[Apropos of this Easter season, I provide another selection from Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), available for order here or here, or as a free pdf here or here. As with our previous three excerpts, we share this chapter as a reminder of what can happen when we allow an LDS perspective to seep into our scholarship and thinking, whether we are conscious of it or not.
[For example, when this chapter discusses how Nature itself–as portrayed in the early poetry of William Butler Yeats and Julia de Burgos–complains and rebels against our oppressions, pollutions, and exploitations, that could very well be a summary of Moses 7:48: “And it came to pass that Enoch looked upon the earth; and he heard a voice from the bowels thereof, saying: Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me?”—as well as President Kimball’s 1976 statement that “I have the feeling that the good earth can hardly bear our presence upon it.”
[Moreover, when I discuss how the frustrated revolutionary projects of W.B. Yeats really did return Christ-like from the dead to exact vengeance upon the oppressors during the 1916 Easter Rising–and how such could still potentially come to pass for Burgos’s Puerto Rico (where I served my mission)–I need you to understand how literally I believe in that, as well as how literally the scriptures believe in that. Just who do we think the Lord will be a swift witness against? Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.]
[Note: a similar version of this chapter also appeared in Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association in 2017].
The Last Romantics
“We were the last romantics.” So declared William Butler Yeats in “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” (Yeats 245). But what sort of romantic was he? The long critical tendency has been to assume Yeats referred to the historical English Romanticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats[1]. Such approaches are certainly sensible, especially given Yeats’ well-documented indebtedness to Blake and Coleridge, not to mention his ardent Irish nationalism, so reminiscent of the radical politics of Percy Shelley, or of Lord Byron fighting for Greek independence. However, this approach belies the intrinsically lopsided power imbalance between imperial England and colonized Ireland. As Stephen Regan observes, “The standard account is one that sees Yeats, the late romantic, the admirer of Blake and Shelley…until fairly recently it was common practice in British universities for the poetry of W.B. Yeats to be taught with a blithe disregard for the long and troubled history of Anglo-Irish relations” (Regan 87).
The English Romantics, whatever else their virtues and revolutionary sympathies, still approached their politic activism from dominant positions of imperial privilege, for whom rights of political self-determination were theirs to grant, not sue for; by contrast, an Irish Romantic—even a member of the Anglo-Protestant ascendancy like Yeats—must necessarily approach politics from the position of the occupied. Edward Said has gone so far as to argue that, “Yeats is a poet who belongs to a tradition not usually considered his, that of the colonial world ruled by European imperialism” (Said 5), a world with which Yeats, in many ways, held closer affinities than he did with the nearby English. Over all, judging an Irish Romantic against English Romanticism is as problematic as judging a Puerto Rican literary tradition against an Anglo-American one.
I do not compare Puerto Rico and Ireland arbitrarily. They are both, after all, predominantly Catholic islands that have often served as the impoverished colonial possessions of neighboring, nominally democratic, Anglo-centric superpowers, and hence may share similar proclivities in their poetical forms of anti-colonial resistance. As Maria McGarrity has argued in Washed by The Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature, “Despite the varieties of colonial regimes and strategies, island cultures, fashioned and indebted to their specific geographies, use analogous strategies to confront their historic struggles” (McGarrity 28).
The analogous strategies extend to their respective poets, as well. As such, it is the contention of this chapter that Yeats’s form of romanticism is more profitably compared not with the English of a century past, but to a contemporaneous Puerto Rican poet of comparable fame: Julia de Burgos, the national poet of Puerto Rico. Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez said of Burgos, “Era lo major que había en Puerto Rico como poeta” [“she was the best there was as in Puerto Rico as a poet”] (Agüeros xxxix). Her 1935 break-out poem “Río Grande de Loíza” was correctly prophesied by one contemporary to be “one of those poems that are born destined to figure in anthologies” (xix), not to mention Puerto Rican grade school syllabi, to this day. Such was the influence of this poem that, at age 22, Burgos was already being invited to speak at pro-independence rallies. Her fame, stature, and association with the independentistas places her in an analogous position with Yeats across the Atlantic.
[…]
Yeats has not been cited as an anti-colonial poet with nearly the same frequency as Burgos, at least not throughout the majority of 20th century criticism. Of course, his fellow countrymen certainly considered him an anti-colonial poet; as his erstwhile lover Maud Gonne once claimed, “Without Yeats there would have been no Literary Revival in Ireland. Without the inspiration of that Revival and the glorification of beauty and heroic virtue, I doubt there would have been an Easter Week” (Cullingford 88). John Wilson Foster notes how “Yeats assumed some feeling of responsibility for the Easter Rising” (Smith 236); in fact Yeats himself near the end of his life openly wondered of his play Cathleen Ni Houlihan, “Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?” (Yeats 345). Such claims may strike modern ears as rather grandiose; yet as Colmán Ó’Hare notes,
“One could dismiss Yeats’s query as mere hyperbole, but the question was not rhetorical. Amazingly, it parallels an observation Pearse once made: “When I was a child I believed that there was actually a woman called Erin, and had Mr. Yeats’ ‘Kathleen Ni Houlihan’ been then written I should have taken it not as an allegory, but as a representation”.”(Ó’Hare 94)
The specific romanticism of Yeats was apparently considered a real influence upon the leaders of the Easter Rising. As Elizabeth Cullingford argues: “before dismissing [Yeats’s] viewpoint as impossibly romantic, one must remember that Irish freedom was won not through parliamentary negotiation, but by the unsuccessful poets’ rebellion of 1916” (Cullingford 6-7). Of these dreamers and poet-rebels, Cullingford argues, “Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett…were heirs of the tradition of romantic nationalism which Yeats himself espoused” (88). This “impossibly romantic nationalism” that so motivated the Irish rebels took a distinctly different form than that of the English poets of a century earlier, whom Yeats in fact often criticized; of the Ur-Romantic William Wordsworth, Yeats claimed that, “[like] most English poets, he finds his image in every lake and puddle. He has to burden the skylark with his cares before he can celebrate it” (Cullingford 24). For Yeats, the English poets burden nature with their own image, as England had long burdened Ireland with its own political image. Yeats’s form of romanticism sees nature not as a mere reflection of himself or as a repository for “his cares,” but as an entity unto itself, an actant imbued with its own non-human agency and consciousness, a fellow ally in Ireland’s various anti-colonial enterprises.
