«Unas pocas palabras verdaderas»: The naming and framing of nature in Machado's «Campos de Castilla»

James Whiston

When a digital version of Campos de Castilla becomes available to scholars, it should not be an excessive task to compile a concordance of key words in the collection. Even without such a version at present, however, the reader is quickly struck by the number of repetitious usages in the collection, with regard to the natural objects that the poet contemplated, especially in the region of Soria, but also in Upper Andalusia, a feature of Campos de Castilla that has been much commented on by critics. Machado himself implicitly defended this procedure to some degree in his notes on poetry in Los complementarios (III, 1278-79)¹, referring with qualified approval to the kind of Homeric formulaism that gives rise to what seem like tautological descriptions, such as 'the hollow boats', when he comments that everybody, from Phoenicians to Spaniards, indeed the whole world, have travelled in such a boat as Homer describes. What Machado appears to find lacking in the Homeric image is 'lo inmediato psíquico' which, in its turn, however (there is frequently a 'sin embargo' waiting in the wings in Machado's prose), may also be lacking in the formulaic 'fondo espectral de imágenes genéricas y familiares sobre el que destaque su singularidad'. Experienced readers of Machado soon come to recognize a formulaic usage, in his descriptions of, say, the 'grises peñas' (II, 543) of Soria or the 'rojas cepas' (II, 545) of Andalusia. In the final line of XV of his Proverbios y cantares, having glossed the Socratic doubt as to the limits of our intelligence, he ends with the line, '¿Qué dice la palabra? ¿Qué el agua de la peña?' (II, 572). We are also very familiar with Machado's personification of nature, even to the extent, as in the example just given, of endowing it with an animated voice with which to speak to us, and not relegating it to the role of being addressed by the poet. Indeed, the words at the beginning of the title of the present paper (from LXXXVIII of Soledades. Galenas. Otros poemas) suggest the same personified sentiment, in which Machado imagines a faint echo of the sound of creation, having been reduced on reaching our shore to a wave that can bring us only 'unas pocas palabras verdaderas' (II, 487). Machado therefore was content with the repeated use of what were for him these few true words in his poems. Donald Shaw, indeed, has seen this as an abiding quest in Machado's poetry, and after Campos de Castilla notes that 'the quest is for even greater «essentiality»: the reduction of poems literally to «unas pocas palabras verdaderas»'². Machado also enjoyed the challenge of copying the conventionally unpoetic landscape of Soria, chiselling out its contents rough-hewn, and shaping it into the exigencies of metre and rhyme, as in the hendecasyllables, 'Y otra vez roca y roca, pedregales / desnudos y pelados serrijones' (II, 110). The not dissimilar metrical patterns of the division of the alexandrine line, with its caesura creating seven syllables for each half, as well as the silva-romance (assonantal) form of hendecasyllables and heptasyllables in the poem from which we have just quoted, gave him scope for reusing descriptions in a different but echoing metrical pattern. This offered some metrical variation, to ease the burden of monotony caused by the repetition of images from one poem to another, or even within the same poem.

A contrasting feature of the 1917 edition of Campos de Castilla is what Geoffrey Ribbans calls its 'gran heterogeneidad'³. Repetition, variation, echoing, then become means of controlling the contrasting character of the collection, linking the poems together, giving the whole, as it became in later editions of the Poesías completas, some recognizable personality and identity. These 'inter-poem', as distinct from 'intra-poem', echoings were quite consciously sought after, because when one reads an individual Machado poem, with its enumeration of the rocks, stones, trees and shrubs of Castile, there is far more often than not no repetition of the same descriptive word within it. The principal exception that I am aware of is the deliberate 'fixing' of the poplars in the poet's consciousness in 'Campos de Soria' through a series of repeated invocations. In his other poems Machado will usually seek out a variation on the descriptive word, if it is repeated. In a not untypical arrangement by Machado, in the line from 'Recuerdos' that follows, he rings the changes on the enumeration of the 'montañas, serrijones, lomazos, parameras' of his remembered Soria, although such nouns often come with a not very particularized adjective. Similarly, in the same poem 'Recuerdos' describing Soria, the 'altas praderas numantinas' is a variation on the 'altos prados' of three lines earlier, which will then become the 'alto llano / cercado de colinas' of some twelve lines later. The nearest we get to direct repetition in this poem is when the 'roqueda parda' of line 18 becomes the 'alcores y roquedas del yermo castellano' in line 35 (II, 543).

There is, too, a wider deliberateness on Machado's part, noted by Ribbans, to exclude from Campos de Castilla aspects of his experience that might be deemed to have been of importance to the poet. As Ribbans comments, 'a su niñez sevillana, es cierto, dedica entrañables recuerdos personales, pero resulta en cierta medida extraño que el poeta no se refiera para nada a su larga residencia madrileña, a su viaje de novios por el norte de España, ni a sus dos estancias parisienses, como tampoco a su tercera, más extendida, de 1911'⁴. Machado indeed draws our attention to such deliberateness in his opening poem of Campos de Castilla, 'Retrato', in the fourth line of the poem: 'mi historia, algunos casos que recordar no quiero'. In the light of this quite trenchantly private line, first published early in 1908, the answer to Ribbans' implied question must lie in Machado's fully conscious decision to concentrate his poetic contemplations and meditations on the landscape of Soria, and later Baeza, as a compressed synecdoche for the expression of his poetic perception of the Spain that he had lived through. Looking back on these experiences, perhaps, and speaking through the mouth of Juan de Mairena, Machado praised the countryside (as distinct from the city) as a place where one could see things more clearly, and where the lessons on offer also struck home with greater clarity: 'Es en la soledad campesina donde el hombre deja de vivir entre espejos' (IV, 2017).

