Antonio Machado's «De Profundis»

Gustavo Pérez Firmat

Señor, ya me arrancaste lo que yo más quería.

Oye otra vez, Dios mío, mi corazón clamar.

Se hizo tu voluntad, Señor, contra la mía.

Señor, ya estamos solos mi corazón y el mar.

According to Luis Felipe Vivanco, the poem quoted above consists of «los cuatro versos más necesarios que se hayan escrito nunca en castellano» (551). I'm not sure what Vivanco means -necessary to whom? for what purpose?- but what is clear is that this quatrain stands out from the rest of Campos de Castilla. What Vivanco labels its «desbordamiento», its «violenta llamarada», is unusual in a poet known for sobriety of expression. Even as part of «el ciclo de Leonor», poems about the death of Machado's wife in August 1912, these four verses -a pocket elegy- are unique for their heightened emotional pitch. In his study of the cycle, Geoffrey Ribbans points out that the quatrain «is the result of a steady process of stripping back to the essential» (79), but this hardly does it justice, for its power derives as much from piling on as from stripping back.

The central texts in the Leonor cycle are seven poems that address rather than anticipate or presuppose Leonor's death (CXVIII-CXXIV)¹. Among them the quatrain is the shortest, the only one where Machado resorts to a closed stanzaic form, and the only one with consonantal rhyme. The others are evenly divided between romances (CXX, CXXII, CXXIII) and silvas-romances (CXVIII, CXXI, CXXIV). In Campos de Castilla the alexandrine cuarteto is used often, most memorably in the «Retrato», but never in a context as emotionally charged as that of «Señor, ya me arrancaste». Machado also composes his elegy for Rubén Darío in alexandrines, though in this instance the meter pays homage to the poet who did more than any other to acclimate it to modern Spanish-language poetry. Nothing like the simple diction of CXIX, the language of the elegy for Darío, predictably, is ornate and literary:

Pongamos, españoles, en un severo mármol,

su nombre, flauta y lira, y una inscripción no más:

nadie esta lira pulse, si no es el mismo Apolo,

nadie esta flauta suene, si no es el mismo Pan.

Two of the poems in the central section of the Leonor cycle unfold as descriptions of the Sorian or Baezan landscape in the course of which the poet is seized by memories of Leonor (CXVIII, CXXIV). Her passing away is related in CXIII. As if to make up for her absence, two of them take the form of apostrophes to his beloved (CXXI, CXXII). And in two others he ponders the possibility of seeing her again (CXX). The quatrain is the only poem in the sequence in which the poet turns away from nature or Leonor and looks to God. In the «Retrato» Machado remarks that someone who talks to himself hopes to talk to God some day. In «Señor, ya me arrancaste» that day arrives, unexpectedly. Rather than descriptive, like the nature poems, or evocative, like those that recall his life with Leonor, this poem is discursive. It is written in the language of argument, not of lyric evocation.

As noticeable as the difference in form is the difference in tone. In two of the poems in the sequence (CXX and CXXII), the poet hopes against hope that he will see her again. In others, the tone is melancholy resignation. Only in CXXIII does Machado describe Leonor's death with something approaching the passion of CXIX:

Una noche de verano

-estaba abierto el balcón

y la puerta de mi casa-

la muerte en mi casa entró.

[...]

Mi niña quedó tranquila,

dolido mi corazón.

¡Ay, lo que la muerte ha roto,

era un hilo entre los dos!

Yet even here the level of intensity is not the same. By framing Leonor's death as an allegorical narrative, Machado creates a detachment absent from CXIX. The reminiscences in the poem of the «Romance del Enamorado y la Muerte» (Zubiría 127), which also ends with the metaphor of the thread of life, add to the literariness of the performance. The final lines, which picture the «girl» resting in peace as the poet grieves, are moving rather than wrenching. By contrast, in «Señor, ya me arrancaste» Machado avoids narration or allegory. Instead the quatrain develops anaphorically, by incremental reiteration. The repetition of the Lord's name parses the poet's mood. Every time Machado repeats the name of the Lord, his distemper goes up a notch.

