She is real and unreal. And her fantasy self, he recognizes perfectly well, is a result of his need, deriving from Guio mar’s unattainability and absence. He needs to dream in peace his genuine false dreams where historical truth, or any similar aberration, does not disturb the truth of the passion. And the poems, uneven like a journal, without the tenderness, nostalgia, and melancholy of those poems written after the death of his child bride, are immediate, fanciful, have a compelling flow and the youthful courtliness of a medieval troubadour. They are never sentimental; they are always tempered with his measures of irony and humor. They tell us that Guiomar really exists in the present time, and is also hopelessly, desperately far away. Resigned to this knowledge, Antonio is joyfully, futilely inventing her:

Your poet

thinks of you.

The distance

is lemon and violet,

the fields are still green.

You are with me, Guiomar.

The mountains absorb us.

From oak to oak

the day is wearing out.

Once again, with the strategy of Chinese aesthetics, Machado uses the condition of parallel drama in nature to express his own passion. We see the two faces of Machado the lover, and they are in harmonious contradiction to each other. One spirited and fanciful face appears in his brief, epigrammatic lyrics of love as self-conscious illusion; the other, sensual face appears in fuller poems, where love is total eros, an earthly creation of a real woman with kissable lips and breasts, with whom he longs to share a real bed, in a single, burning night. In the first the lover speaks conceptually, wistfully, without passion. We see the Andalusian laughing proverbially at his self-deceptions. Machado distances himself from this philosopher by creating a third-person narrator to speak his futile generalizations:

All love is fantasy,

and he invents the year, the day,

the hour and its melody;

invents the lover too, and even

the beloved, which is no reason

against the love. Though she

never existed nor can be.

When Machado speaks, or as the title of the sequence of poems, “Canciones a Guiomar” (“Songs to Guiomar”) suggests, when he sings to his lover, then he is wholly poet and the woman, attainable or not, is wholly woman:

Today I write you from my traveler’s cell

at the hour of an imaginary rendezvous.

A downpour breaks the rainbow in the wind

and its planetary sadness on the mountain.

Sun and bells in the old tower.

O live and quiet afternoon,

opposing its nothing flows to panta rhei;

childlike sky your poet loved!

Here is our adolescent day,

your eyes bright, muscles dark,

when by the fountain you felt Eros

kissing your lips, squeezing your breasts!

Everything in April light is a transparency.

The now in yesterday, the now that still is now

singing and narrating time

through these ripe hours,

burns into a single noon

that is a choir of afternoons and dawns.

Guiomar, I remember and crave you.

In Segovia, after the publication in 1924 of the first edition of Nuevas canciones (New Songs), which are color-patches of memories of other places, largely in succinct, popular-song prosody, Machado assumes the task of two imaginary poet-philosophers: Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena. Independently of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese inventor of poet-voices with their own names and biographies, Machado created a gallery of fourteen poets—including one named Antonio Machado—to comment on the world and on himself. He continued using these names, principally Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena, for his poetry and prose. Only after 1936, at the outbreak of civil war, did the poet publish poems that were not through the intermediary of his apocryphal poets, but he still used these heterónimas for his essays. During that decade, when his poems were only to be found mixed in with prose in the apocryphal songbooks of Martin and Mairena, many of the songs were sonnets.

Antonio becoming sonnetized

In the last years of his life, Machado turned to the sonnet form. There was a struggle going on in Machado between his aversion to certain tendencies in Spanish poetry, to superficial Spanish modernismo that he links with the sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard, Rubén Darío, and even his brother, the modernist Manuel Machado, and to his attraction to the sonnet form. He is so taken by the sonnet that he even imitates Dante and begins one sonnet with Dante’s Nel mezzo del cammin, the first line oí Inferno. The sonnet won out, for he was to use the form in diverse ways in all his later collections. Typical of his whimsical dogmatism, in his posthumous Los complementarios he denounces the form for modern times as a used-up trinket, conceding that his brother Manuel Machado wrote some good ones. The poet is so elusive (and confounding) that one cannot be sure whether it is Machado or a prefatory resonance of one of his later voices speaking; that is, Abel Martin or Juan de Mairena. Clearly, Machado feasts in this confounding of personae:

The sonnet moves from the scholastic to the baroque. From Dante to Góngora, passing through Ronsard. It is not a modem composition, despite Heredia. The emotion of the sonnet has been lost. A skeleton remains, too solid and heavy for a contemporary literary form. One still finds some good sonnets among Portuguese poets. In Spain those of Manuel Machado are extremely beautiful. Rubén Darío never wrote one worthy of mention.7

This mild diatribe dates from, perhaps, 1916, while he is still in Baeza.