There are unexpected bonuses for the reader who is prepared to seek out the cross references involved in the poems' repetitions, as the description or evocation in one poem illuminates or enhances that in another. One of Machado's best-known poems, 'A orillas del Duero' (XCVIII) contains the enumeration of the herbs that the poet treads on as he climbs the hill above Soria: 'las hierbas montaraces / de fuerte olor -romero, tomillo, salvia, espliego-' (II, 493). The evocation of bittersweet smells is very much in character with Machado's general preference for the rougher flora of the region, in consonance with the roughness of the terrain (he called the rosemary 'áspero romero' in his sonnet '¿Por qué, decidme' in Los complementarios (III, 1157). Hence the evocation of the herbs also acts as an atmospheric premonition of the Bergsonian intuition that will dawn on him later in the poem, as he surveys the scene below, in a bittersweet evocation of Castile, past and present. However, when we turn to 'A José María Palacio' (CXXVI) Machado adds to our understanding of the herbs in XCVIII: they not only provide a special kind of decorative and possibly premonitory atmosphere in keeping with the tone of the earlier poem, but are also the objects of attention of the bees in the later one: 'Ya las abejas / libarán del tomillo y el romero' (II, 550). Rereading the 'herbal' lines of 'A orillas del Duero' in the light of those just quoted from CXXVI adds to our understanding as to why Machado might have included them in his path to the top of the hill. The busy bees of the Palacio poem are already ('Ya') at work in the uncertain spring of the Sorian steppes: thus now in full summer in 'A orillas del Duero' it is also time for Castile to shake off her rags and reclaim the energy of former years. The absence of the bees here may also denote, for the purposes of this poem, an analogous absence of transformative activity in present-day Castile.

Another example of a variant repetition that may help to explain a reference elsewhere can be found in the lines describing the storks in 'Pascua de Resurrección' and in 'La tierra de Alvargonzález'. In the earlier poem the personification of the storks as writing on the belltowers is expressed ambiguously as 'escriben en las torres sus blancos garabatos' (II, 511). This could mean what Machado wrote in 'La tierra de Alvargonzález', where the poet fancifully imagines the storks' ungainly legs as graffiti on the sides of these buildings:

en los nidos, que coronan

las torres de las iglesias, asoman los garabatos

ganchudos de las cigüeñas.

In 'Pascua de Resurrección', however, the metaphor is left without the explanatory adjective, 'ganchudos', referring to the zig-zag shape of the storks' legs. But by inserting the adjective 'blancas' in the Easter poem he allows for another interpretation, closely in consonance with the evocation of fertility throughout. That is, that the 'scribbling' on the walls of the towers is the spattered excrement of the storks, sending their annual signal of the fertilizing power of spring. 'Pascua de Resurrección' is a very 'teacherly' poem, with its repeated imperatives ('Mirad', 'Buscad', 'celebrad', 'Gozad'). Machado may be wryly imitating here his own 'blancos garabatos' on the blackboard of his classroom in Soria, and has transferred the teaching function in the poem to the storks presiding over the Spring festival.

Cross references to the sun in the poems may also help us a little with regard to the question of the unity of 'Campos de Soria'. The two valedictory lines '¡[...] que el sol de España os llene / de alegría, de luz y de riqueza!' (II, 516) are often ignored by critics, perhaps because they do not seem particularly expressive and individualized, in the way that much of the rest of the poem is, and hence in their abstraction (and with their abstract nouns) may appear to be out of harmony with the strongly visualized landscape and townscape of much of the rest of the piece. There may be, however, in these two final lines a deliberate recall of the earlier sections of the poem in which the inhabitants are seen or imagined as working the land, if we use lines from other poems to illuminate the final couplet of 'Campos de Soria'. In 'Los olivos' the land and sun are linked as follows, in a fine hendecasyllable, 'La tierra da lo suyo; el sol trabaja' (II, 563), and in his poem to Giner, the sun by extension is linked to other forms of manual work, in the reference to '[el] sol de los talleres' (II, 587). In a further extension, Machado, while incorporating the sun as a fellow worker in the vineyards or workshops of Spain, also recognizes the battle that peasant and farmer have to engage in, under the searing heat of the Spanish sun. Thus, in 'A orillas del Duero', the poet himself is conscious of having to struggle up the hillside, the effort being made all the more strenuous by the 'sol de fuego' that beats down on the 'agrios campos' below both poet and sun. In connection with the hemistich 'la tierra da lo suyo' it is difficult to pass over without further comment this expression of Machado's vision of the ethical aspect of nature, in which the self-giving of the land is a lesson to the 'mano ociosa' of humankind, mentioned later in the poem. And the utter plainness and simplicity of Machado's nature, as depicted in the half line, is a world away, for example, from Lorca's Baroque, atmospheric evocation of the ploughed land in 'Thamar y Amnón', the last poem of his Romancero gitano, a tortured land reflected in the moonlight that will later direct Amnón's own tortured thoughts to the rape of Thamar:

La tierra se ofrece llena

de heridas cicatrizadas,

o estremecida de agudos

cauterios de luces blancas.

Returning to the unity of 'Campos de Soria', a further consideration of the way that the sun is described, or not described, in the poem may also help to illuminate the summary function of those last two lines in this at times disconcertingly disparate poem. The only occasion in the piece when the sun is actually mentioned is in the penultimate line quoted above. In sections III and IV, it is the visual and other effects, only, of the sun's rays that are in evidence. Even though the two sections deal with different seasons (spring and autumn) Machado uses the same time of day -evening- to describe the colouring and spatial effects of the sun on landscape and humans. The perspective of the poet in both sections is from a side angle; the first angle, in Section III, is an elevated one, while the second viewpoint in Section IV is angled from below the figures on the landscape. Simply expressed, the poet is on top of a hill in one section, and in the next section the figures perceived are on top of a hill, with the poet below.