Halfway between a lament and an indictment, the quatrain points an accusing finger not at the anonymous figure of «la muerte», as in «Una noche de verano», but at an anthropomorphic God, el Señor. The dominant emotion is not sorrow, as in the other poems in the cycle, but bitterness. Sorrow is blameless; bitterness craves a culprit. One grieves in the face of misfortune; grief evolves into bitterness when misfortune results from injustice. Leonor has not simply passed on, she has been torn away by God from the poet: «me arrancaste». Of the poems in the cycle, this is the only one in which sentimiento rises to resentimiento, which is why it contains no ayes, exclamation marks, or ellipses, as do the companion poems. The bitter man does not moan, he accuses. In «Caminos» (CXVIII), Machado describes himself «a solas con mi sombra y con mi pena»; in «Allá en las tierras altas» (CXXI), he is «triste, cansado, pensativo y viejo». Only in the quatrain does Machado adopt a temperamental posture that subordinates bereavement to bitterness.

The intensity of affect makes it important that Machado find the appropriate form for his feelings. In the other poems in the cycle Machado uses loose, open-ended meters like the romance. But in CXIX, the poet's talante, his disposition, is different. In danger of letting his bitterness about Leonor's death get the best of him, Machado submits to the limitations imposed by the cuarteto alejandrino. It is hard to wail in alexandrines, or to shriek in rhyme. Metrical measure imposes tonal mesura. Hence also the absence of enjambment. The pause after each verse -moments of silence, as befit an elegiac poem- gives the poet an opportunity to gather himself before proceeding.

Machado scholars have sometimes cited William Wordsworth's definition of poetry as «emotion recollected in tranquility» to elucidate Machado's poetics. According to Sally Harvey, in Los complementarios Machado paraphrases Wordsworth when he refers to «el derecho de la lírica a contar la pura emoción» (46)². If by «contar» Machado means only to narrate, his paraphrase is missing the crucial element of recollection in tranquility. But contar may be not only to narrate but to count, to measure, to contain. If so, this poem offers a splendid example of the poet using poetic form to achieve the tranquility that Wordsworth enjoined. Machado wants to vent, to shake his fist at God, but he knows that he shouldn't; and so he elects a poetic vehicle that makes venting difficult. And yet what makes the poem memorable, in my view, is that he succeeds only in part. The relation in the poem between forma interior and forma exterior is tense, conflictual. The poet cries out; the poem tries to muffle his cry. Far removed from the «manantial sereno» to which Machado compares his poetry in «Retrato», CXIX is a barely controlled overflow of powerful feelings, to paraphrase Wordsworth once again.

At the same time that the alexandrine forces Machado to moderate his distemper, it helps him to organize what is, in effect, an argument with God. The bipartite structure supplies him a protocol for opposition. In each verse the caesura not only divides the line but sets God and the poet against each other. The first hemistichs refer to God's agency in Leonor's death, while the second ones note the speaker's lack of conformity with God's will. As verse follows verse, Machado's argument gains force until, in the last line, the human creator displaces the Creator metrically and conceptually.

The opening words of the poem -«Señor, ya me arrancaste»- reveal that God has taken something away from the poet, but do not tell us whether this event has been salutary or harmful, for the act of «arrancar» is not necessarily destructive. In one of the canciones, Machado uses the same verb to describe aromas that waft in the breeze:

Y este olor

que arranca el viento mojado

a los habares en flor.

In addition, tearing away can sometimes be curative, at least in intention, as in «Yo voy soñando caminos» (XI):

En el corazón tenía

la espina de una pasión;

logré arrancármela un día:

ya no siento el corazón³.