Parallel Histories
For Burgos too, the wilderness is an active, personified consciousness, integral to her anti-colonial projects. Wilderness is vital to the logic of both Yeats and Burgos’ poetry, because historically, their islands have seen their ecological environments become the sites of ruthless appropriation: from the common-land enclosures and potato mono-cropping that led to the Potato Famine, to the deforestation of Puerto Rico that razed the refuges of the indigenous Taínos and cleared land for the sugar plantations. Both populations have also suffered from systematic attempts to eliminate them from their own countries: I have discussed before how in 1596, the English poet Edmund Spenser published A Veue of the Present State of Irelande that called for a general extermination of the Irish natives, to clear the island for further English settlement. That same logic appeared to undergird Great Britain’s lackluster response to the Potato Famine: in 1847, while literally a million starved to death in the green countryside, Assistant Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury Charles Trevelyan proclaimed the Famine to be “punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people” (BBC). For his relief efforts, he was knighted in 1848.
Similar rhetoric appeared in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. The U.S. President, in contrast to his more positive pronouncements on the contemporaneous hurricane relief efforts in Houston and Florida, claimed that the island had already been devastated by a financial crisis “largely of their own making”, as though predatory international lending practices and their long-standing territorial status had nothing to do with their present budget problems; he also declared that “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders…in P.R. forever” (Diaz), indicating that profligate Puerto Rico should be grateful for what little help they can get.
Of course, as numerous other commentators have noted, the U.S. President himself helped contribute to Puerto Rico’s financial woes in 2015, when he strategically filed bankruptcy in order to avoid repayment on a $33 million bond to the Puerto Rican government, which he had used to fund the construction of a luxury resort. As with Victorian England and Famine-era Ireland, state actors engaged in flagrant acts of victim-recriminations in order to distract from their own complicity in the catastrophe.
In any case, the implicit message was the same: Puerto Rico is suffering “punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful…indolent and un-self-reliant people.” This U.S. hostility against the Puerto Rican population was nothing new; from the 1930s through the 1970s for example, Puerto Rican women were frequently subjected to coerced-sterilization at a rate over 10 times higher than woman in the mainland United States, such that by 1965 roughly one-third of all women on the island had been subjected to “la operación,” a euphemistically-named birth-control surgery that many of these women did not realize was irreversible (Briggs). The sterilization program was explicitly a depopulation effort, and was openly compared to similar efforts in Ireland: “If Ireland can depopulate itself, Puerto Rico can” (Kitch 216) said one U.S. economist in the 1940s, as though Irish and Puerto Rican depopulation were intrinsically desirable, in a chilling echo of the rhetoric of Edmund Spenser.
Now, all these comparisons are not intended to claim that the local situations of Puerto Rico and Ireland are exactly identical; as Regan justly warns, “To assume that colonial politics took precisely the same form in Ireland as they did in India, Africa and the Caribbean can lead to a dangerous distortion of the particular social and cultural conditions that prevailed in Ireland in the period leading up to independence in 1922” (Regan 88). Nevertheless, to say they are not identical does not signify that they do not correspond—in both senses of the word.
As in so much of Latin America as we have detailed, the two populations do not just parallel, but intertwine: Jorge L. Chinea has detailed how throughout the 1600s and 1700s, numerous Irish refugees escaped indentured servitude in the Anglo-Caribbean by stealing boats and defecting to Spanish-held territories, seeking haven among their fellow Catholics. Some became pirates and smugglers; others became members of the settler class, who were instrumental (it must be stated) in the development of the Spanish-Caribbean’s plantation systems. Many of these same Celtic families in Puerto Rico later helped repel the 1797 English invasion of San Juan (Chinea 171-81). That is, Ireland and Puerto Rico have long histories of resisting Anglo-centric imperialism, often together at the same time. Touched by the same Atlantic Ocean and swept together by the same Gulf Stream that keeps the Caribbean tropical and Northern Europe temperate, Ireland and Puerto Rico together form part of the massive constellation of world islands colonized and creolized by European empire.
[…]
Nor were these Irish creoles so disassociated from the creoles of the Caribbean; Pedro Albizu Campos for example was a militant 20th-century Puerto Rican nationalist that was influenced by the Irish Republicans he met during his time at Harvard—perhaps not incidentally, he was also an associate of Julia de Burgos. The Irish and Puerto Rican independence movements are not so distinct from each other. Overall, the Irish were part of what Joseph Roach once called the “circum-Atlantic world,” which “locates the peoples of the Caribbean rim at the heart of an oceanic interculture” (Roach 5). This oceanic interculture included Ireland and Puerto Rico together within this massive exchange of economic, political, and cultural resources, “a vortex in which commodities and cultural practices changed hands many times” (Roach 4). When Hurricane Ophelia suddenly struck Ireland only a month after Maria devastated Puerto Rico, it was but one more reminder that Ireland and Puerto Rico are still encompassed together by this same circum-Atlantic vortex—and by the same industrialized neocolonial order that continues to wreak havoc upon weather systems and economic systems alike.
