His own biographical poem “Retrato” (“Portrait”) points to his primordial landscapes—Sevilla of his childhood and Castilla of his young adulthood:

My childhood is memories of a patio in Sevilla

and a bright orchard where the lemon trees ripen;

my youth, twenty years on the soil of Castilla,

my life, a few events just as well forgotten.

In his later forties or early fifties, Machado wrote a sonnet, “Light of Sevilla, the great palace house,” recalling his father, a literary man who died young. As he often does, Machado plays with time so that in the last lines of the poem, his father’s eyes will look upon the child speaker who is now, suddenly, the graying writer:

“Light of Sevilla, the great palace house”

Light of Sevilla, the great palace house

where I was born, the gurgling fountain sound.

My father in his study. Forehead round

and high, short goatee, mustache drooping down.

My father still is young. He reads and writes,

leafs through his books and meditates. He springs

up near the garden door, strolls by the gate.

Sometimes he talks out loud, sometimes he sings.

And now his large eyes with their anxious glance

appear to wander with no object to

focus upon, not finding anywhere

to rest in void. They slip from past and through

tomorrow where, my father, they advance

to gaze so pityingly at my gray hair.

As seen in “Light of Sevilla,” Machado’s childhood comes to us from memory, but apart from announcing that he was born in the great palace house with gurgling fountain, which he may have remembered, there is no child in the poem. The poet enters only in the last line to inform us that he already has gray hair. Apart from a few anecdotes about childhood in Sevilla scattered through his prose, we know Machado’s Sevilla only through his poems. And he is rarely a child in those poems but a young man (which he never was in his native city), who is the dominant persona in his first books, Solitudes (1903) and Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems (1899–1907). The young man is a romantic figure in solitude, in love, in idyllic Sevilla, and already a poet looking at the horizon for clues to his enigmas. Yet sometimes, even among the first poems, the young man becomes the mature older Machado as in the bleak and extraordinary “On the Burial of a Friend,” where he watches the gruesome act of burial under a terrible July sun. We do glimpse children, in references to small schoolchildren and a stern schoolteacher or to the tumult of young voices as they escape from class to run around the pleasant streets. There are also glimpses of a child lost at a fair, little girls singing in a group, and in one poem, XCII, the boy Antonio is sitting on a wooden horse on a whirling merry-go-round.

The most distinctive poem of childhood is “The Voyager,” where through “a childhood dream” we witness a brother leave for a foreign land. Then, the brother is back, and by now gray, disappointed, and recalling failed dreams of his youth. In this opening poem of Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems, we fittingly see the room and the family of a presumed childhood memory. The poem is fictive or, better said, an imaginative combination of many strands of the poet’s memories. One of his younger brothers, Joaquin, did go to the Americas, as did his father, but not during the poet’s childhood. Machado’s beautiful and melancholy Eden in Sevilla hardly touches on the child Antonio. Yet one line, with beauty and pain, takes us right into the boy of his childhood, and this is the previously noted, last line of verse he will write: “These blue days and this sun of childhood.”

In Madrid the young man becomes a poet. However, the interesting life of freedom, the battles as a young artist, and his voyages abroad do not make it into the poetry. Oddly, he skips himself in the city and the city itself to leap ahead to Soria, which he will visit in May 1907, in anticipation of his teaching post there. Soria is captured in lines here and there and particularly in “Banks of the Duero,” which he places near the beginning of his volume. Madrid is not a city without poetry for Machado; it is simply not the subject of his poems, just as equally interesting Segovia will not be. In Madrid he writes, and by the time he leaves for Soria in late autumn of 1907, he has already composed and published the first great part of his oeuvre. Except for the war poems about Madrid, most of which he writes while in pastoral Rocafort in Valencia, the one poem that takes place in city streets, those of Granada, and which he definitely wrote in Madrid, is the elegy to Lorca. He composed it immediately after the terrible news of Lorca’s execution was confirmed. From all this we can say that Antonio, who loved Madrid, Segovia, Valencia, and Barcelona, and in his letters speaks of his exile in the provinces, is a poet of the provinces. Nature is in his poems as seen by an invented young man in an Edenic Sevilla, by the walking country schoolteacher in his afternoons of wandering, and by the fantastic dreamer in the love poems to Guiomar.

Machado in Madrid and Paris

In that Madrid of his young manhood, Machado leads a bohemian literary life. He writes poems, essays, and reviews.