Because of the different contexts in which «arrancar» can be used, the first hemistich sets up a question: Could the poem be an expression of gratitude to a merciful God for having relieved the poet of something painful or unpleasant? The second half of the line immediately answers it in the negative, since what God has taken from Machado is what he loved most: «lo que yo más quería». In the other poems in the Leonor cycle, Machado's wife is called by her name, by the third person pronoun, or referred to in an intimate way: «compañera», «mi niña». In CXIX the poet does not identify her by name, noun or pronoun (the only reminder of her name arises, trenchantly, from the way it echoes in «Señor»). The generality of «lo que más quería» -a category rather than an individual- emphasizes the enormity of the poet's loss⁴. Machado will resort to the same circumlocution in «Poema de un día»: «lo que yo más quería, / la muerte se lo llevó». The difference is that in CXIX the agent is not death but God, and He does not take, He tears.

After reading the first sentence of the poem, the reader realizes that it's not gratitude that motivates the poet to write. In fact Machado's wording recalls Salicio's angry complaint about Galatea's fickleness in Garcilaso's First Eclogue:

No hay corazón que baste,

aunque fuese de piedra,

viendo mi amada hiedra

de mí arrancada, en otro muro asida.

It is perversely tempting to imagine that Machado is comparing the Almighty to Isabel Freire's husband, but a more relevant parallel passage comes from the Book of Job. After his children have died and he has been dispossessed, Job asks: «He snatches away; who can stop Him?» (Revised Standard Version, Job 9.12). In the Spanish of the Reina-Valera Bible: «He aquí, arrebatará; ¿quien le hará restituir?». Job-like, Machado reproaches God for taking what he loved above all things, perhaps -with a hint of sacrilege- what he loved above God Himself. But unlike Job at the conclusion of his ordeal, the poet does not repent in dust and ashes, nor is Leonor restored to him, as Job's losses were restored. Since there is no theodicy in Machado's poem, no attempt to justify the ways of God to this man, I am puzzled by Sánchez Barbudo's opinion that CXIX demonstrates Machado's humility before the Almighty⁵. I find just the opposite. His attitude is that of the unrepentant Job:

Therefore I will not restrain my mouth:

I will speak the anguish of my spirit;

I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

The second line of CXIX also has a source in Scripture, the first two versicles of Psalm 130, De profundis clamavit: «Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. // Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications» (New Revised Standard Version). In the Reina-Valera Bible: «De lo profundo, oh Jehová, a ti clamo. // Señor, oye mi voz; estén atentos tus oídos a la voz de mi súplica». Machado follows the psalmists form of address -«Oye, otra vez, Dios mío, mi corazón clamar»- but his is not a plea for redemption or forgiveness. In the Psalm, the speaker is hopeful: «I wait for the Lord, my soul waits and in his word I hope» (130.5). Machado has nothing to wait or hope for. Instead he holds God to account: clamar as reclamar, a complaint whose sting is sharper for the inclusion of amar -the reason for his predicament- inside clamar.

This is not, moreover, the first time that the poet cries out to God: «Oye, otra vez, Dios mío, mi corazón clamar». Machado may be referring to other grievances, or perhaps simply to earlier iterations of the complaint in this reiterative poem. But the repetition does suggest that God did not heed the earlier pleas. The situation is not unlike that sketched in one of the «Proverbios y cantares»:

Anoche soñé que oía

a Dios gritándome: ¡Alerta!

Luego era Dios quien dormía,

y yo gritaba, ¡Despierta!

In «Señor, ya me arrancaste» Machado is certainly alert, but again God pays no attention to his cry. Ironically, the second verse is the only time in the poem that Machado names God in a personal way -«Dios mío»- but the possessive only underscores the poet's bitterness: why should «his» God deprive him of the thing he holds most dear? The chiasmus, placed strategically at the alexandrine's midpoint -«Dios mío», «mi corazón»- opens the divide between the speaker and a God not truly his. It's not only the caesura that separates «Dios mío» from «mi corazón». Rather than joining God and supplicant, the two possessives juxtapose aggressor and victim: God tears out, the heart suffers.

