Gabriela Mistral: 6 fundamental poems analyzed and explained
Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1945. For her, poetry was the most important discovery of his life, since it allowed him to find his own path and, obviously, historical significance.
Through this genre, Mistral managed to conquer the heart of the world, leaving an indelible mark on Latin American culture.
Let's learn about her most famous poems in this article. At the end, you will find a brief profile of Gabriela Mistral.
Kisses
It is a poem in which the odd verses are free, and the pairs form consonant rhymes. In this poem, Mistral takes a figurative journey through the meaning of kisses. The kisses of sensuality, affection, truth, gratitude, redemption and betrayal. In the end, the unique kisses will shine, created by the one who kisses for the loved one.
There are kisses that they pronounce by themselves
the condemnatory love sentence,
there are kisses that are given with the look
there are kisses that are given with memory.
There are silent kisses, noble kisses
there are enigmatic kisses, sincere
there are kisses that only souls give each other
there are kisses forbidden, true.
There are kisses that burn and hurt,
there are kisses that take away the senses,
there are mysterious kisses that have been left
a thousand wandering and lost dreams.
There are troublesome kisses that enclose
a key that no one has cracked,
there are kisses that engender tragedy
how many brooch roses they have defoliated.
There are scented kisses, warm kisses
that throb in intimate longings,
there are kisses that leave traces on the lips
like a field of sun between two ice.
There are kisses that look like lilies
for sublime, naive and for pure,
there are treacherous and cowardly kisses,
there are cursed and perjured kisses.
Judas kisses Jesus and leaves a print
in his face of God the felony,
while the Magdalena with her kisses
piously fortify his agony.
Since then in the kisses it beats
love, betrayal and pain,
in human weddings they look alike
to the breeze that plays with the flowers.
There are kisses that produce ravings
of fiery and crazy loving passion,
you know them well, they are my kisses
invented by me, for your mouth.
Llama kisses that in printed trace
they carry the furrows of a forbidden love,
storm kisses, wild kisses
that only our lips have tasted.
Do you remember the first one??? Indefinable;
covered your face with livid blushes
and in spasms of terrible emotion,
your eyes filled with tears.
Do you remember that one afternoon in crazy excess
I saw you jealous imagining grievances,
I suspended you in my arms... he vibrated a kiss,
and what did you see after??? Blood on my lips.
I taught you to kiss: cold kisses
they are of impassive heart of rock,
I taught you to kiss with my kisses
invented by me, for your mouth.
Little feet
Social concern was common in the Latin American intelligentsia in the first half of the 20th century. Even more in Gabriela Mistral, who in addition to being a poet was a distinguished educator, and she collaborated with the educational design of her country and that of Mexico.
In this poem, Mistral takes a compassionate look at poor and abandoned children whose little, naked, feet are the image. The poet wonders how it is possible that nobody notices them, that nobody does anything for them ...
Little feet of a child,
bluish with cold,
How they see you and do not cover you,
OMG!
Wounded little feet
for the pebbles all,
outraged snow
and sludge!
The blind man ignores
that where you go,
a flower of living light
you leave;
that where you put
the bleeding plant,
the tuberose is born more
fragrant.
Thirst, since you march
along the straight paths,
heroic as you are
perfect.
Little feet of a child,
two suffering jewels,
How they pass without seeing you
the people!
Love love
Love is exposed here as an inescapable destiny. The poet knows: it is not the will that determines the love experience. Love simply prevails and there is no way to close the door. Thus, love is represented almost as a command, like a voice that breaks in and forces one to be heard.
Go free in the furrow, flap the wing in the wind,
it beats alive in the sun and ignites in the pine forest.
It is not worth forgetting it like bad thought:
You will have to listen to him!
He speaks the tongue of bronze and speaks the tongue of a bird,
timid prayers, imperatives of the sea.
It is not worth giving him a bold gesture, a serious frown:
You will have to host it!
He spends traces of owner; they do not make excuses for him.
Ripping flower vases, cleaves the deep glacier.
It is not worth telling him that harboring him you refuse:
You will have to host it!
It has subtle tricks in the fine replica,
arguments of a wise man, but in the voice of a woman.
Human science saves you, less divine science:
You will have to believe him!
He throws a linen bandage on you; you tolerate it.
He offers you his warm arm, you don't know how to run away.
Start walking, you are still spellbound even if you saw
That that stops in dying!
I sing what you loved
In this poem, the poet uses her voice as an image of an itinerary of clues that the loved subject must follow to find her. The voice is itself, her presence. Making your voice sound, her songs, and putting in it the memory of the things loved by the other, is the sure way to reunion. The lover waits for this vocal trace, this sound breath that is the song, to be the echo of sirens that attracts the navigator.
