Emblematics in Antonio Machado’s Poetry

Abstract

The pictorial quality of many of Antonio Machado’s poems has been the object of extensive critical attention, and this quality reveals a perceptive eye for the visual image as well as a knowledge of the principles of composition and execution in contemporary painting. This was an interest fostered by his education at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) and by his frequent visits to El Prado. At the same time his fondness for the aphoristic genre became increasingly manifest in his poetry and his prose, as discussed by James Whiston and other critics. This essay explores the presence in his work of these two characteristics or interests which are combined in the art of the emblem, and examines several instances of ‘emblematic’ poems in his work. In these poems the poetics of that tradition are conjured up in the visual nature of their central images. The analysis leads to some unexpected encounters with Shelley and Baudelaire.

Key words:

• Antonio Machado
• late 19^th- early 20^th-Century Spanish poetry
• Symbolism
• Baroque ideology and imagery
• Emblems
• Andrea Alciato
• Semiotics
• poetic image
• prosopopeia
• simile
• P. B. Shelley
• Democritus and Heraclitus
• Charles Baudelaire

Notes

1 Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2 vols (London: The Warburg Institute, 1939), I, 10. The influence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, interpreted as a purely ideographical form of writing after the discovery in 1419 of a Greek translation of Horapollo, Hyeroglyfica, is seen as one of the contributing factors in the emblematic vogue of the Renaissance; see John Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 45.

2 Los complementarios contains a section with the title of ‘Antología de Fray Luis de León para el uso particular de un aprendiz de poeta’, with more than sixty fragments of his poetry, in Antonio Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed., con intro., de Oreste Macrì, con la colaboración de Gaetano Chiappini, 4 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe/Fundación Antonio Machado, 1989), III, 1258–46. All references to Machado’s work are to Macrì’s edition. See also his poem ‘Mis poetas’, Vol. II, CL, dedicated to Berceo; and appreciative references to Jorge Manrique are scattered in his essays.

3 Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, Vol. II; the poem was first published in El Porvenir Castellano in 1914, and later included in the collection Campos de Castilla within the 1917 edition of his Poesías completas.

4 Aurora Egido, ‘Variaciones sobre la vid y el olmo en la poesía de Quevedo: amor constante más allá de la muerte’, in Homenaje a Quevedo. Actas de la II Academia Literaria Renacentista (Universidad de Salamanca, 10, 11 y 12 de diciembre de 1980), ed. Víctor García de la Concha (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 1982), 213–28 (p. 227 and note 48).

5 Bradley J. Nelson, The Persistence of Presence: Emblem and Ritual in Baroque Spain (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2010), 6.

6 In Mairena’s words: ‘El poeta barroco […] emplea las imágenes para adornar y disfrazar conceptos, y confunde la metáfora esencialmente poética con el eufemismo de negro catedrático’, in ‘Cancionero apócrifo’ (Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrí, II, 704).

7 For the poetics of emblems, see Peter M. Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem: Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2^nd ed. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979).

8 See Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor & Jacobo Sanz Hermida, ‘“Alciato Flotante”: simbólica de estado en una galera española del siglo XVII’, in Los días del Alción: emblemas, literatura y arte del Siglo de Oro, ed. Antonio Bernat Vistarini et al. (Palma de Mallorca: J. J. de Olañeta, Editor/Univ. de les Illes Balears/College of the Holy Cross, 2002), 493–503.

9 In Mario Praz’s words: ‘One can safely assume that Petrarch was a forerunner of the Seicento not only because of his taste for conceits but also because of his emblematic bias’, in his Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2 vols (London: Warburg Institute, 1964), I, 11.

10 The same motto is used by Juan de Borja, in his Empresas morales, ed., con intro., de Carmen Bravo-Villasante (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1981), emblem No. 19.

11 Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London/New York: Longman, 1994), 45–46.

12 In Macrì’s edition of Machado, Poesía y prosa, II, 922, n. 2.

13 Bath discusses the emblem in terms of the relation of natural to conventional signs, with reference to the opposition of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies of knowledge and expression (Speaking Pictures, 155–58).

14 Cf ‘La inteligencia […] nada puede intuir; no tiene ojos. […] La metáfora no suele ser en poesía sino retórica, abunda en el barroco literario, es decir, cuando el mundo intuitivo del poeta ha cedido su puesto al mundo de conceptos […]’ (‘Sobre el libro “Colección” del poeta andaluz José Moreno Villa’, Los complementarios, in Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, 1360, 1369).

15 Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, I, 12.

16 ‘Poetica’ (1934), in Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, 1802; cf. ‘la lírica […] sin renunciar a su pretensión a lo intemporal, debe darnos la sensación estética del fluir del tiempo’ (‘Nota [sobre su propio quehacer]’, Los complementarios, in Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, 1312).