The play on spatial and temporal perspective has a contradictory, and complementary, effect on how the figures are viewed. In Section III they are 'plebeyas figurillas', while in Section IV they are apostrophized as 'Las figuras del campo sobre el cielo' whose 'sombras se agigantan' (II, 512-13). A cross reference to the poem 'Los olivos' enables us to see how Machado used the sight of the workers in the fields and hills of Soria and Andalusia. In a marvellous trope in the later poem he definitively links the farm worker's toil with the beast that helps to till the soil and with the sky above, a sky that in the juxtapositional context of the line osmoses into heaven: 'y su fatiga unce la tierra al cielo' (II, 563). Similarly, the somewhat derogatory description of the plebeian passers-by in Section III of 'Campos de Soria' becomes enhanced by the description of the peasant farmers in Section IV. This is one effect of the change of perspective in the poem, from one section to the next. But, as indicated earlier, the evening perspective remains in both, with its corresponding visual effect of colour change, from gold to a reddish then a scarlet hue, repeated from Section III to IV:

Section III

la tarde arrebolada [...]

el lienzo de oro del ocaso [...]

las cumbres de nieve sonrosada.

Section IV

una nube de carmín y llama,

en el oro fluido y verdinoso

del poniente.

Given that the descriptions of the next two sections take place in the gloom of winter (the 'blancos torbellinos' of the snow in Section V) or under the moonlit sky of the town of Soria, and that Section VII is also set at the time of the 'tardes de Soria', it would appear that Machado deliberately kept back the reference to the 'full' daytime sun of Spain until the end of the poem. Its final couplet, therefore, may be read as a conscious 'special-effect' climax to the work, allowing the poem to end in a blaze of light, wealth and happiness, elements that up to this point have been largely absent from it.

One of the ways in which Machado uses repetition and variation is exemplified in the first section of 'Los olivos' (CXXXII), a poem that belongs to his Baeza phase (although it is dedicated to a writer from Soria). The technique of reiterated enumeration is not very different from the Soria poems, with the exception that here the flora -the olive groves- are more abundant, and in the first section of 'Los olivos' appear to flood the poem with the rolling repetition brought about by their continued invocation. We do not find out until Section II that the poet is on a coach journey, and the poem is roughly divided into the location of the country and town respectively that Machado chooses to present in it. The division is accentuated by changes of rhyme and metre, where the parallelistic rhythm in Section I contrasts with the meditative, prose-like notes of Section II, and by the transition from the invocations that dominate Section I to the more sober descriptions that make up most of Section II.

This poem is also a useful example of Machado's 'framing' as well as 'naming' of nature, because alongside the enumeration of the olives in all their various guises, the vital economic importance of the olive groves to the local gentry, farmers and peasantry is brought to the fore in the second half of Section I. The frame, therefore, for this type of poem, and there are many of them in Campos de Castilla, is the human presence in the landscape, whether actually recorded as having been seen by the poet, remembered from another time, or imagined there. Aside from the actual presence of those who live and work on the land, Machado personifies the landscape itself, thereby creating a further bond between himself, the land and its inhabitants. From the beginning of 'Los olivos' the olive trees are relentlessly personified or linked in a multiplicity of ways to human existence. Thus, they are described from the outset as being 'sedientos' for the seasonal rains, the countryside is metaphorized as being 'peinado por el sol canicular', the sierras are 'embossed' with olive groves (II, 560-61). Machado was thus able to generate an extraordinary number of scenarios, ranging from the joyful invocation of nature in times of optimism, through the more overtly critical socio-historical connotations, as in 'A orillas del Duero', to the personal tragedy of the loss of Leonor. Like the players in Hamlet (Act II, Sc. II), Machado with seemingly effortless ease could turn his hand to 'tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene undividable, or poem unlimited'⁵. The framing of nature within real or imagined, personal or socio-historical scenarios gives his poems a unique tone and organizational structure.

Machado's enumeration of other trees of Spain, and particularly of the northern half of Castile, offers the reader fascinating overlaps and variations, in the ways in which the poet deals with them. Although most of Machado's trees are personified, in a manner that raises them at times above the human figures in Machado's landscape, the prize for the trees closest to him must go to the poplars by the Duero, at least as they are invoked in 'Campos de Soria', where Machado makes a triple association between these trees and his poetic life and affections. In the poem they are conceived of as 'álamos del amor', as 'liras del viento' and as 'álamos [...] cerca del agua que corre y pasa y suena' (II, 516), where love, art and life are encapsulated in the poet's vision of these riverside trees. However, if we turn to the poem 'Las encinas' we observe that in describing the poplars, the association with love, and the lyrical intensity of evocation of 'Campos de Soria', are absent. Of the nine trees evoked or described in 'Las encinas', Machado certainly devotes most attention (ten lines) to the poplars, apart from the holm oak of the title. The former are once again 'liras de la primavera' as in the earlier poem, but there is a cooler, more self-absorbed, and hence more remote atmosphere engendered by the poet in his description: 'En su eterno escalofrío / copian del agua del río / las vivas ondas de plata' (II, 501). In 'Las encinas', Machado evidently wished to give the primacy of his poetic affections to the doughty and humble old holm oaks, 'working' trees, with historic hearts of oak, reflecting Castilian resilience, so the poplars are perceived here as being more tremblingly concerned with their precious self-image, reflected in the silver waters of the river.

