Soon he will write the sonnets in which he is “glossing Ronsard,” dreaming of Dante invoking hell, light, nightmare, and vision. In the subsequent sequences, Heracleitus is for Machado what he is for Borges: an obsession. We know that Machado and Borges, both sworn to Heraclitean relativism, will never persuade with absolutes. And when they inch toward a static absolute truth, we note their skeptical grins. Machado tell us absolutely that absolute truth is impossible. Or more plainly, truth is impossible:

Let us be confident:

there will be no truth

in anything we think.

We can guess what he really has in mind when he contrasts Pedro Calderón de la Barca with the flow of things and consciousness in Heracleitus, saying, “The whole charm of Calderón’s sonnet—if it has any—rests on its syllogistic correctness. The poetry here does not sing, it reasons, discourses about certain definitions. It is—as all or almost all our baroque literature—left-over scholasticism”8. So while Don Antonio condemns the baroque sonnet for its plodding, heavy ways, he also disproves his disapproval of the form by writing lyrical sonnets with the power of song. Yes, his sonnets sing. His model is not, however, popular Spanish song but Dante, and Shakespeare, whom he translated. In his later poems, he exchanges the alexandrine of medieval verse and didactic elegy—that dominate Fields of Castilla—for the shorter eleven-syllable sonnet line. The sonnet was Machado’s compromise between the alexandrine and the octosyllabic ballad. Endowing it with his epigrammatic simplicity, Machado made of the sonnet a complete vehicle for his final poetic expression, using it in sequences for his fields of Spain, his woman in open-eyed dream, and his fields of war.

Antonio back in his Madrid cafés

On the day the Second Spanish Republic was declared in 1931, Machado and his students in Segovia climbed to the roof of the city hall to raise the tricolor Republican flag. He transferred soon afterward to a newly opened school, El Instituto Calderón de la Barca in Madrid. There must have been some witty god laughing at Machado, to have appointed the poet a professor in a Madrid public high school named after Calderón de la Barca, the masterful Spanish playwright of La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), of the wondrous, allegorical auto-sacramental, El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theater of the World), and the aforementioned author of baroque sonnets that Machado considered the epitome of foolish excess.

In the Madrid of 1931 to the war in 1936, Antonio became a more successful man of letters and continued collaborating with Manuel in their not overly significant but very popular plays. He lived with José, his younger brother, the painter, and his family. As for Guiomar, his muse or maybe muses, she too was in Madrid, the secret woman, real, invented, absent, and desired.

Now at last truly back in Madrid and its literary life, Machado retained qualities of the loner, keeping to his own older tertulia (a café literary group), which had its own café, the Várela on calle Preciados, where he might chat with Ricardo Baroja or the actor Ricardo Calvo. Sometimes Miguel de Unamuno would stop by. His tertulia was separate from that of the younger poets associated with the popular Generation of 1927. But Machado was not aloof. Indeed, more than being simply friendly to these wonderful poets—to Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, and Lorca—Machado was warm and supportive in every way. But in his poetry, he did not share their avant-garde premises and prosodies. He didn’t care for the baroque, or for the cold metals and obscure and semi-surreal imagery of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora, whom the poets of the ’27 movement held in great favor. In this regard, four years before Machado ‘s return to Madrid, Federico García Lorca gave a seminal lecture in Granada on Góngora, in 1927, at a symposium to celebrate the tricentennial of Góngora’s death in 1627. That gathering of scholars and poets in Granada in 1927 was the symbolic genesis of the Generation of 1927.

In the end, what was there between Antonio Machado and the younger poets? A porous boundary. Literary categories and influences are never as neat and simple as the academy might wish them to be. Indeed, there was abundant crossover of friendship and aesthetic within that extraordinary grouping of Spanish poets who were to dominate the poetry of Spain in the twentieth century. The instance of Machado and Lorca is telling and complex. In “A Summer Night” Antonio writes:

I will fan you,

with the white moon

on a cove by the sea

which recalls Lorca making the moon into a musical instrument, a tambourine for his gypsy girl to play:

Preciosa comes playing

her moon of parchment.

“Preciosa y el viento”

Whether influence, affinity, or mere coincidence, Machado and Lorca shared a fantastic playfulness in domesticating the moon and bringing her down to earth for a girl to use as a fan or Castanet.