The Biblical echoes continue into the third line with an obvious allusion to the Lord's Prayer: «Tu voluntad se hizo». But what follows is not acquiescence in the universality of God's will -«así en la tierra como en el cielo»- but the strongest indication yet that the Lord is deaf to the poet's cries: «Señor, contra la mía». «Mía» rhymes with «quería», which reminds us that had the Lord's will not been done, Leonor would still be alive. «Mía» is also one of many first person markers in the poem: «me», «yo», «mío», «mi», «mía», «mi». As in other elegies, the poem focuses as much on the bereaved as on the deceased. Machado not only mourns for Leonor, he mourns for himself. That is why he frames the clash of human and divine wills so starkly. Instead of «contra la mía», he could have said (albeit less euphonically), «y no la mía», thereby not portraying himself as God's antagonist. But he has no interest in softening his opposition, which gains force from the alliteration: «contra» resonates with the hard «c» sounds in «corazón» and «clamar», as well as with those in the opening verse: «arrancaste», «que», «quería». Jorge Manrique, the poet to whom Machado would build an altar, has his father Rodrigo say in the Coplas that to oppose the will of God is madness: «Que querer ombre bivir / cuando Dios quiere que muera / es locura» (277). Machado risks madness to state his case without equivocation: Machado contra God.

After a preposition that flirts with blasphemy, the last line contains Machado's most daring defiance. If up to this point he has been bitter, now he turns vindictive. His vengeance, one might say, is grammatical. The first hemistich -«Señor, ya estamos solos»- also poses a question: what is the subject of «estamos»? The reader could think that the plural designates the poet and his God: «Señor, ya estamos solos [Tú y yo]...». But again the caesura signals a detour: the subject of «estamos» is not God and Machado, but Machado and the sea. This is the only sentence in the poem whose grammatical subject is not God. In the first three verses of the quatrain the first hemistich has «belonged» to God. In the last line Machado encroaches into His territory by installing himself squarely inside it: «estamos». The progression from arrancar to clamar to estar takes us from a world in which God reigns supreme to one in which the poet has the last word.

As in other poems by Machado, the sea in CXIX is a totalizing image that encompasses life, death, destiny, the unknown. Rather than mitigating the poet's aloneness, it enhances it⁶. The Psalmist's de profundis was echoed by Isaiah (40.3) and John the Baptist (John 1.23), whose voices cried out in the wilderness. Machado intones his cry by the sea, but it too is a wilderness. As José Ángeles points out, Machado is saying, «ya estoy radical y definitivamente solo» (37). In «Al gran Cero», Abel Martín states that when the Supreme Being -«el Ser que se es»- created the world, He gave man the paradoxical company of «la ausencia de la amada» (Poesías completas 693). This is Machado's company in the poem, an absence whose correlate is the sea.

Machado occasionally writes about the interdependence of God and man in Unamunian terms, as in these lines from «Profesión de fe»:

Yo he de hacerte, mi Dios, cual tú me hiciste,

y para darte el alma que me diste

en mí te he de crear.

In the quatrain Machado takes the opposite tack: instead of creating God, he dismisses Him. Machado's vengeance, his own arranque (in both senses), is to deny, not the existence -he continues to address Him- but the presence of God. In the course of four sentences Machado has progressed from stating his loss to explaining its impact on him, to doing something about it. The consensus reading of the last line of the poem is that it expresses Machado's acceptance of the will of God. But this overlooks the care -one might say, the deviousness- with which Machado, here and in the foregoing verses, has crafted the alexandrines. Machado counters God's willfulness with willfulness of his own. If in the first line he reveals that God has ripped out what he most loved, in the last line he answers God's ripping out with a ripping out of his own. As God has withdrawn from the poet, the poet withdraws from God.

In a poem sent to Unamuno in 1913, Machado anticipates (or reprises) the quatrain from Campos de Castilla.

Señor, me cansa la vida;

tengo la garganta ronca

de gritar sobre los mares,

la voz de la mar me asorda.

Señor me cansa la vida

y el universo me ahoga.

Señor me dejaste solo,

solo, con el mar a solas.