One of the best examples of how Machado could order his construction of nature in order to produce different tones and mood is the poem 'Caminos'. The original draft of this poem, in La Lectura, as Geoffrey Ribbans notes, was quite different in structure from that published in Poesías completas of 1917. I call the earlier published version a 'draft' because structurally it is quite unlike its finished counterpart, and demonstrates that Machado could coolly reorder the tragic experience of isolation and loss recounted in the poem. In order best to visualize this reworking it will be necessary to place the two versions beside each other, as follows:

First Version XI De la ciudad moruna tras las murallas viejas, yo contemplo la tarde silenciosa, a solas con mi sombra y con mi pena. El río va corriendo, entre sombrías huertas y grises olivares por los alegres campos de Baeza. La luna está subiendo arrebolada, jadeante y llena. Los caminitos blancos se cruzan y se alejan buscando los dispersos caseríos del valle y de la sierra. Caminos de los campos... ¡Ah, ya no puedo caminar con ella! XII La vega está bordada de olivares y surcada de pardas sementeras. Tienen las vides pámpanos dorados sobre las rojas cepas. Guadalquivir como un alfanje roto y disperso, reluce y espejea. Lejos, los montes duermen envueltos en la niebla, niebla de otoño, maternal. Descansan las rudas moles de su ser de piedra en esta tibia tarde de Noviembre, tarde piadosa, cárdena y violeta. El viento ha sacudido los mustios olmos de la carretera, levantando en rosados torbellinos el polvo de la tierra. Aguardaré la hora en que la noche cierra para volver por el camino blanco llorando á la ciudad sin que me vean6.

Second Version Caminos De la ciudad moruna tras las murallas viejas, yo contemplo la tarde silenciosa, a solas con mi sombra y con mi pena. El río va corriendo, entre sombrías huertas y grises olivares, por los alegres campos de Baeza. Tienen las vides pámpanos dorados sobre las rojas cepas. Guadalquivir, como un alfanje roto y disperso, reluce y espejea. Lejos, los montes duermen envueltos en la niebla, niebla de otoño, maternal; descansan las rudas moles de su ser de piedra en esta tibia tarde de noviembre, tarde piadosa, cárdena y violeta. El viento ha sacudido los mustios olmos de la carretera, levantando en rosados torbellinos el polvo de la tierra. La luna está subiendo amoratada, jadeante y llena. Los caminitos blancos se cruzan y se alejan, buscando los dispersos caseríos del valle y de la sierra. Caminos de los campos... ¡Ay, ya no puedo caminar con ella! (II, 545)

Considered as a means of shedding light on the creative process of composition in Machado's poetry, 'Caminos' is unusual in that the changes made from the early printed version to the later one are almost wholly structural, as there are only three changes of vocabulary (the title is added, the adjective describing the moon is altered from 'arrebolada' to 'amoratada', and in the final line there is the change from 'Ah' to 'Ay'). (A glance at Ribbans' notes to the poems of Campos de Castilla will reveal that most of the changes made to the other poems in subsequent versions were to a word, a short phrase or a couple of lines.) What Machado did with the poem that we know to-day as 'Caminos' was to change the original bipartite structure, consisting of 16 + 20 lines and construct a new poem of six stanzas, the first three of four lines each, the last three of six, thirty lines in all. In the process six lines from the original were discarded. If ever the phrase 'the shaping spirit of the imagination' needed an example to illustrate it, then Machado's changes to the earlier printed prototype of 'Caminos' must be a prime candidate for such an illustration, in which every one of the images and sentiments of the completed poem have been made to count towards the Bergsonian intuition of the poem's last line. In the final version the sense of passive, fatalistic solitude of the poem's opening is contrasted throughout all the remaining lines (except the final one) with the happy, active, fertile, peaceful or hopeful scenario of the solidarity of nature, through the various guises presented by Machado, in images of caring pregnancy and maternity, of rosy life that is seemingly being brought back from the dead of an approaching winter. The hypallage used to transform the white roads into busy neighbourhood visitors leads to the final terrible intuition of immobility and isolation. I have made the point that these 'caminitos blancos [que] se cruzan' may also represent the intuition of death's finality, forming the shape of the white crosses of a cemetery, but still hidden in the text, until the final line⁷. Ribbans also makes the point that some of the later descriptions of nature evoked in a poem apparently describing Baeza and its surroundings 'are significantly similar to those of Soria'⁸. When we compare the finished product with its prototype, and the latter's note of somewhat snivelling self-pity in the four final lines (omitted after that earlier version) we can appreciate Machado's reshaping and redirection of the original, and the thin line that can divide genius from a lesser creation. Sánchez Barbudo is surely mistaken when he calls the poem 'una pura descripción casi [except for the last line]'⁹. Images of the river, the countryside and its flora, the mountains, the mist, the 'tarde piadosa', the wind, the moon: all are harnessed in the final version to the end of contrasting their fulfilled, lifegiving companionship with the narrator's solitary immuration.

The sacrifice of two 'trademark' Machado lines -'La vega está bordada de olivares / y surcada de pardas sementeras'- was governed by the need to eliminate from the poem any traces of real, as distinct from metaphorized, human activity, other than the poet's silent and lonely contemplation. (As Ribbans remarks, the poet 'shuns other people'¹⁰.) Hence the first of the two rejected lines, which fitted in well with the images of the personified companionship of nature (the plain 'embossed' by the olive groves) was removed when the second, rhyming line that introduced the image of human work in the fields had to be discarded. The added contrast of the poem's opening lines is also made plain in all the descriptions of nature in the poem: isolated from them in condition and mood, the narrator is all too closely hemmed in by the ancient walls of his human consciousness. Yet although the evening ('la tarde silenciosa') at the beginning can tell him nothing, by the end of the poem the poet's consciousness has decoded the intuitive message delivered by nature's personified agents throughout the piece. This is the logic of the change in the last line from 'Ah' to 'Ay', in which the new, extended sequence of images of the second version forces the shift from romantic nostalgia to existential anguish. Also the addition of the title brings out beautifully the physical presence of nature and yet its metaphysical absence for the poet, because he can no longer walk these 'caminos'. The completed piece that has come down to us today, a perfect marriage of philosophy and art, shows us the Bergsonian process of intuition in poetic action, through the personification of nature, making it fully deserving of its place at the front of the so-called 'Leonor cycle'.

