Did Darío not understand the principal puritan beliefs? Significantly, his North American idols, as stated before, are Whitman and Poe. But what about Emerson and even Hawthorne? Was it his troubled Catholicism that made it impossible for him to connect with a core Protestant constituency north of the Rio Grande?

In 1848, almost half a century before the Spanish-American War, the United States, by signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acquired a large portion of Mexico’s territory—largely what today is known as the Southwestern states. What were Darío’s views on the Mexican population in places like Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico? He ignored it. And yet, in “To Roosevelt,” he announced that Spanish America, in spite of American imperialism, is alive and well. And in the poem “The Swans,” he reiterates this view but also foresees, tangentially, the growth of a Latino community within the United States. His view is not comforting, though. Should this demographic transformation be applauded or condemned, he wonders? Herein two crucial stanzas:

 

Hispanic America and Spain as a whole country
are fixed on the origin of their fatal destiny.
I am questioning the Sphinx about what it can foresee
with the question mark of your neck, asking the air for me.

 

Are we to be overrun by the cruel barbarian?
Is it our fate that millions of us will speak in English?
Are there no fierce shining knights, no valiant noblemen?
Shall we keep our silence now, to weep later in anguish?

 

Seen from another perspective, this poem, also part of Cantos de vida y esperanza, brings Darío back to his enduring symbol, the swan, made famous in Azul . . . What tigers and mirrors are to Borges, what houses and the ocean are to Neruda, the swan is to Darío. But in 1905 the poet’s act of return makes the bird less a chimera and an artifact of fairy tales than an outright symbol, though, at this stage in his life, the swan is a symbol infused with a political pathos. Darío announces: “What sign do you form, oh, Swan, with the curve of your neck’s shape / when the wandering dreamers who are filled with grief pass by? / Why is it you are silent, white, lovely in this landscape, / a tyrant to these waters, heartless to these flowers? Why?”

However, Cantos de vida y esperanza also includes the poem “Poets! Towers of God!”, in which Darío establishes, once and for all, his Pythagorean approach to poetry and poets:

 

Poets! Towers of God!
You bear storms that are infernal
like a jagged mountain range,
like a heavenly lighting rod,
breakwaters of the eternal,
high summits that will never change!

 

The rest of the stanzas emphasize Darío’s opinion that “while on one side a poet leans toward nature, and in that he approaches the estate of the plastic artist, on the other side, he is of the race of priests, and in that he rises toward the divine.” For this reason, the poem is a manifesto: an elegy to poetry as the seeker of harmony. It is also a hymn to elitism.

 

Darío was quite productive in his last decade of life. At just the moment he was unsuccessfully trying, from his post as a diplomat in Spain, to annul his marriage to Rosario Murillo and, as Francisca was giving birth to Rubén Darío Sánchez, nicknamed Guicho, Darío himself was publishing, in 1907, El canto errante . This is a volume in which Darío comes to terms with his own mortality, a subject that is part of the poem “Lo fatal” (Destined to Die) but that increasingly permeates all his work as he approaches his end. By our standards, he was still young. But unhealthy habits (alcohol, visits to prostitutes) got the best of him. Not surprisingly, though, his physical decline encouraged his poetic ambition. His next collection, Poema de otoño y otros poemas (Autumn Poem and Other Poems), released in 1910, includes pieces about death and eternal peace. For instance, the poem “Vesperal” includes these lines:

Now that the siesta’s done,
now that the twilight hour is drawing near
and the tropical sun

 

that charred this coast has almost disappeared,
there’s a gentle, cool zephyr breathing here
through the western sky’s trees of illusion
lit by purple flames in the atmosphere.

 

Darío seems to ask: Might I claim for myself a place in Western civilization as a whole? The answer in his view was inconclusive, yet he did not give up his quest. He recognized at that point his enormous influence over Spanish-language poetry, the way he had brought fresh life into a culture known, until him, for its allergy to innovation. Symbolically, the image of Jesus Christ is solidly present in his poetry of the period. His poem “To Columbus,” included in El canto errante, was written some years earlier to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the Genoese admiral’s voyage across the Atlantic. He portrays the navigator as a bringer of misery to the Americas, and he indicts him for the abuses. But he also sees Columbus’s messianic ghost wandering the continent, a witness of his own atrocities:

 

The cross you brought us never seems to diminish.
When will corruption in revolutions be shown?
Not in the works of women who will demolish
the keen language of Cervantes and Calderón.

 

Christ is wandering through the streets, diseased and lean.
Barrabas has slaves, military distinction.
The lands of Chibcha, Cuzco, Palenque have seen
their panthers tamed, beribboned, brought to extinction.

 

The horror, the wars, the constant malarias
are doomed paths from which our luck has not recovered:
Poor Admiral, yes, you, Christopher Columbus,
pray to God for the world you discovered!

 

A couple of years later Darío brought out Alfonso XIII and El viaje a Nicaragua e Intermezzo tropical (Voyage to Nicaragua and Tropical Intermezzo), after which he released his collection Poema del otoño y otros poemas (Autumn Poems and Other Poems). His health deteriorated rapidly in the years following World War I.