It is not known whether Machado composed this poem before or after «Señor, ya me arrancaste», but they share the apostrophe to God, the image of the sea, and the lament. Both also indicate that this is not the first time the poet complains to the Almighty: «tengo la garganta ronca / de gritar sobre los mares». The difference is the tone. In this poem, as in «Allá en las tierras altas», Machado is «triste, cansado, pensativo, viejo». Tedium, rather than muffled rage, defines him. To say to God «me dejaste solo» is moderately querulous; to say «me arrancaste lo que yo más quería» is harshly inculpatory.

José Luis Aranguren has called CXIX «quizá el [poema] más religioso de todo Antonio Machado» (389). If so, his is the religiosity of a defiant Ahab, not of a repentant Job. And if his attitude is that of the «creyente cristiano», as Sánchez Barbudo asserts (253), he is a believer who rejects the God he believes in. The poet of the quatrain resembles Unamuno less than he does the «Iberian man» of «El dios ibero» (CI). Both the quatrain and «El dios ibero» appear in Campos de Castilla, though they are vastly dissimilar: one is a «Spain» poem; the other, a «Leonor» poem. Yet the dramatic monologue that Machado puts in the mouth of el hombre ibero -«oración, blasfemia y alabanza»- is closer in spirit to the quatrain than any of the poems in the Leonor cycle.

Señor de la ruina,

adoro porque aguardo y porque temo:

con mi oración se inclina

hacia la tierra un corazón blasfemo.

This «corazón blasfemo» is also Machado's. Written at about the same time, late in 1912 or early in 1913⁷, «El dios ibero» even contains an odd lexical echo of the quatrain:

¡Señor, por quien arranco el pan con pena,

sé tu poder, conozco mi cadena!

But whereas Iberian man, fearful of God, submits, the poet does not. There is no awe in Machado, no supplication. He does not plead, he accuses. His oración -or rather, his oraciones, four of them- consist of blasfemia without alabanza.

The initial hemistichs of the first and last verses mirror each other: «Señor, ya me arrancaste» / «Señor, ya estamos solos». The difference between the two iterations of «ya» could not be greater: the first one marks the poet's separation from his beloved; the second, interposed between «Señor» and «estamos», his separation from God. Unlike so many other poems by Machado, including some in the Leonor cycle (for example, «A José María Palacio»), the quatrain does not reflect on duration, but on rupture, discontinuity. As there is little sense of place in this poem, there is little sense of time, which figures only as a «before» and an «after», with Leonor's death drawing the line between them. Neither hopeful nor melancholic, as in the other poems in the cycle, Machado is only bitter. Metrical measure confines but finally cannot contain the poet's animus. Vivanco remarks that the poem seems incomplete: «En realidad se trata de una primera estrofa. ¿No sentís la falta de las que deberían venir atrás?» (551-2). But incompleteness is the point, since these verses spring from the shock of severance: «arrancaste». Whatever is left to be said after the last verse, the sea's roar -the clamar of the mar- says it for him.

In the poem that follows the quatrain, Machado has recovered his equanimity. Hoping against hope, he tells himself that perhaps Leonor has not left him altogether.

Dice la esperanza: un día

la verás, si bien esperas.

Dice la desesperanza:

sólo tu amargura es ella.

Late, corazón... No todo

se lo ha tragado la tierra.

The dialogue between hope and despair, like that between Machado and his heart, implies a degree of detachment. But the two lines in the middle of the poem take us back to the sea-world of the quatrain. By naming the emotion at the heart of Machado's corazón in «Señor, ya me arrancaste», these lines supply the missing link in the quatrain's phono-semantic chain: mar-amar-clamar-amargura. Like clamar, amargura contains both the bitter sea and the love whose absence it symbolizes. When despair tells him, «sólo tu amargura es ella», Machado reverts to the mood that motivated the quatrain. In «Dice la esperanza un día», he calms down, clams up, but the bitterness remains.