Important Differences
But to claim that Ireland and Puerto Rico are long-entangled is not to claim that Yeats and Burgos are exactly similar, either: Yeats was male, Anglo-Protestant, a social conservative, and at least nominally aristocratic; Burgos was female, Afro-Spanish, a social radical, and raised in rural poverty. Her full name was Julia Constanza de Burgos García, but as Burgos scholar Jack Agüeros notes, her pen name of “Julia de Burgos…technically makes no sense in the Spanish form. But…Julia has literally made a defiant announcement. She will henceforth be of herself, for signing Julia de Burgos is like signing Julia who belongs to herself” (Agüeros xv). That is, in contrast to the landed aristocracy of Yeats’s ancestors, Burgos could lay claim to nothing but herself. When she was asked of her publisher, “‘Where did you come from?’ she thundered a lesson: ‘Like you, from nothing’” (Agüeros xxv).[2] Yeats could choose to be Irish; Burgos was never allowed to be anything but Puerto Rican.
Moreover, her progressive feminism features in this statement, as she identifies as a child of the “nada,” the Nothing of not only the dust of the Earth, but of the empty womb as well, leveling and equalizing all humanity to the level of the same uterine nothing. This anecdote is illustrative of her radical world citizenship and humanism, one that situates her within the broad swath of humanity rather than marginalized in the local, even as she still strove ardently for localized independence. Unlike Yeats, she was burdened by no aristocratic entitlement that could cause her to forget her common kinship with others, nor warp her nationalism into fascist sympathies—and she would deny others the same sanctuary. She neither pretended to privilege, nor allowed others to hide behind theirs.
[…]
[Yet] although their biographies diverge significantly, they nevertheless draw together in how they both anthropomorphize wilderness in the service of securing national independence from an overwhelming colonial regime. For both Yeats and Burgos, wilderness is an ally, a sanctuary, a refuge, a proto-nationalist space, and a potential launching ground for counter-imperial resistance. Rather than “find [their] image in every lake and puddle” and “burden the skylark with [their] cares before [they] can celebrate it,” as Yeats accused in Wordsworth, these two poets attempt to engage with wilderness as an entity and actant on its own terms. This is an attitude present right from the inception of their respective poetic careers, with their first published poems, “The Stolen Child” and “Río Grande de Loíza” respectively.
Poem Summaries
Yeats’s “The Stolen Child”, the 1886 poem that launched his career at the age of 21, is narrated from the perspective of certain faeries leading away a human boy to their sanctuary upon a “leafy island” (l. 3) on a lake in County Sligo, Ireland. The poem is structured into four stanzas of 8-10 lines arranged in rhyming quatrains; in most published versions, each stanza finishes with a chorus that instructs the child to:
Come away, oh human child
To the waters and the wild
With a faerie hand in hand
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
By poem’s end, the child has complied, as he goes “Away with us…solemn-eyed” (ll. 42-43), somber and wide awake, implying (contrary to the assumptions of numerous critics) that this gentle abduction is consensual. The solemn consent of the child is significant, because in most Irish folklore, the faeries are portrayed as malevolent trickster figures, ones who seduce, fool, or even kidnap the poor mortals that cross their paths. But Yeats’s faeries do not seduce, fool, or kidnap the boy, largely because they do not need to; their chanted “the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand” is a gravely accurate summary of the situation, so the child deliberately chooses to take his chances with the faeries amidst “the waters and the wild” instead, no matter their reputation. He “comes away” with them as a sort of escape from and rebuke against the prevailing global-imperial order.
Similarly, “Río Grande de Loíza”, the 1935 poem that dramatically launched young Burgos’ poetic career at age 21, involves a small child drawn towards a mysterious body of water, narrated this time not by the faeries but by the child herself, as she addresses the river directly. Her poem is far more formally adventurous than Yeats’s, with stanzas that vary in size from 2 to 6 turbulent lines, in no apparent pattern or set rhyme-scheme. Though these two poems on their surface appear formally antithetical, the same logic undergirds both, as each features a child that wanders away into unregulated realms of wilderness, ones not charted on the official maps.
“The Stolen Child” for example commences with a description of “Where dips the rocky highland/Of Sleuth Wood in the lake” (l.1-2), emphasizing that this setting is not someplace accessible or settled, but separated, differentiated, a space where one can become lost beyond the limits of established law and civilization. “Río Grande” likewise launches with the child’s desire to “let my soul lose itself in your rivulets”[5] (l. 2), and thereby also be lost from imperial jurisdiction. Unlike the Yeats poem, the child feels herself drawn towards the waters directly, without the intermediaries of the faeries. Yet though no water spirits openly inhabit the poem itself, the text still features a wilderness in possession of extra-human personality, amidst an atmosphere of romance and magic.
Moreover, Burgos’s childhood imagination apparently populated the Río Grande with supernatural beings; as one anecdote from her youth records: “Young Julia wanted to put the body of one of her dead siblings on a raft with flowers and float it down the river where the water spirits would welcome the body, a ritual far more beautiful than sticking the body of the child in the ground, according to Julia” (Agüeros xi). For Burgos, interring a body keeps it imprisoned within grounds governed by empire, while entrusting a lost child to “the water spirits” liberates the child away from empire. Now, the water spirits do not make the jump from her childhood imagination to her first published poem; nevertheless, whether the water spirits are directly manifested, as in the Yeats poem, or hidden away as in the Burgos poem, what is common between both is that a living wilderness is presented as a refuge for escaping children.
