The coffin, covered with the tricolor flag of the Republic, was carried by officers of the Spanish army to the grave.

On February 25, his mother died. Antonio Machado and his mother, Ana Ruiz Hernández, remain at Collioure today, in the same tomb.

And when the day for my final trip arrives,

and the ship, never to return, is set to leave,

you will find me on board with scant supplies,

and almost naked like the children of the sea.

(“Portrait”)

The last lines from Machado’s pen were found by his brother José, a few days after the poet’s death, scrawled on a scrap of paper in his overcoat.17

Through the sun of Collioure he saw his childhood in Sevilla:

These blue days and this sun of childhood.

The true biography of a poet

Antonio Machado’s life ended dramatically. But while his exile, suffering, and extinction represented the body and entombed spirit of Spain perfectly and clearly, his end—alone in Collioure, the sick wet man, almost naked as he disappeared from his Spanish life—was not the whole Machado. His last close Spanish companion, Tomás Navarro Tomás, told me memorably, “La verdadera biografía de Antonio Machado queda en su poesía”: The true biography of Antonio Machado resides in his poetry.”

We cannot know what poems Machado wrote between 1937 and his death in February 1939; they have disappeared in the rain. Among his best poems are those last sonnets and coplas of succinct pathos, with colors of stone and flower, which he composed at the start of the civil war. They are a simple culmination of his poetic life. Yet having said this, one might also say that his poetic life is contained in the first poem with which he chose to begin his Solitudes,“The Voyager,” an extraordinary biography of foretelling, one projected on a disappeared brother or himself, which ends,

The grave portrait on the wall is still

flashing light. We are rambling.

In the gloom of the den pounds

the clock’s ticktock. None of us talks.

My eyes in the mirror / are blind eyes looking / at the eyes I see with

In the end Don Antonio is always and never the paradoxical philosopher; meaning, he alternates between being the poet who speaks through images, eschewing philosophical abstractions, and the philosopher who loves to play with contradictory ideas in cunning wisdom-verse. He can justify his blatant contradictions, just as Whitman did, when he asserts, “I am never closer to thinking one thing than when I have written the opposite.”18 It is strange, the Andalusian garden of whimsy and contradictions that was Machado. He was famous for his public silences, for being a man of a few plain, deep words, as the early Darío elegy paints him and as do countless pious portraits of the poet; yet there are even more personal reminiscences that reveal a talkative, humorous Sevillano, a grand raconteur, who exalted conversation second only to poetry, which often, from Machado, seems to be overheard thought or conversation. Yet Machado’s is the quieter verse of solitudes, for he knows that words are just subjective sounds bound in letters, and cannot be counted on for what they seem to record. Certainly, truth like the lover is absent. In fact his poems aspire to wordlessness, to “silent paintings” as the Chinese call Wang Wei’s poems—or to la música callada (the music of a silence), a phrase from San Juan de la Cruz.

Antonio Machado was a philosopher who spoofed, who was grave, who laughed at the failure of his speech, used words to prove that the events of the mind are always beyond the frailty of language and that attempts to impose absolutes of truth upon elusive consciousness are laughable, pompous nonsense. He loved to make rich, insightful points of linguistic failure. Machado’s gods—among them Cervantes—always saved him from truth and other falsehoods.

A relativist sworn to eternal movement, he grins melancholically at conceptual phrases (including his own) that others would endow with fixed attributes. It is enough for him to give you, at an indeterminate hour of an endless afternoon, a stork on a tower, or a violet mountain with perhaps its geographical name—but no verb or event.

He is satisfied with speaking through landscape or saying a few tart aphorisms.

Writing through the land

Like the Prague poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who shared with him his year of birth in 1875, Machado was a poet of solitude and landscape. He described in stark color planes (never in the saturated colors of the early Stevens) the landscapes of monastic Castilla and fertile Andalucía. Like the Chinese, he was a poet of fantastic and acute observation, of departure and absent love seen through objects and the places he knew. He saw them through a metaphysical lens of open-eyed dream. What he saw, by extension, was also the soul of Spain made personal and particular. More important, those outer landscapes of Spain’s soul were also the silent fiery lands of his solitude.

He communicated an image of his being with minimum means and minimum loss. Like Frost’s genius of a few monosyllabic sentences to say the land, Machado used few words, with extraordinary subtlety in their plain utterance. There is a huge gallery of possibility in the right placement of words in a line, and in each case he labored until no labor showed and the word was sonorously invisible. To his willing reader he bequeathed with unlimited generosity and modesty an intimate picture of an interior landscape. And Antonio el Bueno remains a lucent world. He inhabits a sky below the earth where the poet, filled with solitary sky, walks alone amid his remembered streets and far mountains.

1  The epithet “the good” (el bueno) was born of nastiness as a result of his poem “Portrait,” in which he speaks of himself as “good.” His brother Manuel, writing a parallel autobiographical poem—both poems being written in 1908, at the request of a contemporary Madrid newspaper—speaks ironically of himself as one who lounges in his garden, eating the fruit fallen from the Arabian trees. In times of suspect moralizing, Manuel was dubbed, by mischievous comparison, “Manuel the bad” (Manuel el malo), le poète maudit (the damned poet). His later active siding with the Franco revolt and regime confirmed the negative title to many minds, but Antonio’s cognomen stayed mythically with the schoolteacher poet throughout his life. Machado’s kindness, ethical courage, and dusty suit were legendary.

2  Barea, Arturo, Lorca: The Poet and His People, trans.