According to Aurora de Albornoz, the hope expressed in «Dice la esperanza un día» suggests Machado's search for God (243). Perhaps so, but He is nowhere invoked in this poem or in any of the poems of the Leonor cycle, except for «Señor, ya me arrancaste». The «earth» -the complement to the «mar» of the preceding poem- does not swallow Leonor entirely because she abides inside the poet, not because of any belief in an afterlife. In the two poems that follow (CXXI, CXXII), Machado will indeed meet Leonor again, though only in dreams and daydreams:

¿No ves, Leonor, los álamos del río

con sus ramajes yertos?

Mira el Moncayo azul y blanco; dame

tu mano y paseemos.

Soñé que tú me llevabas

por una blanca vereda

en medio del campo verde,

hacia el azul de las sierras,

hacia los montes azules,

una mañana serena.

Like «Dice la esperanza un día», these two poems record the flights of an anguished man's fancy. «Señor, ya me arrancaste» portrays the same man with his feet firmly planted next to the sea. The Biblical echoes notwithstanding, the quatrain neither praises nor pleads. The poem is an invective, a genre not unfamiliar to the author of the well-known couplet from Campos de Castilla: «Castilla miserable, ayer dominadora, / envuelta en sus andrajos desprecia cuanto ignora» (XCVIII). Literally «invective» means «to protest vehemently». Most often, Machado lodges his protests against his countrymen. Here, exceptionally, he turns on the not-so-good Lord. In somewhat similar circumstances -his elegy for Teresa- Esprocenda spit at heaven, only to have the spittle fall back on him⁸. Less given to spite or spittle, Machado settles the score more elegantly: he justly writes Him off.

• Albornoz, Aurora de. Presencia de Miguel de Unamuno en Antonio Machado. Madrid: Gredos, 1968.
• Ángeles, José. «El mar en la poesía de Antonio Machado». Hispanic Review 34 (1966): 27-48.
• Aranguren, José Luis L. «Esperanza y desesperanza de Dios en la experiencia de la vida de Antonio Machado». Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 11-12 (September-December 1949): 383-97.
• Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo. Rimas. 2nd ed. Ed. José Pedro Díaz. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968.
• Castro, Rosalía de. Poesía completa. Ed. Juan Barja. Madrid: Abada, 2009.
• Espronceda, José de. El diablo mundo. Ed. J. Moreno Villa. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1965.
• García Blanco, Manuel. «Cartas inéditas de Antonio Machado a Unamuno». Revista Hispánica Moderna 22.2 (1956): 97-114.
• Garcilaso de la Vega. Poesías castellanas completas. Ed. Elias Rivers. Madrid: Castalia, 1969.
• González, Ángel. «Antonio Machado y la tradición romántica». Aproximaciones a Antonio Machado. México D. F.: U Nacional Autónoma de México, 1982. 9-38.
• Harvey, Sally. «La presencia de Wordsworth en la poesía de Antonio Machado». Antonio Machado hoy. III. Sevilla: Alfar, 1990. 45-66.
• Laín Entralgo, Pedro. La espera y la esperanza. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957.
• León Alonso, Rosario. «La mujer en Machado: De Leonor a Guiomar». Antonio Machado hoy. I. Sevilla: Alfar, 1990. 457-63.
• Machado, Antonio. Poesías completas. Ed. Oreste Macrí. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1988.
• Manrique, Jorge. Poesía. Ed. María Morrás. Madrid: Castalia, 2003.
• Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. «Antonio Machado and the Poetry of Ruins». Hispanic Review 56 (1988): 1-16.
• Reina-Valera Antigua. July 14, 2014. https://www.biblegateway.com.
• Ribbans, Geoffrey. «Machado's 'Ciclo de Leonor'». Negotiating Past and Present: Studies in Honor of Javier Herrero. Ed. David Thatcher Gies. Charlottesville: Rockwood P, 1997. 76-91.
• Sánchez Barbudo, Antonio. Los poemas de Antonio Machado. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1969.
• The Holy Bible. New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
• Vivanco, Luis Felipe. «Comentario a unos pocos poemas de Antonio Machado». Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 11-12 (September-December 1949): 540-65.
• Zubiría, Ramón de. La poesía de Antonio Machado. Madrid: Gredos, 1966.