Strikingly, the wilds of both Sleuth Wood’s lake and the Río Grande are supposed to provide these children with sanctuary from unending tears specifically. Yeats’s faeries warn the child of a “world more full of weeping” (l. 12), while Burgos calls the greatest of her island’s tears “those that come from my eyes/of my soul for my enslaved people”[6] (ll. 43-44). These wildernesses serve as refuges from the silenced cries of the colonized. Yet interestingly, both these watery refuges from the world’s weeping are themselves filled with tears: in “The Stolen Child,” the “wandering water” (l. 28) and “young streams” (l. 37) are places where the “ferns…drop their tears” (l. 36), while Burgos’s Río Grande is explicitly called “Great flood of tears/The greatest of all our island’s tears”[7] (ll. 41-42). These twin refuges from tears are also filled with tears because the protesting tears of the colonized are excluded from the dominant discourse that will brook no such castigation. But here in the wilderness, the colonized are free to give their weeping full expression, safe from reprisal. The wilderness, then, is not only a refuge from, but also a censure against, the prevailing imperial apparatus.
Living Wilderness
This conception of a living, anti-colonial wilderness specifically is part of what turns Yeats closer towards the Caribbean than to neighboring England. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert makes a similar distinction between the Caribbean and the English Romantics, arguing that, “unlike the white settler culture of nature writing, Caribbean writers refuse to depict the natural world in terms that erase the relationship between landscape and power” (100). She goes on to argue that for Caribbean writers, the natural world is not apolitical, nor an escape from power or politics; the natural world is what was slashed and burned to drive out the natives, plant the slave plantations, deny escape to the slaves, and establish the colonial regimes.
The preservation of wilderness, then, is not only an aesthetic consideration, but a political act, an attempt to severely restrict the limited land available for plantations, slave labor, and the enrichment of a foreign occupier. Yeats in Ireland likewise refuses to erase “the relationship between landscape and power,” and sees a wild land as integral to a liberated land. Part of each poets’ nationalist projects, then, is to “re-naturalize” their respective islands, to render them “wild” once more. They therefore do not differentiate between reclamation of wilderness and reclamation of national sovereignty. As Paravisini-Gebert explains, such was the comparable project of many Caribbean writers, who
“return…to old notions of the forest as the mysterious environment for…spirits…this “naturalization” was in the service of identifying the developing national character with notions of the indigenous or autochthonous in which the “primeval” forest stands for a precolonial space of “national” authenticity…The importance of the forests in the discourse of national and cultural formation in the Caribbean is most clearly seen in the twentieth century, as the islands begin to articulate the parameters of their postindependence identities”. (Paravisini-Gebert 109)
If we exchange the word “Caribbean” for “Ireland” in this passage, much the same could be said of Yeats’s “The Stolen Child”, which likewise returns to old notions of the forest as “a mysterious environment for sprits.” In both the Yeats and Burgos poems, spirits are invoked “in the service of identifying the developing national character…in which the ‘primeval’ forest stands for a precolonial space of ‘national’ authenticity.” As such, the “wild” can serve as both a symbolic space and a very literal space for formulating an anti-colonial, independent national identity, one that is simultaneously precolonial andpostcolonial. Conversely, the loss of such wilderness can signify the loss of such nationalistic space. Paravisini-Gebert explicitly identifies such natural spaces as Romantic:
“Throughout the nineteenth century, the idealization of the diminishing forest environment in the emerging literatures of the Caribbean responds to Romantic sensibilities and the adaptation of European models that turned the forests into highly symbolic spaces. Romanticism was linked—especially in Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean—to processes of national definition in islands that had already gained their independence in the early nineteenth century and were, literally, postcolonial…or were engaged in protracted ideological battles against continued colonial control and functioned as pre-independent political spaces (such as Cuba and Puerto Rico). In the literatures of these islands, the celebration of the forests as significant national spaces acknowledges their symbolic role in preserving the integrity of the nation (or proto-nation), a role based on an acknowledgment of scientific notions of climate change and land preservation”. (Paravisini-Gebert 108-109)
Again, what is said here of Puerto Rico can be said of Ireland as well, that the preservation of the forest specifically as a wild, uncultivated space, unclaimed and unclaimable by empire, is both symbolically and quite literally a preservation of a proto-national independent space. These poets then, rather than “burden” their own image onto wilderness, instead subsume themselves into the wilderness: “I was yours a thousand times”[8] (l. 21) declares Burgos to the Río Grande de Loíza, electing to give herself to the wild rather than colonize it with her own image and cares. The wilds in turn reciprocate by providing children escape from the “world more full of weeping than you can understand.”
Rebellious Spirits
According to Kathleen A. Heininge, the trope of faeries stealing away children into the wilderness featured prominently in the Irish folklore that Yeats drew upon for the composition of his poem. As Heininge argues, these faeries, or Sidhe, are analogous to the Irish, who “have had to find a niche for themselves within a hierarchy of souls that makes no provision for them” (Heininge 103). Like the colonial subject that exists in an ever-unresolved state of political and legal limbo, it is never quite clear just how the Sidhe are to be accounted for: “The Sidhe might be the spirits of the dead, or the ancient gods ‘in a degraded form,’ or ‘a folk-memory of a very ancient race of mortals’” (Heininge 102). In Heininge’s reading, the prevailing Catholic theologies of the day first tried to eliminate the Sidhe folklore from the island; failing that, they then attempted to appropriate them into their own framework: “In Yeats’s time, the Christian understanding of this tradition was that so many angels chose to leave heaven with Lucifer that God was in danger of being left alone” (Heininge 102).