One of the poems from the cycle that offers an interesting variation on the framing of nature is 'Otro viaje' (CXXVII). It is less successful than 'Caminos', perhaps because it draws more attention to the poet's lack of companionship on his journey by train through the countryside of Jaén, and therefore misses out on the more subtle evocation of the contrast between the poet's isolation and the imagined companionship of nature in 'Caminos'. In 'Otro viaje', the poet certainly does not lack company, as he describes his fellow travelling companions in the carriage, three men and a dog; one, the unidentified man, is asleep, oblivious to his surroundings, the others are a priest and a hunter, the latter pair a synecdoche for Machado of important aspects of Andalusian life. The poet narrator chooses not to look at his companions, but rather fixes his eyes on his travelling case and remembers another, more joyful, journey 'hacia las tierras del Duero' (II, 551). This voluntary isolation within the carriage echoes the early description in line 10, of the 'turbia ventanilla', which also isolates the poet from the landscape that is passing before him, by reason of the freezing dawn mist and condensation on the window. The rapid movement of the train imagined as 'devouring' the landscape means that the countryside is fleeing from him: 'El campo vuela'. Six lines earlier he imagines 'la niebla de la mañana huyendo por los barrancos' and these images of flight act as a prelude to his meditation on his own isolation from line 29 onwards. The poem's last six lines point up a chilling variation on the contrast of isolation and companionship that runs through the Leonor cycle:

Soledad,

sequedad.

Tan pobre me estoy quedando,

que ya ni siquiera estoy

conmigo, ni sé si voy

conmigo a solas viajando.

In these lines the poet experiences the pangs of isolation to such a degree that he even feels split from any companionship with himself: the human consciousness that frames his poetic vision has been broken into pieces, in spite of the emphatic repetition of 'conmigo' at the poem's end.

One of the most attractive features of the poem that follows 'Otro viaje' -the well known 'Poema de un día'- is that the poet shows us a picture of himself challenging the dead hand of the monotony of a miserable November day in a dreary, cold Baeza, and moving out of his lonely room to partake in the companionship of the tertulia in the local drugstore. Before that, Machado uses a similar device to the description of the train window in 'Otro viaje' to suggest the isolation of his room, as the rain on the fading light of his window creates a sieve-like effect, making it a 'tarde gris tamizada' (II, 553), and hence, one supposes, preventing him from having any visual communication with outside. The image of the sieve, however, does allow for some 'sifting' of outside experience by the poet. Although the conversation on politics that he eventually is part of is predictable and platitudinous at the beginning -what Machado called 'el lenguaje [...] que empleamos para entendernos unos hombres con otros [y que] expresa lo convencional' (III, 1210)- the drugstore discussion of how the crops are progressing takes us back to the poem's beginning. Here, Machado prays for rain, both in the literal sense, and in the metaphorical one, having earlier imagined himself as a 'fantástico labrador' concerned with his own sowing and harvesting of the fruits of his art. This attempt to capture the varying moods of consciousness is reflected in the humour that arises from the doggerel effect of rhyming couplets ('Este Bergson es un tuno; / ¿verdad, maestro Unamuno?' [II, 555-56]) which is cleverly offset in more 'serious' parts of the poem by alternate rhymes that avoid this comic doggerel effect, as in the moment when the poet remembers his grievous loss: '(Tic-tic, tic-tic...) Era un día / (Tic-tic, tic-tic) que pasó, / y lo que yo más quería / la muerte se lo llevó' (II, 553). The poem's last four lines, with their emphasis on the poet's longing for self-transcendence, are also given in the non-jingling sounds of an alternate rhyming structure. Indeed the whole poem with its swift and random changes of mood, in its use of pie quebrado and the meandering, unpredictable rhyme scheme/stream, is in line with Bergson's idea of the 'immediate data of consciousness' ('immediate', in its meaning of 'unmediated or coming directly into the consciousness'). The poet's consciousness skilfully frames the whole text, in the shape of the link forged between culture and agriculture, as Machado summons Unamuno, Bergson and Kant to this agricultural backwater to witness the creative work of both rain and inspiration falling respectively on the land and in the poet's consciousness. Through this framing device Machado hoped to avoid what he called being a slave of 'la ciega corriente vital' of Bergsonian intuition (III, 1194).

In the same piece on Bergson, Machado describes another means of avoiding becoming drowned in the Bergsonian current of time and consciousness, by keeping his distance from the things around him, and describes how such an

hondo espectador, que retrocede ante todas las cosas, para nunca confundirse con ellas, crea a imagen y semejanza suya el mundo eleático, el de las normas inmutables, el de las ideas platónicas.

