Poems the poet yearning for the world to become a kosmos in which fields of maize transmute into human fields, and these into the “[s]olar and nutritious absence of the sea, / and oceanic feeling for everything!” as we read in the poem “Telluric and Magnetic.” In this quest for a complex orderly self-inclusive system, the manifestation of the poet’s desire for completion takes the form of complaints that he has only ever been given life and never once death; yet this feeling is frustrated by the very language that expresses it, as we see in the poem “Today I like life much less,” where he writes, “I almost touched the part of my whole and restrained myself / with a shot in the tongue behind my word.”
This notion of language as an obstruction from reaching cosmic totality was prefigured in the image of the Venus de Milo from poem XXXVI of Trilce, but in Human Poems the poet doesn’t appear to have only accepted his “orphanhood.” Instead, he starts acquiring a quasi-Whitmanian everythingist vision; although contrary to his democratic forebear, Vallejo’s gaze is set on the promise of socialism. Thus, in “The peace, the wausp, the shoe heel, the slopes,” he seeks to fraternize with “[t]he horrible, the sumptuous, the slowest, / the august, the fruitless, / the ominous, the convulsive, the wet, the fatal, / the whole, the purest, the lugubrious, / the bitter, the satanic, the tactile, the profound.”
From the experimental poetics of Trilce and Scales to the compositions we find in Human Poems, the direction of the poetic voice begins its outward turn, and the thematics shift from the existential concerns of the individual to the universal crises of the species. This can be explained by Vallejo’s adoption of a sort of Marxism that, as Ricardo González Vigil shows, “was ‘critical’ and ‘creative,’ loyal in this regard to Marx and not to the dogmas fabricated by his disciples.” In Human Poems Vallejo’s fundamental sensibility underlies his Marxism, formed during his childhood years with its Andean household background, his Christian and pantheistic upbringing, and his early awareness of injustice and sociocultural marginalization. These are poems seeking Peruvian roots and the origin of being, leading the poet “to accept the Revolution as the (dialectically superior) return trip to the paradise of the origin, the communal model of the Indian (cf. ‘Telluric and Magnetic’ and Tungsten) galvanized by the Bolsheviks (‘Angelic Salutation,’ Russia in 1931, and Reflections at the Foot of the Kremlin) and the militiamen of the Spanish Civil War (Spain, Take This Cup from Me).”88
The time has come for us to linger on Vallejo’s last and most accomplished book of poems, Spain, Take This Cup from Me, composed and revised in 1937–38. Published in 1939 with a prologue by Juan Larrea, with the editorial support of Manuel Altolaguirre and a drawing by Pablo Picasso designed especially for the cover, it was printed at the Montserrat monastery near the end of the Spanish civil war. As we’ve recently learned from the first edition, discovered in the Montserrat library by Julio Vélez and Antonio Merino and subsequently published in facsimile at the hands of Alan Smith Soto, the government of the Generalitat had transformed the monastery into a hospital and printing center. Created in the fourteenth century by direct descendants of Guttenberg and then under the direction of Altolaguirre, the press was operated by soldiers of the Aragon front and published the imprint Ediciones Literarias del Comisariado, Ejército del Este, which, in addition to Vallejo’s book, produced editions of Pablo Neruda’s España en el corazón: Himno a las glorias del pueblo en la guerra and Emilio Prados’s Cancionero menor de los combatientes. In February 1939 Francoist forces destroyed virtually all Republican publications no sooner than it occupied the monastery.89
In the heat of 1937 Vallejo was tormented more than ever by the tragedy taking shape in the Spanish landscape and by the hidden designs of evil incarnated by imperialist powers, which is why, when many people wavered, he marched down the socialist path and produced politically committed art in response to the threat of fascism.90 The profound inspiration that he found in the selflessness of Spanish militiamen is recorded in “Popular Statements of the Spanish Civil War,” which might as well have been a preface to Spain, Take This Cup from Me, since there, writing as what in today’s lingo would be called an “embedded reporter,” Vallejo profiled the heroic feats of anonymous Republican soldiers who ended up resurfacing in the opening hymn of his last book of poems.
Comparative readings of Vallejo’s edited typescripts reveal a reordering of the poetic sequence, which resulted in a remarkable sense of continuity. The anguished editing of the texts from Spain, Take This Cup from Me and, in some cases, the existence of labyrinthine originals, attest to Vallejo’s rare ability to assimilate the experience of the war while it was happening with a seemingly supernatural drive toward completion. Reordered, the poem moves like a play, with an opening act that depicts the war as a panorama in which impassioned soldiers march off to battle (I); the succession of different battles (II); funeral songs for the anonymous heroes and the emblematic contemplation of death (III–VII); the poet’s meditations on death and destruction alongside corpses (IX–XI); resurrection triggered by universal solidarity and the transfiguration of the universe raised by the dust of the dead (XII–XIII); and the final warning to Mother Spain of her potential defeat and the prophesy of her fall (XIV–XV).91
If in his earlier poetry Vallejo’s voice aims inward and in Human Poems it begins its outward turn, in Spain, Take This Cup from Me, it’s directed completely outward to address the masses, crowds, and soldiers, against a backdrop of “the world of twentieth-century man, at the center of which Vallejo portrays himself as conceiving his own death. By the time the España manuscript was completed, the elitist tradition of many of the Modernist and Postmodernist poets had been turned inside out.”92 When these poems reach their emotive heights, the poetry “obtains the grandeur and potency of an epinikion,” as is the case with the opening “Hymn to the Volunteers for the Republic,” where the poet frames the entire poetic sequence in just a couple of lines: “Battles? No! Passions. And passions preceded / by aches with bars of hopes, / by aches of the people with hopes of men! / Death and passion for peace, of common people!”93 With Marxian ideology and a sermonic drive reminiscent of Whitman, Vallejo’s “Hymn” can be read as “an overture of the entire collection of poems. It becomes a microcosm of almost all the themes and issues that we find in the compositions that follow it.”94
Further on in that same “Hymn,” when Vallejo gives the order to “kill / death” and the reassuring exclamation that “[o]nly death will die!” he’s alluding to the prophecies of Isaiah (25:6–8, 26:19, and 28:15, 18, with clear echoes of Saint Paul: “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:25–26). But, Vallejo’s biblical allusions are more auditory than visual, and this line is also the revolutionary response to the infamous motto of Gen. Millán Astray: “¡Viva la muerte!” Nor can we forget that this was the motto of the Legión de los Tercios Españoles, who sinisterly called themselves the Volunteers of Death and used to sing the hymn “El novio de la muerte.”95
The resurrection we see in poem III, dedicated to Pedro Rojas, who “after being dead, / got up, kissed his blood-smeared casket [and] / wept for Spain”—reveals his act of martyrdom as the saving grace of not only the side he’s fighting for but all of humanity, which is why “[h]is corpse was full of world.” He has accepted death voluntarily out of love for humanity to create a better world, and he is not dead as long as his ideals live on.96 The invincibility of these ideals acquires more potent meanings toward the end of the collection, when the poet addresses the “[c]hildren of the world” and “sons of fighters,” warning them that if Mother Spain ends up falling, it will be their duty to “go look for her!”
In late 1937, around the time that he was writing Spain, Take This Cup from Me, Vallejo transformed his novella Toward the Reign of the Sciris into a three-act tragedy called The Tired Stone. He wrote this piece in an exalted poetic language saturated with a Quechua vocabulary, an element that returns this late composition to pre-Columbian Peru, where he depicts a hero hiding in