That is, there is a theme of rebellion and revolt associated with these Sidhe, with natural resonance for the Irish: “[God] therefore ordered the gates of heaven and hell to be shut simultaneously. Those who had already fallen as far as hell became devils; those who had not fallen at all remained angels; while those who were caught in between became fairies” (Heininge 102). These faeries then, like the Irish, occupy a sort of constant purgatorial condition, neither completely independent nor completely subjugated, denied a direct voice or clear paths towards self-determination. As fellow fallen rebels, the secretive Sidhe for Yeats become natural allies to the Irish against the English. They hide in “the waters and the wild,” infusing themselves into the surrounding landscape, rendering the wilderness a magical space that the Imperial apparatus does not acknowledge as existent or even possible, and therefore cannot access. It is from these wilderness refuges that the Sidhe, the faeries of the forest, steal away children to safety.
This unresolved limbo is also a fair way of describing Puerto Rico’s long history as a Spanish and then U.S. colony. Perhaps not coincidentally, Puerto Rican folklore likewise features tropes of wilderness-spirits stealing away children from the limits of civilization for their own good. Paravisini-Gebert records an early colonial Puerto Rican legend wherein, “a child had been lost in the woods, which in that part of the island are most dense and frightfully steep” (104). When the child was found, she reported “that a woman had given her to eat during all that time, pampering and caressing her like a mother, whom we understood to be Our Lady of Montserat, to whom her father was devoted” (104).
As with the Irish Sidhe, this ancient Puerto Rican legend is appropriated as a Catholic tale of faith, yet the basic pieces remain the same: a child disappears into a wild, uncolonized forest by means of some mysterious, supernatural consciousness, where the child is protected and cared for. Both the Irish Celts and the Taíno ancestors of the Puerto Ricans read in the forest not just a potential avenue of escape, but as a conscious entity capable of actively interceding on their behalf.
Fluid Waters
The fact that both these poems focus upon “the waters” as sites of escape—and not land-masses—is likewise significant. Vanessa Pérez Rosario makes the provocative argument that Burgos’ poetry was in part a response against the Generación del Treinta (Generation of Thirty), that generation of Puerto Rican writers during the 1930s who sought to “heal the wound of colonialism” through a literature that “rooted Puerto Rican national identity in the land” (Pérez Rosario 2). Pérez Rosario cites for example Antonio S. Pedreira’s famous 1934 essay “Insularismo,” which “expressed the need for to define Puerto Rican identity as tied to the island’s geography,” as well as the works of Tomás Blanco, Luis Palés Matos, Vicente Geigel Polanco, Manrique Cabrera, Luis Muñoz Marín, and Enrique Laguerre, whom she claims “sought to define a national identity or ‘essence’ characterized by the natural landscape and geography of the island” (Pérez Rosario 16).
This valorization of landscape often found expression in the figure of the jíbaros, the rural farmers of the mountain countryside, who purportedly embodied a native tradition of fraternity and brotherly love opposed to the exploitative colonial order. Burgos herself emerged from this same jíbaros milieu, born in the mountainous regions of Barrio Santa Cruz, in the hinterlands of Carolina.
However, Pérez Rosario makes the provocative argument that these Treintistas were also often fraught with contradiction: their primary focus upon landscape and farmers, she argues, was often patriarchal, conservative, overly-traditional, and too often elided the history of Spanish colonialism and African slavery. This Treintista focus upon land resulted, she argues, in a largely static nationalistic formulation. Burgos’ privileging of waters over land, then, is an attempt to move beyond Treintista nationalistic ideations, to formulate a more fluid and radical identity that could flow in, around, and through imperial jurisdictions and ontological states of being. As Pérez Rosario further argues: “With her imagery of waterways, routes, and pathways, Burgos creates a dynamic subject that could not be fixed or contained, placing her among the historical vanguardias. She attempts to create escape routes as a liberatory strategy” (Pérez Rosario 3). For Burgos, the waters in and around Puerto Rico—the rivers, lakes, and oceans—with their opaque depths and ever shifting tides, levels, and currents, all resist rigid imperial mapping much more effectively than land.
The waters are not only her new escape route, but her new identity: “Burgos focuses on the river, using it to create a nomadic subject that, like water, cannot be contained” (Pérez Rosario 18). She does not so much attempt to establish a new identity by means of fluidity as much as establish fluidity as her identity. As Ivette López argues: “In this context, the ocean is a part of an extensive homeland”[9] (López 208). For Burgos, the surest way to liberate a new homeland is to keep it flowing, hidden in the waters, where it can never be pinned down or limited. This is a homeland that can spread beyond the strict physical and political boundaries of the island itself to seep across the seas into other lands, including those of the colonizer itself (as demonstrated by the significant Puerto Rican communities in the ports of Florida, New York, and New England).
As López argues, Burgos’ poetic project “is the construction of a space wherein distance is a fundamental coordinance. We should never forget that Burgos is a writer in transit from one island to another, one that rests finally in the island of Manhattan. Her poetry is also a transit from one world to another, a flow that represents a confluence of the river/ocean metaphors”[10] (López 207). With the ocean functioning as an extension of her homeland, she can likewise exceed, surround, and transcend the limits of the massive political power that currently contains Puerto Rico, to surround and exceed even the limits of the gargantuan United States. Moreover, these same waters flow out across the Atlantic to touch upon Ireland, where this same impulse towards flowing waters likewise undergirds the logic of “The waters and the wilds” in “The Stolen Child.”
