He wrote abundantly, but the forms and tone were different. He expressed himself now in verses that, like later Lorca, were based on prosody of popular Spanish song. He wrote brief, aphoristic philosophical poems, and he wrote sonnets, the latter for the first time. Castilian gravity gives way to Andalusian irony and humor in the philosophical and allegorical verses of this period.

Learn to wait. Wait for the tide to flow,

as a boat on the coast. And don’t worry when it buoys

you out. If you wait, you will know victory,

for life is long and art a toy.

And if life is short

and the sea doesn’t reach your galleon, stay

forever waiting in the port,

for art is long, and never matters anyway.

In Baeza, Machado managed to obtain an advanced university degree in philosophy in 1919 by commuting to Madrid. At the time, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was a member of the examining board. Machado’s interest in the degree was not to enhance his modest, high school teaching career. Rather, he had become addicted to philosophy and, he claimed, gave himself to reading only philosophy during these years. He writes long series of proverbial verse in the manner of one of his preferred poets, the medieval Spanish rabbi Sem Tob (Shem Tov):

In my solitude

I have seen very clear things

that are not true.

His poems of this period are on the way to epiphany, always secular, with Heraclitean skepticism for absolute truths, yet always seeking.

Also in Baeza he perfects the special dream focus in which landscape provided the poet with the symbols to express nearly all ideas and emotions. This simple Chinese device of using the outer landscape to describe the inner landscape of the spirit is among the oldest techniques used by poets. Antonio Machado, however, prefaces a step to the usual procedure, because even his outer landscapes have had their origin in open-eyed memory dream. The poetic mechanism is, in its three steps:

  1. The poet dreams of a remembered landscape,
  2. which he describes as an outer landscape, and
  3. which he transforms into a symbol of his inner landscape.

Steps 1 and 3 are inner landscapes, with step 2 a mirror in the outer world of steps 1 and 3. And at times Machado bypasses the second step and proceeds directly from first to third. The strange beauty of Machado’s best poems may be followed logically if we remember his method: the poet dreams a remembered landscape, he then presents a temporal reflection of his dream—an outer landscape—to the reader, who in turn reads back into it the original dreamed landscape. Occasionally, as mentioned, the poet moves directly from step 1 to 3, omitting step 2. Then the poet dreams of his own inner landscape.

Precisely this poetic process, made explicit in his later philosophical reflections on time and abstraction, permits Machado his most mature work, poems of a secular mystical character. The mystical nature of these poems lies in Machado’s dream vision and follows the familiar vías of the mystical process. The poet, as it were, is blind before the world about him, blinded in an afternoon of tedium in which sun and consequently time both seem to stop; in this darkness the poet opens his eyes in dream to a world of light. Through dream, his mind takes flight, he awakens, the world is revealed in images of startling clarity, and the outer and inner worlds of symbolized nature conjoin.

In one typical poem, “Desgarrada la nube; el arco iris” (“The torn cloud, the rainbow”), we have an analogue of San Juan de la Cruz’s awakenings. Here dream, landscape, and a metaphysical equivalent to the instant of mystical astonishment (asombro) in the Spanish saint are all present:

The torn cloud, the rainbow

now gleaming in the sky,

and the fields enveloped

in a beacon of rain and sun.

I woke. Who is confounding

the magic crystal glass of my dream?

My heart was beating

aghast and bewildered.

The lemon grove in blossom,

cypresses in the orchard,

the green meadow, sun, water, rainbow.

The water in your hair!

And all in my memory was lost

like a soap bubble in the wind.

After citing a landscape that is emerging from a sky of rain, the poet himself awakes, emerging from dream. It is stated abruptly: “I woke.” The dream was a preparation, as was the stormy landscape with its beach of sun. His awakening leaves him astonished and dumb. After the darkness of the former dream, he is barely capable of speech and is given to exclamation. No verbs, and each thing of nature carries the force of great clarity and importance. It is enough merely to cite the existence of these things of nature, quickly, without qualification or explanation.

After two stanzas of darkness and illumination, Machado’s third stanza of vision is not an instant of ineffable revelation—the poem with its words does exist—yet it is limited in these four lines to nouns, to things, except for “green,” which as a quality inherent in the meadow is more substantive than adjectival in function. Then in the poem’s last lines, the memory of the vision is lost, and he wakes a second time to the world without vision or memory:

And all in my memory was lost

like a soap bubble in the wind.

With one word—”hair” in “the water in your hair!”—the poet equates his vision with love. When Machado begins to write sonnets, poems to Guiomar, and his aphoristic mountain songs, we find a fluent and intensely clear vision of love and nature.