17 Even though there is a degree of inconsistency and overlapping in terminology, Denis L. Drysdall’s essay, ‘Authorities for Symbolism in the Sixteenth Century’, offers a useful distinction between emblem and impresa: ‘impresa expresses a personal proposition or state of mind, and requires the freedom to create meanings for individual perceptions and situations […] Unlike the emblem, which all agree expresses universal moral teachings and for most “signifies” by traditional and fixed allegory, the impresa enjoys a considerable freedom because the image can be associated with any words, any context the creator may choose, and can ‘express’ his personal, original concept or feeling’ (in Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory 1500–1700, ed. Peter M. Daly & John Manning [New York: AMS Press, 1999], 111–24 [p. 120]).

18 Nude or naked emblems are those devoid of pictures; see Manning, The Emblem, 40.

19 The Adages of Erasmus, selected by William Barker (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2001), 171–77.

20 The epigram translation by Alison Adams is: ‘Transient and vain is everything in our life: everything hangs from the thread of Lachesis. As quickly as the wet swelling of the bubbled water perishes, so the certain hour of death comes to anyone’ (Jean Jacques Boissard’s ‘Emblematum liber/Emblèmes latins’ [Metz: A. Faber, 1588], a facsimile ed. using Glasgow University Library SMAdd415, with a critical intro. & notes by Alison Adams [Turnhout: Brepols, 2005]; see <http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FBOa007> [accessed 11 October 2018]).

21 Donald S. Russell, ‘Perceiving, Seeing and Meaning: Emblems and Some Approaches to Reading Early Modern Culture’, in Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory 1500–1700, ed. Daly & Manning, 77–91 (p. 80); see also Bath, Speaking Pictures, 155–59.

22 Wayne M. Martin ‘Bubbles and Skulls: The Phenomenological Structure of Self-Consciousness in Dutch Still Life Painting’, in The Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 559–84 (pp. 564–65).

23 See Ángel M. García Gómez, The Legend of the Laughing Philosopher and Its Presence in Spanish Literature (1500–1700) (Córdoba: Univ. de Córdoba, 1984).

24 See Alistair Fowler, ‘The Emblem As a Literary Genre’, in Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and Its Contexts. Selected Papers from the Third International Emblem Conference, Pittsburgh, 1993, ed. Michael Bath & Daniel Russell (New York: AMS Press, 1999), 1–25 (pp. 18–21).

25 ‘Entrevista con Antonio Machado: dos preguntas de Tolstoy: “¿Qué es el arte?” “¿Qué debemos hacer?” ’, in Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, III, 1614.

26 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Routledge, 2004 [1^st ed., London: George, Allen & Unwin, 1947]), 72.

27 Shelley, Hellas, in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford U. P., 1927), 441–73 (p. 452).

28 ‘Demócrito y sus átomos’, in Machado, Poesía y prosa, ed. Macrì, IV, 1951–53; see also p. 2367.

29 Miguel de Unamuno, Cancionero, Poem No. 559 (13 December 1928), in his Obras completas, prólogo, ed. & notas de Manuel García Blanco, 16 vols (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1958–1964), XV, Poesía III, 324. See also García Gómez, The Legend of the Laughing Philosopher, 277–78.

30 John L. Lepage, The Revival of Antique Philosophy in the Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 114.

31 Lepage, The Revival of Antique Philosophy, 84.

32 ‘L’Amour et le crane (vieux cul-de-lampe)’, in Oeuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, preface, presentation & notes de Marcel A. Ruff (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 118.

33 Charles Baudelaire, ‘El amor y el cráneo (antigua viñeta)’, in his Las flores del mal, trad. Eduardo Marquina (Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fe, 1905), 326–27; the same edition was reprinted, with an introduction, by José María Álvarez (Madrid: Pre-Textos, 2002).

34 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1980), 49. See also Martin, ‘Bubbles and Skulls’, 11, note 19.

35 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy was first published in Oxford by John Lichfield and James Short in 1621 under the pseudonym ‘Democritus junior’.

36 Miguel de Unamuno, ‘Vida y Arte, al señor don Antonio Machado’, Helios, 2 (1903), 46–50. For the reception of Baudelaire in Spain, see William F. Aggeler, Baudelaire Judged by Spanish Critics 1857–1957 (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1971).

37 Hans Mattauch, ‘Las “Galerías” de Antonio Machado: origen y evolución de una metáfora central de su poesía’, Revista de Literatura, LXV:129 (2003), 225–35.

38 Dietrich Jöns (1966), cited in Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem, 57.

39 Daly, Literature in the Light of the Emblem, 59.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.