Yet when his poem was first anthologized in 1888’s Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland, Yeats had amended the chorus to read “Come away oh human child/To the woods and waters wild” (emphasis added). This addition of “woods” is a momentary deemphasis of the waters, as he tries to keep the poem’s anti-imperialism grounded upon the land (in a move perhaps reminiscent of the Treintistas in Puerto Rico). Given his family history as a member of the landed gentry, Yeats perhaps felt an impulse to ground himself more into terra firma as the premier heritage of Ireland.
However, this edit is short-lived, as he appears to have intuitively determined that a politically liberated identity cannot be based solely upon the fixed and static, but in the ever-flowing. As Margaret Mills Harper argues, Yeats’s “need or longing is neither for erasure nor exposure, but for change” (Harper 66), and few things change as persistently as moving waters. Hence, when the poem was included in his first collection a year later, 1889’s Wanderings of Oison, he had already returned the wording to “the waters and the wild,” shifting the emphasis back towards the waters that, like Burgos’ river, cannot be contained, wherein the possibilities of identity and national formation can still flow, fluid and dreamlike.
Dreams are also an important structural feature within both poems’ wilderness spaces. The “slumbering trout” (l. 32) of Sleuth Wood’s lake receive “unquiet dreams” (l. 34) from the faeries, “While the world is full of troubles/and is anxious in its sleep” (ll. 22-23). These dreams are not mere idle flights of fancy, but are “unquiet dreams” induced by an “anxious” sleep, an anxiety induced by a world “full of troubles.” The dreams are as much an indictment against the world as they are an escape from the same—much like the wilderness itself. Burgos similarly pleads with the river to “confuse yourself in the flight of my bird fantasy/And leave a rose of water in my dreams”[11] (ll. 11-12), calling the Río Grande “a river in the poem of my first dreams”[12] (l. 18). “Confuse” (or “confound”) carries connotations of disruption—of authority, of maps, of imperial jurisdiction—in favor of the much wilder illogic of dreams. “My bird fantasy” in turn conjures up flights of escape into this same dreamscape.
In both poems, wilderness becomes involved in the realization of an alternative dream-world in opposition to the imperial one. These dream-like descriptions may seem to over-romanticize these wilderness spaces, save that romanticizing is the whole point. These places must appear so dreamlike, and hence so unreal, so that these places are not commandeered by the official reality these poets find so intolerable. For these wilderness spaces are both dreamscapes and verifiably real places: there is in fact a Río Grande de Loíza where Burgos played as a young girl, that runs through El Yunque National Forest and municipal Carolina, and drains into the Atlantic along the north-east shores of Puerto Rico; there is in fact a Sleuth Wood with a “lake” (Lough Gill) and “leafy island” (Isle of Innisfree) in County Sligo, Ireland that Yeats explored as a small boy. Romance for these two poets does not invent imaginary fantasy spaces, but rather reclaims real places from the current colonial regime; Sleuth Wood was part of the British Empire, and the Río Grande part of the Spanish and then U.S. empires, but in the poetry of Yeats and Burgos, these places are separated into an imaginary realm and thereby decolonized.
Both poems likewise utilize vocabularies of theft to implicitly foreground and critique the colonizer’s own theft of the homeland. Right from the first stanza of Yeats’s “The Stolen Child,” the faeries confess to hiding the “reddest stolen cherries” (l. 8). These faeries’ thievery—of the cherries, of the child—is necessary to steal back what was first robbed them.The Penal Acts and Enclosure Acts had long since commandeered the best land and resources of Ireland (the effects of which had its extreme expression in the Potato Famine), so the faeries could only respond in kind. Burgos, similarly, seeks to “hide you [the river] from the world and hide yourself in yourself” (l. 7), so as to ensure that the river, like the faeries’ lake, remains a space separate from a plundering world, a refuge from empire. The outside world, Burgos tells the river, “robbed you as a child” (l. 3)—the river itself had been irrigated to support the slave plantation system—but will rob the Río Grande no more now that the river has been reclaimed into this other-worldly romantic wilderness.
Easter Resurrection
Yeats similarly sought to reclaim County Sligo as a romantic wilderness—or at least, so he did while he was still an idealistic young man. By middle-age, Yeats’s belief in the efficacy of poetry and romance hardly extended beyond wishful thinking. W.H. Auden in his elegy to Yeats wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but Yeats already knew that. In his youth, Yeats “had absorbed…the idea of the imminence of a new epoch…inaugurated with revolutionary violence and war” (Beaumont 219), but by 1913, his youthful idealism had noticeably given way to middle-aged cynicism. In his poem “September 1913”, Yeats declares repeatedly, in a sort of weary mantra, that “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone/it is with O’Leary in his grave” (Yeats 108). Yeats on the eve of the Great War yearned for “Romantic Ireland” only with the dispiriting conviction that it could never return. But then, why would it? The totality of Ireland, wilderness and all, was by then completely mapped out and under the jurisdiction of a global imperial power, the largest in recorded history, with a Navy that reigned over the very seas and waters themselves. There was no more unmapped wilderness, no more liberating waters, no more magical realms: romantic Ireland was dead and gone.
Which is why the Easter Rising comes as such as a surprise to him; it was something new that came from nowhere. Before the Rising, he was “certain that they and I/But lived where motley is worn” amidst the “grey…houses” in a “casual comedy” (l. 5-14); but now he writes in “Easter 1916”: “All is changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born”. It was an armed rebellion held at the height of World War I to enforce the terms of the 1914 Homerule Act that had been indefinitely postponed by English Parliament. Initially the Rising was a resounding failure; some in fact argue it was an intentional failure. Amy Stock claimed that “The men who made the rising did so with the clear expectation of defeat” (Perloff 348) in some sort of symbolic Christ-like sacrifice—though with the added wrinkle that the sacrifice here actually worked.
