ausencias (1938-1941),1 written during the last years of his life, are filled with pathos and stand as a lasting testimony to the desolation and sense of spiritual and physical loss expressed by a poetic voice caught in the throes of grief, hope, and despair. The title of the volume itself establishes the thematic focus of the poems. The negative aspects of the theme of absence pervade the volume and arise from the poet's plaintive statements concerning his incarceration, the separation from his wife and child, the untimely death of his first son, and the destruction of human relationships brought on by the Spanish Civil War in all its brutality, desolation, and dehumanization. One of the compelling undercurrents of the volume is its expression of the desire, indeed the urgency, for union, the achieving of the coincidentia oppositorum,2 and the establishing of a harmony between the opposite and competing internal and external forces as the lyrical voice seeks a oneness within the self and between the self and the exterior world.