The poem 'Noviembre 1913' might appear to be an example of this attitude, in which the frame created by the poet's presence in the landscape seems very insubstantial, in the absence of any direct reference to his persona, with a suggestion that the poet has indeed withdrawn from things 'para nunca confundirse con ellas'. The Bergsonian 'immersion', however, is still present, because the poem has, as Wordsworth expressed it in his Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 'a presence which is not to be put by', a consciousness that registers the scene. From the outset there is a definite chronological, hence human, placing, through the poem's date-title, and in the reference to the passing of time in its first three words ('Un año más'). There then follow a series of impressions in the present tense (Machado's fondness for this tense must be a deliberate attempt to depict the 'immediate' relationship of the consciousness with its raw material). The reference to the sower in the opening two lines is followed by the description of the ploughing teams, the ashen clouds, the darkening countryside, the ploughed fields, the olive groves, the muddy water, the taller mountain seen as a cap on its snowy neighbour, the stormy horizon in one direction, the sight of the sun in another. Taken together, these landscape images mingle signs of the literal, reassuring continuity of agricultural work, together with a metaphorical awareness of darkness, disturbance and decay, that appear to threaten it, while the whole scene is crowned by the repetition of the sun's presence in the final line, 'montes con sol, montes de sol y piedra' (II, 558). Once again, as in 'Caminos', the November setting suggests the onset of winter, with its connotations of decay and death, yet the framing of 'Noviembre 1913' between this title and the sun shining on the stone of the final line also recalls the ending, but without needing to say it directly here, of another of the Leonor poems, CXX: 'Late, corazón... No todo / se lo ha tragado la tierra' (II, 546). And just as November is in the Catholic tradition the month of remembrance and prayers for the souls of the dead, so Machado uses this resonance in a framework of nature, as he did in a much more hopeful context in 'Pascua de Resurrección'.

Another interesting variation on the framing device used in 'Noviembre 1913' may be found in the justly celebrated 'A José María Palacio'. Of course, the epistolary framework immediately involves a joint sharing of the experience or experiences given in the poem, and this note is sounded from the poem's first word, with the naming of the recipient of the letter-poem, 'Palacio'. But from lines 2 to 16 the emphasis is mainly on an evocation of nature as it exists on its own, that is, with hardly any intervention from farmer, hunter or builder. What Machado does to 'compensate' for the lack of the human presence in this initially evoked landscape is to personify it, and in this way to hint at and move progressively towards what will become the intimate climax of the letter, the request/command to his friend and relative Palacio to visit 'where her/their plot is'. (This technique of an initial panning-out effect that then closes towards more intimate emotion is broadly similar to that adopted in other poems.) Thus, in 'A José María Palacio', spring is imagined as 'clothing' the poplar branches with leaves; she is late arriving, but a beautiful sight to behold when she does. The acacia trees are still naked, but Moncayo in the background is imagined as being in the best of health, 'blanca y rosa' (II, 550). The poet then descends nearer 'home' to the smaller flora of blackberry, daisies and short grass, before directly linking nature with the work of human hands: the storks in the belltowers, the wheat fields, the mules, the honey bees, the cherry trees, the poachers. The evocation of the nightingales in the trees planted by the river bank forms a transition to the final coda. In his poems Machado evoked the image of the nightingale in a double sense, firstly in an ironic way to denote his own artistic mission ('aprendiz de ruiseñor' in 'Poema de un día' and 'A Xavier Valcarce'), associating himself with the bird's traditional song of love (as in the apostrophe to the 'Álamos del amor que ayer tuvisteis / de ruiseñores vuestras ramas llenas' [II, 516]). Secondly, by extension from the love song of the nightingale, he also ascribes his creative impulse to his heart, as he confesses in a negative moment to Xavier Valcarce: 'Ya sólo reza el corazón, no canta'.

At the entry of the nightingales into the Palacio poem, therefore, Machado subtly turns the focus from the Sorian spring and its associated landscape to his own part in it, having graduated his enumeration of different facets of nature, wild and domestic, to reach this point. The final contribution of 'nature' to the poem is represented by the roses and the irises or lilies, not wild here, because we are told that they are from 'las huertas'. The tantalizing reticence that characterizes the poem throughout has been noted by the critics, but not, I think, the ambiguous part to be played by these flowers, which is so much in keeping with the whole tentative tenor of the piece, thereby keeping this tentativeness as an integral part of the poem right until the end: 'Con los primeros lirios / y las primeras rosas de las huertas, / en una tarde azul, sube al Espino'. Is Machado asking Palacio to bring these flowers to the Espino cemetery? Or is he suggesting that he should wait until they have appeared in the gardens before making his visit? Or is he leaving it to Palacio to decide for himself? Conversational, and written, syntax points to the second interpretation, but the poetic licence that Machado freely availed of in his pursuit of strict rhyme and metre must also allow for the first interpretation. In this latter case, they would be cut flowers to lay on the grave of the unnamed loved one, or loved ones. Either way, the image of these domestic flowers, linked to love, recalls its first image, the poplars of love from 'Campos de Soria' -here in the Palacio poem, 'las ramas de los chopos'.