In fact, Yeats spends the majority of “Easter 1916” simply illustrating how unexpected and surprising the revolt was. As self-anointed national bard, Yeats’s role had been “The displacement of political anger into cultural expression” as “a central tenet of [Irish] bardic nationalism from its beginning” (11), as Trumpener formulates it; but now, to Yeats’s consternation, the roles have switched, the flows have been reversed, as now Yeats must examine how cultural expression has now instead displaced into political anger. Rather than detailing events, Yeats instead observes how profoundly they surprised him; he confesses of the rebels in his midst, “I have passed with a nod of the head/or polite meaningless words…being certain that they and I/But lived where motley is worn” (l. 5-14).
But why would he suspect otherwise? In the endless monotony of Realism, the speaker is certain that nothing more than un-romantic “motley” could perpetuate. For Yeats in pre-uprising Ireland, everyone dutifully performs their programmed roles in this “casual comedy”: he catalogs how “This woman’s days were spent/In ignorant goodwill” (l. 17-18), while “This other man I had dreamed/A drunken, vainglorious lout” (l. 31-32). Everyone played the part this “casual comedy” demanded, and whether these parts called for being of “ignorant goodwill” or inversely “drunken, vainglorious,” mattered less than the fulfillment of their assigned roles. But in the Romance of the Easter Uprising, anything can happen—the utterly programmed can become “changed utterly,” so that even this lout “has resigned his part/In the casual comedy/He, too, has been changed in his turn” (l. 36-38). The assigned parts have been abandoned, the script thrown out, the actors have left their roles and exited the stage, because something real has happened. The formulaic comedy has suddenly transformed, not just into a tragedy, but a Romance.
The poem’s diction itself highlights this shift; as Kahn notes, “The thematic contrast is reflected in the difference between ‘vivid faces’ and ‘grey…houses’, ‘close of day’ and ‘fire at the club,’ ‘mocking tale or a gibe’ and ‘To please,’ ‘motley’ and ‘terrible beauty’” (50). All throughout this text, a “motley” thing is paired together with a Romantic one. Though the Uprising was initially only seen (in the words of Ezra Pound) as “merely as something to ‘give that country another set of anecdotes to keep it going another hundred years’…Out of fury at the government’s ineptness, a slow recognition began to stir: that what had happened might be…‘the beginning of Ireland’” (Foster 50). It is that “slow recognition” that is the focus of the poem, not the particulars of the event.
For Yeats, what happened matters less to him than the fact that something happened. This is “a Romanticism not consoling and formally traditional, as it has too often been described, but inherently transgressive” (Rothenberg and Robinson 2), as the “motley” and the expected have been radically disrupted. Yeats implicitly confesses how much larger the Uprising is than his poetic ability to contain it by refusing to recount the events in the content of the poem, as would have been his bardic prerogative. Hence, though the poem in its rhymed-quatrains has both the form and the traditional theme of a bardic poem marking great events, it purposefully lacks the content of a bardic work. […]
Beyond the vague moniker of “A terrible beauty” and a general allusion to “England may yet keep faith,” Yeats’s poem likewise strains to evince a field of reference for an event that no mere words of his can properly negotiate, so he calls attention to their frightening portentousness by hardly referring to them at all. Note that, outside a rollcall of the executed leaders in the final stanza, Yeats in “Easter 1916” goes into almost no detail concerning the actual events of the Easter Uprising. “MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse…are changed, changed utterly” (ll. 75-76, 79-80) is all the depth of detail that Yeats gets into (and their “changed utterly” could not be more macabre, as they literally and irreversibly change from living to dead).
Foster and Kiberd argue that these figures are foregrounded in this poem all throughout: the “woman at while” is Constance Markievic, the “This man had managed a school” is Patrick Pearse, “This other his helper and friend” is Thomas MacDonagh, and the “drunken vainglorious lout” is John MacBride; yet the genius of the poem is that one need not limit its characters to the executed, for the revolutionaries have transcended their limited roles to become potentially everyone in this Romance. Not just they, but we are the ones who have now resigned our parts in this casual comedy. All are changed, changed utterly.
Instead of a comedy, “A terrible beauty is born” (l. 15-16). The beauty is “terrible” not just because of its awful and bloody violence, but because it was so unexpected—if such a sudden “and then” as the Easter Uprising can occur, then anything can. The dreamlike logic of Romance took these figures with a vengeance, for “We know their dream; enough/to know they dreamed and are dead” (ll. 70-71). They were “bewildered” (l. 41) to death—bewildering being a word that, as Harper notes, shares the same root as “wild” (Harper 64). The “wilds” have been unleashed themselves at last upon the colonizers. A Romance has occurred, a “stone/to trouble the living stream” (l. 44). As Camel Jordan argues of this stone troubling the stream, “The stone appears to represent Ireland herself” (36), for “All the kings of Ireland, both pagan and Christian, were crowned upon this inauguration stone and their destiny was tied in with the magical powers of the stone” (37); that is, ancient, mythologized, Romantic Ireland, formerly dead and gone, is what has risen to trouble the living stream in its decreed, controlled channels (for waters will not be contained), to shatter Realism’s “illusion of logic and causality.”
