Poem of the Week LIV
Rima XXIGustavo Adolfo Bécquer
¿Qué es poesía?, dices mientras clavasen mi pupila tu pupila azul.¡Qué es poesía! ¿Y tú me lo preguntas?Poesía eres tú.
An okay translation:What is poetry? you say as you fixon my pupil your pupil blue.What is poetry! And you're asking me?Poetry is you.
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Poetry is you, I said, because poetry is feeling and feeling is woman.
Poetry is you, because that vague desire for the beautiful that characterizes it, and that is a faculty of intelligence in man, in you could be said to be an instinct.
Poetry is you, because feeling, that in us is an accidental phenomenon that passes like a gust of wind, is so intimately united to your special organization that it constitutes a part of yourself.
-Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Literary letters to a woman.
One thing I noticed while translating the letter was that it is a perfect aid in teaching Theology of the Body. It's as if Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer had read JPII and expressed some of his ideas in poetical form.
Allow me to explain myself. The letter expresses quite clearly a relationship of complementarity between men and women, with very clear cut differences between the sexes. What he means when he says: "that vague desire for the beautiful [...] that is a faculty of intelligence in man [...] in you could be said to be an instinct" is that men are made to appreciate beauty while women are made beautiful. Beauty would be useless if there were no one to gaze upon it, and it would be pointless to have someone to admire it if it did not exist. Both are equally necessary, even though they are different.
By saying "poetry is you" he's taking another step in the analogy. Man is the poet, woman is poetry. It is through this relationship of complementarity, by both artist and art working together, that a poem can exist. Poetry without a poet cannot exist, a poet without poetry would not be a poet.
I would dare to add something to all our discussions on men and women. I believe we both have what we could call a poetic yearning. Women are poetry but poetry is an abstraction. Women truly yearn to be made a poem, which is something real, something tangible. Men, on the other hand, yearn to turn the art of poetry into a poem. We desire to pull poetry down from the world of ideas and see it as a reality, as something we can touch.
Perhaps I have pushed the analogy way too far. I don't know. Let me know what you think.
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