I sing what you loved, my life,
in case you come closer and listen, my dear,
in case you remember the world you lived in,
at sunset I sing, my shadow.
I don't want to be silent, my love.
How would you find me without my loyal scream?
Which sign, which tells me, my life?
I'm the same one that was yours, my life.
Neither slow nor misplaced nor lost.
Come at dusk, my dear;
come remembering a song, my life,
if the song you recognize as learned
and if you still remember my name.
I wait for you without deadline or time.
Do not fear night, fog or downpour.
Go with or without a path.
Call me where you are, my soul,
And walk straight to me, mate.
Caress
Gabriela Mistral wrote a series of poems with childhood evocation, inspired by the teaching work that she did for years. Mistral evokes in this the image of the mother and her caresses of absolute protection of her. In the mother's arms the child lies safe, calm.
Mother, mother, you kiss me
but I kiss you more,
and the swarm of my kisses
she won't even let you look...
If the bee enters the lily,
she doesn't feel the flapping of it.
When you hide your little boy
you can't even hear him breathe...
I look at you, I look at you
without getting tired of looking,
and what a cute child I see
look into your eyes...
The pond copies everything
what you are looking at;
but you in girls have
your son and nothing else.
The little eyes you gave me
I have to spend them
to follow you through the valleys,
by the sky and by the sea ...
Desolation
Chile lived in the mid-nineteenth century what they call a selective colonization. The government had opened its borders to receive Catholic foreigners with minimal secondary education. Thus the Germans arrived, imposing their language and customs on the areas they inhabited. Mistral raises his voice at this, at the transformation of the affective landscape, at the strangeness of a space that begins to lose its identity.
The thick, eternal mist, so that I forget where
The sea has thrown me in its brine wave.
The land I came to has no spring:
has its long night that what mother hides from me.
The wind makes my house its round of sobs
and howling, and breaking, like glass, my cry.
And on the white plain, with an infinite horizon,
I watch intense painful sunsets die.
Who can call the one who has come here
if further than her were only the dead?
Only they contemplate a quiet and stiff sea
grow up in her arms and her beloved arms!
The ships whose sails bleach in the harbor
they come from lands where those who are not mine are not;
his light-eyed men don't know my rivers
and they bring pale fruits, without the light of my gardens.
And the question that rises to my throat
Watching them go by, she descends on me, defeated:
they speak strange languages and not moved her
language that in lands of gold my poor mother sings.
I watch the snow go down like the dust on the bone;
I watch the fog grow like the dying,
and not to go crazy I can't find the moments,
Because the long night is just beginning now
I look at the ecstatic plain and I pick up their mourning,
who comes to see the deadly landscapes.
Snow is the face that peeks out of my windows:
His sapwood will always be coming down from the skies!
Always her, silent, like the great look
of God over me; always her orange blossom on my house;
always, like fate that neither diminishes nor passes,
it will descend to cover me, terrible and ecstatic.
About Gabriela Mistral
Gabriela Mistral was born in Chile in 1889 and died in New York in 1957. Her name is a pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga. She was a poet, a pedagogue with a long and recognized career, as well as a diplomat.
Mistral tells of having found a love for poetry when she found poems by his father, who had abandoned her when she was three years old.
She devoted many years of her life to school education and gained international recognition for it, even though she did not do professional studies in this area, which earned the envy of many of her to her around.
Gabriela Mistral's intellectual level was finally recognized and for this she was awarded the title of educator. With this profession, she Mistral would travel throughout the Chilean territory and also to many Latin American countries, teaching children, workers and peasants to read and write.
She obtained the first literary recognition of her in 1914 with the Floral Games contest of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile, in which she won first place.
Little by little, she began to enter into poetry, to which she dedicated her energies. Thus, in 1945 she would receive the Nobel Prize for literature, becoming the first Latin American to obtain this recognition.
In recent years, Mistral had a wandering life, which is why she dies far from her native Chile, in New York City.
Works by Gabriela Mistral
Among the works that Gabriela Mistral published during her lifetime we can mention:
- Desolation. (1922).
- Readings for women. Intended for language teaching. (1923).
- Tenderness. Children's songs: rounds, songs of the land, seasons, religious, other lullabies. (1924).
- White Clouds: Poetry, and The Teacher's Prayer. (1930).
- Felling. (1938).
- Anthology, author's selection. (1941).
- The sonnets of death and other elegiac poems. (1952).
- Winery. (1954).
- Errands, counting Chile. (1957).
