Then he completely abandoned his death and his most intimate dead, and remained an eternal season in everyday life, in order to die again, like the best of the others, to die better than the others, than we who are more attached to the side of existence that we have accepted as life. And no final death could possibly have been more appropriate to his strange, earthly Spanish life; so much the more now that Antonio Machado, alive forever in an invisible presence, will never again be reborn in his own spirit and body. When bodily death came, he died humbly, miserably, collectively, the lead animal of a persecuted human flock, driven out of Spain—where he as Antonio Machado had had everything, his dovecots, his sheepfolds of love—through the back gate. In this condition he crossed the high mountains of the frozen frontier, because such was the way his best friends, the poorest and most worthy, made the crossing. And if he still lies under the ground with those buried there away from his love, it is for the comfort of being with them, for I am certain that he who knew the rough uneven path of death has been able to return to Spain through the sky below the ground.

All this night of high moon—moon that comes from Spain and returns to Spain, with its mountains and its Antonio Machado reflected in its melancholy mirror, moon of sad diamond, blue and green, in the palm tree of violet grassy plush by my little door of the true exile—I have heard in the depths of my waking-sleeping the ballad “Night Rainbow,” one of Antonio Machado’s most profound poems and one of the most beautiful that I have ever read:

And you, Lord, through whom

we all see and who sees our souls,

tell us whether one day

we are all to look upon your face.

In the eternity of Spain’s evil war, which joined her in a monstrous and terrible way with the other eternity, Antonio Machado, with Miguel de Unamuno and Federico García Lorca, all three so alive in death—each in his own way—have gone, in a different, lamentable, and yet beautiful manner, to look upon the face of God. Great it would be to see how God’s face, a foremost sun or moon, shines on the faces of the three who have fallen, more fortunate perhaps than we others, and how they are seeing the face of God.

Juan Ramón Jiménez

1940

Introduction

Antonio the good

Spain of the twentieth century was a nation of extraordinary poets, each distinctive and original. The most beloved of those poets, then and now, is Antonio Machado. He is the quietest, the least pretentious, the most subtle and amusing in aphoristic skepticism, the deepest in the spirit’s labyrinths, the freshest in voice, and the plainest in clear, landscape vision. Don Antonio of Sevilla and the provincial cities, of Madrid and internal and foreign exile, would be the first to ignore these superlatives, yet the cognomen Antonio el bueno (Antonio the good) sticks with him1.

The poet read and loved philosophy. But he iterated many times that logic doesn’t sing. Machado sings in all his poems. In early poems of shadow and sun, in long poems about harsh Castilla, in fragmentary mountain songs, even in philosophical lyrics when he hauntingly plays with metaphysics: “The eye you see is not / an eye because you see it. / It is eye because it sees you.” Look carefully at his minimal speech, for he fools you with spinning insights. He tells us that the eye of the other already is, and not because by perceiving it you render it living, but because it is there waiting to come into more apparent being by seeing you. In waking you to its being, it gives you life. And you are companions. Like the world, the eye is on its own. And the world and the eye will go on being, when you are darkness.

Often in his landscapes, as in a Chinese Taoist painting, the author seems to disappear because scene is all. Even the live figures in the field participate in a vibrant still life—a black bull, two slow oxen plowing, a man with a crease on his forehead walking behind the beasts, a rainbow of birds, a stork sitting absorbed in the sky over a spire. Yet behind the vision, the poet is there, guiding you, walking with open eyes filled with memory of poplars by the river, a dry elm waiting for resurrection, and the Espino hill on which he wheels his dying wife. Or, on a cobbled street in an ancient Castilian village, he tramps alone at midnight by night jasmine, by the illuminated clock on the town hall, a moon at its zenith, all in the severe solitude of his widowerhood. When you walk with blind open eyes in his fields, you have disappeared with the poet.

Spain when Antonio Machado began to write

Antonio Machado began to write his first poems in the last years of the nineteenth century. He was a Spanish poet already aware of his French counterparts Baudelaire and Verlaine and the Americans Whitman and Poe, all of whom represented the new poetry. The late Spanish romantic Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer also left his mark in the early sensitive, intimist poems of elusive love, a city pastoral landscape, and youthful melancholy. But the avant-garde voices of Rimbaud and Mallarmé had not yet crossed the Pyrenees into Iberia. Then came the earthquake of Spain’s war with America in 1898. It took a decade before that catastrophe permeated Spanish letters. Yet already in Machado’s second book, Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems (1899–1907), the poet moves from the subjective and sensitive young poet, who recalls unrequited love, kitsch European melodies, and the shadow of gallows and graveyard, to being the observer and critic of a traditionalist, fraudulent Spain marked by greed and anger in the countryside and political office. The history of Spain and contemporary intellectual artistic movements come self-consciously into his poetry. He has a powerful social agenda, at times rhetorical and journalistic, for creating a new Spain.