In the course of his excellent article on this poem, Terence McMullan comments on Machado's general reiteration of a 'consciously limited range of references and phraseology', remarks that 'scrutiny of how it functions [...] has been patchy and incomplete', and proposes that there is 'a strong argument for reviewing the data in a more thorough and methodical manner'¹¹. McMullan contends that the Palacio poem stands out 'as a concentrated compilation of elements synthesized by [Machado] from his own work', and concludes that 'the importance of 'A José María Palacio' [...] resides in its function as an anthology or summary of Campos de Castilla at its best'¹². It may be necessary to add a correction to McMullan's contention about the poem's anthologizing scope, since the historical element in Campos de Castilla is not represented in the Palacio poem, unless we take the unadorned, parenthetical, reference to the Moncayo mountain framed in the Aragón skyline as such an evocation, a rather slim historical connection, it must be said. Another, but much more neglected, poem with very similar qualities of anthological concentration and synthesis is 'Recuerdos', where Machado again rings the changes on those selected aspects of the Sorian landscape that he had come to make his own. Once again we see that fascinating, apparently insignificant, repetitious variation to which McMullan refers, if we compare the two 'Aragonese' lines in the different poems. In 'A José María Palacio' the relevant two lines read '¡Oh, mole del Moncayo blanca y rosa, / allá, en el cielo de Aragón, tan bella!', while the line from 'Recuerdos' is '¡Moncayo blanco, al cielo aragonés, erguido!'. It is not the healthy roseate beauty of Moncayo (in contrast to the human dead at the end of 'A José María Palacio') that Machado wishes to invoke in 'Recuerdos', but rather the mountain's erect defiance and defining presence. The reference in 'Recuerdos' to the Sorian countryside as 'el alto solar del romancero' and to its 'crestas militares' creates a link to the region's literary and political history absent from the Palacio poem, because Soria in 'Recuerdos' is depicted as a region that embodies an indomitable will to survive, in the face of the sternest odds. As Donald Shaw has commented generally of the poems of Northern Castile in the collection, so too we find in parts of 'Recuerdos' that 'all the softer elements of highland scenery, flora and fauna, are eliminated in favour of a quasi-mythical vision: that of a warrior-like ascetic dignity, the background to the dream of «una España implacable y redentora»'¹³.

In 'Recuerdos', too, Machado makes many more demands on his own versifying capacities than in 'A José María Palacio', by composing it in alternate consonantally rhyming alexandrines (the Palacio poem is in the 'easier' silva-romance assonance). Does the extra concentration on consonantal rhyme really matter, we may ask? In the context of McMullan's plea 'for reviewing the [repetitive] data in a more thorough and methodical manner' it certainly helps the critic to be aware that, given the requirements of the poem's strict rhyme and metre, it is all the more likely that Machado consciously chose the words that he did, in the way that he did, simply because he had to make them fit into the initially chosen metre and into the rhyme scheme of the poem's different stanzas. When we add the use of syntax and semantics to metrical and rhyming convention the question becomes much more intricate, and would require a book-length study to elucidate it. For example, the line from 'Recuerdos' quoted earlier, 'Montañas, serrijones, lomazos, parameras', could have been ordered differently because Machado has chosen (or invented: 'lomazo' is not in DRAE) four words of three and four syllables each, and therefore well adapted syllabically to the seven-syllable caesura of the alexandrine line. In fact, the syntax used in the line is another example of how Machado starts the process of 'bringing the poem home', as the word order suggests the descending movement from mountains through lesser heights to the rough plains of Soria¹⁴.

The metre in 'Recuerdos' is predominantly iambic throughout, with the 'weak' prepositions and adverbs 'entre', 'para', 'sobre', 'hacia' and 'donde', together with 'tierra' in lines 33 and 39, forcing a trochaic stress. (And in this context see my comment on the words 'expoliario' [line 28] and 'tierra' [line 39] in the following paragraphs.) The rhyming words of the first eight lines devoted to the countryside around Baeza are all used to underline its relentlessly abundant fertility: 'naranjales, enverdecido, trigales, florido, vergeles, azucenas, mieles, colmenas'. There, too, the emphasis is on how advanced nature is: the jasmine flowers are open to the April sun, the wheat is growing strongly, the olives have come through the wished-for rainy season and are now in flower, the gardens are overflowing with lilies, the bees are like a golden swarm scattered around the countryside. This latter image, incidentally, is a good example of the way Machado condenses the effects of poetry into an imaginative 'fiction', since it is highly unlikely that the poet could actually 'see' these swarms, as he professes to, in his use of the verb 'miro' in line one. The picture of Sorian growth that he gives us is, by contrast, more patchy, as the rhyme endings show: 'hogares, empedernido, pinares, erguido, escalofrío, romancero, río, Duero'. Machado subordinates everything in 'Recuerdos' to a Numantine view of Soria. Even the eight opening Andalusian lines listing the abundant fruits of the earth are phrased as a subordinate time clause ('cuando miro'), which must therefore depend on the string of main verbs that follow, describing Soria and its uncompromising surroundings. The 'sol de abril' of Andalusia in line six is replaced by the burning 'encina roja' in Soria that in the poet's conceit creaks with the effort of keeping its inhabitants warm. And to further show the lengths to which the Sorian landscape needs to go to revive itself from its winter sleep, Machado gives us a variation of the miracle of the water springing from the rock that he uses in other poems, such as 'Pascua de Resurrección'. Here in 'Recuerdos' it is the 'roqueda parda' that seems to have 'más de un zarzal en flor'. (In contrast, the blackberry bushes in the Palacio poem grow 'entre las grises peñas' [my italics], not seemingly from them.) The sheep, too, in 'Recuerdos' must make their effortful way 'entre grises peñas' to the high grazing grounds. Some of the signs of the Sorian spring can indeed only be tentatively evoked, as in the Palacio poem, through the use of the future conjectural tense (on five occasions in 'Recuerdos') in the first stanza.

