Y que quien cifra sobre ella
el bien del amor ajeno,
no acierto más que veneno
en su delicia verter.
It is easy to see in the literary endeavor of Zorrilla a common character identifiable in all his poetry—the dramatic form—no matter how imperceptible the perpetual dialogue may be, a circumstance that can be explained by the intense zest for life that the author wished to communicate and did communicate in all his works, the reason for which concurs so strongly with the dramatization of thought to the benefit of the clarity and vigor of his ideas.
No aspiro a más laurel ni a más hazaña,
que a una sonrisa a mi dulce España.
This is what the poet sang in his prelude, when he was inviting the reader to a tasting of his poetry:
las sabrosas historias de otros días.
In effect, whereas Espronceda lost himself in the national meaning of his inspirational themes, throwing himself into the world to harvest from the activity of the human spirit the eternal concerns, the perpetual agitation that makes him thirst for a solution to the metaphysical problems; while this colossus of spiritualist thought, confronting the odyssey of the century on his way toward the conquest of his ideals, was singing all the disillusions and all the doubts in a free, robust, burning, and booming intonation, like the thrust of life itself; Zorrilla, nostalgic for the infancy of his race, dreaming of legendary times of his people’s past, more Spanish than human, more patriotic than universal, put on the chords of his lyre the old fibers of the Castilian heart. That is why in his poetry, as we have already said, there prevails the ardent fantasy of the low latitudes, gold-plated melancholy of the meridian, fierce heroic impetuosity, consoling theology, and the instinctive sadness of the soul of Spain. In this sense, the oeuvre of the author of Don Juan marks the resurgence of Spanish classicism, insofar as all the arguments of his works are so genuinely portrayed from social reality that they resemble, as we have already said, projections of actuality, repetitions of events, ideas and feelings that have transpired on the stage of life.
Just look at the vital breath with which he is penetrating a thought that, exposed in another way, would have become figurative:
¿No es verdad que cuando a solas
hablo con vos, Don Rodrigo,
va vuestra alma en lo que os digo
como nave entre las olas,
esperando de un momento
a otro, verse sumergida
por la mar embravecida
de mi airado pensamiento?
And the energetic image of an attitude:
¿No es verdad que cuando clavo
mis ojos en vuestro rostro,
os hielo el alma y os postro
a mis pies como un esclavo?
And as for his technique? When we were speaking about Espronceda, we said that the preferred verse of romanticism in Spain has been the hendecasyllable, and Zorrilla shows us just this. For the most part his dramatic poems are developed in this metrical form, and in the secular assonant romance, which, as Piñeiro puts quite well, only on the Zorrillesque plectrum does the natural charm and untamed music thrive as it does in the Spanish cantares of heroic feats.
With regard to what of Zorrilla’s is relegated to the traditionalist genre, including the poems Granada and Al Hamar, there prevails almost exclusively the same combination of primitive measure, sometimes adorned with consonant rhyme that may diminish its value of spontaneity and finesse like the popular heroic meter, but it also enables it to gain auditory and melodic force, as well as a visual effect.
Therefore, without denying the guiding influence of Lamartine and Musset,9 given the preponderance that French romanticism exercises on all European literatures, one can say that José Zorrilla was a genius whose works are the exclusive fruit of his own artistic organization and philosophical temperament. This is confirmed by the fact that no poet of his rank has become the representative voice of his race and epoch to the point of reaching his level or rising above him, which is clearly manifest not only in the content but also in the formal technique of his works, and this has incited Alberto Lista—a classicist through and through—to read the grandiose creations of this author and then exclaim in a scathing critique of the liberty of Zorrilla’s executive manner,
[W]hen on the wings of the idea our fantasy wants to fly to the empire, an incorrect expression, an improper word, an impossible Gallicism or neologism warns us that we are stuck in the mud of the earth … We cannot attribute this defect to the school of contemporary romanticism, first because its leaders in France have never managed to remove the yolk of their grammar, which is one thousand times more burdensome in French than in Spanish, and second because there are many poets among us who belong to the same school and who despite the liberty that they take during their raptures of imagination, still do not dare trespass the limits that preformulated poetic language has imposed on the license of genius.10
As for his technique, there is no doubt that Zorrilla left many of his contemporaries in the dust, with his autonomous exaltation and profound knowledge of the science of the belles lettres, which is why to the chagrin of the Aristarchuses of the world11 and the rulings of prescribed science, rather than being transgressions, as the professor of the University of Madrid suggests, those breaks with the academic rules of language have become the greatest merits of his work. With regard to morphology, the true legislator and motor for the transformation or disappearance of words is not the fanciful will of writers but of society, which thus fulfills one of the various projections of the evolution of the human spirit. That is why, when Zorrilla had penetrated this truth, placing in his poetry all the feeling, desire, and action of his people, he knew better than anyone where it was going, following the impulses of his own original artistic orientation. Today in his diction society sees words and phrases heard every day in different situations of life among the Spanish people. For this reason, one author says,
[I]n Zorrilla one does not find reminiscences of Homer’s grandiosity or Virgil’s delicate tenderness or Horace’s cultured philosophical expression: in his poetry one does not sense the exotic yet enjoyable flavor that reading the works of foreign writers transmits, but of him one can say what Michelet said of Alexander Dumas: he was a force of Nature.12
[JM]
FROM The Black Heralds
THE BLACK HERALDS
There are blows in life, so powerful … I don’t know!
Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them,
the undertow of everything suffered
welled up in the soul … I don’t know!
They are few; but they are … They open dark trenches
in the fiercest face and in the strongest back.
Perhaps they are the colts of barbaric Attilas;
or the black heralds sent to us by Death.
They