In stanza two Machado continues to imagine the 'viajeras golondrinas' again making their way to the source of the Duero (personified as 'el joven Duero' receiving a visit from these voyaging birds) and the sheep climbing to 'las altas praderas numantinas'. A picture of toil and spoil is presented, in which the naming of nature serves to emphasize in a graphic, physical way the roughness of the terrain, and the demands on its inhabitants. Thus the approach to the elevated pastures is only achieved through 'cañadas hondas', followed by an enumeration of groves of trees, which are traversed only by the 'ágil ciervo', then mountains and plateaux, watched over by the eagle, further underlining their inaccessibility to the outside world. The positioning together of eagle and crow in line 27 is another piece of the patchwork effect of the poet's imagination that juxtaposes the conventionally noble with the mundane. The reference to the crow seeking out its 'infecto expoliario' is a daring inclusion in a poem that walks the tightrope between hope and despair. Machado must have had a special wish to include the image, with all its ugly connotations, as part of his vision of a Soria that ekes out a harsh existence, because the middle diphthong in 'expoliario' leaves the alexandrine a syllable short according to a strict metrical count. (It is acknowledged that some poetic license may be being availed of here.) The rest of the stanza leads the poem into more domestic memories of Soria, in which the reiterated small scale of rock-strewn fields, of streams and shelters, used by both beast and human, underlines the struggle of both species to survive, and the meagre nutritional returns received.

The penultimate stanza, with its farewell to Soria, hems in the region even more within its mountainy, desert terrain, in the oaks and the holm oaks, praised for their strength and courage in 'Las encinas', and that here appear as ghosts and shadows in the poet's memory. To judge by a passage in Los complementarios, Machado, continuing the idea from his Soledades period, thought of such 'ghostly' or dreamlike images as part of the familiar, generic background on which to base any personal and intuitive experience, and which together combined to form the total poem:

Lo inmediato psíquico, la intuición, cuya expresión tienta al poeta lírico de todos los tiempos, es algo, ciertamente singular, que vaga, azorado mientras no encuentre un cuadro lógico en nuestro espíritu donde inscribirse. Pero esta nota sine qua non de todo poema necesita, para ser, [sic] reconocido como tal, el fondo espectral de imágenes genéricas y familiares sobre el que destaque su singularidad.

The line 'fantasmas de robledos y sombras de encinares' in 'Recuerdos' acts as a trigger for the intuition that follows immediately in the final stanza, although it is fair to say that the poem already had its share of descriptions that are akin to Homer's 'nave hueca': 'azules [...] montañas', 'cierzo helado', 'verdes hojas', 'rebaños blancos', 'grises peñas', 'viajeras golondrinas', 'cañadas hondas', 'desnuda roca'. As in 'A orillas del Duero', the intuition had been signalled earlier, here by the image of the jaded oxen at the end of the day's work coming to drink from the streams. So Machado, on the verge of completing his poet's task in 'Recuerdos', is aware that his creative spirit is being nurtured by the memory of this unpromising land, a structural paradox that is fundamental to many of the poems in Campos de Castilla. The poem's final two lines are a wonderful summary and fusion of what has gone before: 'Tierra de alma, toda, hacia la tierra mía, / Por los floridos valles, mi corazón te lleva'.

Apart from its place at the beginning of the line, the trochaically stressed 'tierra', where an iamb was called for, ensures its prominent survival in the poet's scheme of things, a survival that is copperfastened by the simple use of 'toda', delayed by the commas, and hence incorporating everything of Soria that has gone before into the poet's imagination, even the crow's 'infecto expoliario', and spiritualizing it. The commingling of both lands in the line, the physical 'tierra mía' and the spiritual or imagined 'tierra de alma', leaves them united in the creative emotion of the poet -his heart, as we have noted, often being used as a synecdoche for his creative powers. The 'flowering valleys' of Andalusia have now also become an integral part of the picture, acting as the conduit for the union brought about by the poet's vision. Thus the bleak landscape of Soria, spiritualized, becomes 'framed' in the flourishing uplands of Andalusia, a fusion of the physical and the imaginative that is a hallmark of Machado's Campos de Castilla. However, in order to graphically underline Soria's survival in his affections, the principal framing device in 'Recuerdos' that appeared to be provided by the abundant flora of upper Andalusia, evoked at the beginning and mentioned at the end of the poem ('los floridos valles'), is itself framed by another one, in the poem's first two words ('Oh Soria') and the last four ('mi corazón te lleva'), to make it begin and end in Soria.

One of the most memorable lines in Machado's poetry is also one of his simplest, the line 'Es la tierra de Soria árida y fría' that opens 'Campos de Soria'. The syntactical switch of the verb from after to before the subject, in order to produce the hendecasyllabic count, also has the effect of 'essentializing' this landscape, an effect emphasized by the end-stopped line. The impression given is that the landscape simply is there, whether invoked by the poet or not; but as we have seen, it is Machado who orders his and our experience of it through his choice and positioning of words. If we move to the last two lines of the poem, '¡[...] que el sol de España os llene / de alegría, de luz y de riqueza!' we can see the immense intentional distance travelled from start to finish: the poem that has begun in cold aridity has ended in the wished-for blessing of a full beneficent sun. In all the Castilian and Andalusian landscape poems of Machado this dialectic between what is and what is experienced or desired is a constant feature. One answer to a concern about the repetitious elements of his poems is that these elements of nature are always there in the poet's vision, memory and imagination: the naming of nature is imposed on the poet by its presence, rugged, delicate, or the many shades in between: the 'imágenes genéricas', the 'hollow boats' of Homeric resonance. The framing of nature, however, is imposed by the poet through his choreographed presence in the development of images and narrative, through which emerges the revelation of the intuitive 'inmediato psíquico', in a setting individual to Machado. The poet was a meticulous proofreader of his poetry, but it is tempting to imagine that there might at some time have been a comma in the phrase that has given us our title, viz. 'unas pocas palabras, verdaderas', in its meaning as 'unas pocas palabras, pero verdaderas'. The first three words would then come to be a summary of the repetitive, 'generic' language that acts as a frame ('un cuadro lógico', as Machado calls it) into which the poet inscribes his intuitive truth, in the word 'verdaderas' of the phrase's final utterance.