Yeats found that Romance, now that it was alive and up close, to be just as threatening to him as it was to anyone. By contrast, thirty years earlier when he first published “The Stolen Child,” Yeats had merely hoped Romance would interrupt the dull, unending narrative of the domestic and quotidian, “the lowing/Of the calves on the warm hillside/Or the kettle on the hob…/Or see the brown mice bob/Round and round the oatmeal chest” (l. 44-49). Partly this was a function of Yeats unsure as to what Romantic Ireland would even look like: as Sa’id argues, “Like all the poets of decolonization Yeats struggles to announce the contours of an ‘imagined’ or ideal community” (18). Hence, when an actual Romance did occur, it did far more than just disrupt the domestic; following the Easter Uprising, all of Ireland was carried away in a current of turbulent political turmoil that continued through the end of the century, as surely as the stolen child was, only far more dramatically and violently than the faeries ever aspired to. The Easter Uprising exceeded all of Yeats’s Romantic enterprises.
In short order, the Rising launched Ireland into a storm of political change and civil wars that would result in autonomous homerule by 1922, followed by the secession of the majority of Ireland from the UK in 1937. As R.F. Foster notes, “The contempt WBY had expressed in ‘September 1913’ rang hollowly now. The ‘romantic Ireland’ of O’Leary’s sacrificial nationalism had returned from the grave” (Foster 49). This Rising could not have been more astounding to Yeats than if an actual dead body had risen from the tomb. This romantic resurrection even occurs on Easter; as Ó’Hare glosses it:
“It is no accident that it was on Christmas Day of 1915 that the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood chose Easter as the day…Ireland, after all, had endured the great Calvary of the potato blight and the subsequent starvation, so surely Ireland would now be ready for resurrection.” (Ó’Hare 97) (emphasis in the original)
Easter is the holy day which commemorates the sacrificial death and resurrection of Christ, an event that rendered even the ancient Apostles “terrified and affrighted” (Luke 24:37 KJV). In Yeats’s mind, the Easter Rising is an event as incredible and terrifying as the first Easter. As A.V.C. Schmidt comments, “Easter 1916…bears on its surface the shocked expression of a man who has been shot and doesn’t know if he is dead or alive” (Schmidt 328); but it is not just whether Yeats himself is dead or alive, but whether romantic Ireland is, the one of the Stolen Child—and what is most frightening to Yeats is not so much that he might now be dead, but that he might instead be alive.
It is a life brought about by sacrificial death: “MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse…are changed, changed utterly” (ll. 75-76, 79-80) he lists in roll-call, and their “changed utterly” could not be more macabre, as they literally and irreversibly change from living to dead. The dreamlike logic of romance took these figures with a vengeance, for “We know their dream; enough/to know they dreamed and are dead” (ll. 70-71). Yeats describes them as “bewildered” (l. 41) to death—bewildering being a word that, as Harper notes, shares the same root as “wild” (64). That is, the hidden “wilds” have at last unleashed themselves upon empire, to render the wilderness wild once more. A romance has occurred, a “stone/to trouble the living stream” (l. 44), as the waters likewise have their revenge. Not everything had been so mapped out and accounted for after all; the “waters and the wilds” had returned. This “bewildering” is part and parcel for how for how everything becomes wild again, and therefore becomes alive again.
El grito de Lares
The Easter Rising exceeded Yeats’s wildest ambitions. I suspect such an event would not have exceeded those of Burgos. Although her political stances also become more complex as she grew older, her later poetry (perhaps to compensate for her own increasing ambivalence) only became more polemical, indicating that she perhaps would not have stood in terrified awe at the “terrible beauty,” but enthusiastically participated in it. At least, so we can perhaps presume based upon “23 de septiembre,” a late-period occasional poem she wrote to commemorate the 1868 Puerto Rican uprising known as “el grito de Lares”, the Lares Shout.
She deploys a similar Easter vocabulary of resurrection and rebirth as Yeats to describe el grito: she writes, “alive in all the dead alive and untiring/that each day are reborn in sacred protests”[13] (ll. 17-18; emphasis added), as though the dead had resurrected to life by means of their sacrificial martyrdom. She repeats the word “alive”[14] no less than 15 times in this 43-line poem. The line “alive in the new man”[15] (l. 9) perhaps refers not only to the Marxist or Millennial new kind of man (as her numerous Bolshevik references over the course of her oeuvre might suggest), but of one literally dead, reanimated, newly returned to life.
Harris Feinsod notes that this poem was cited specifically by the FBI in their dossier on Burgos (they used it as evidence against her receiving a civil service appointment in Washington, D.C.). They read it as a “eulogy” for her contemporary Pedro Albizu Campos, recently imprisoned for his independentista activities. But Feinsod disputes the FBI’s reading, noting that, “[The poem] calls itself a song, not a eulogy, and rather than dedicate itself to the memory of Albizu Campos, it speaks to him in a repetitive apostrophic address. Instead of commemorating his carceral absence, it insists, through the sonorous compilation of epithets, on the presence he registers withal” (Feinsod 109). Her poem is not an observance of the dead but of the living; in fact, it insists that the dead are still living, that they are already resurrected.
I cannot help but note that the fact that “23 de septiembre” calls itself a song places Burgos in a similar bardic tradition as Yeats, who believed, as Ó’Hare argues, that his most nationalistic poems “would someday be sung by the common people” (Ó’Hare 100). There is a music to Yeats’s poetry, and Ó’Hare considers it “no accident” that “Easter 1916” refers to itself as a “Song”—nor, we might add, that “The Stolen Child” is itself structured in the verse-chorus form of a song. The song-like structure of “The Stolen Child” and “Easter 1916” together situates them (despite their printed nature) within an oral tradition, capable of being passed from person to person independent of official channels.
Burgos was apparently working within a similar oral tradition, in identifying certain of her poems as songs, though with this crucial distinction: in “23 de septiembre,” the focus is less on what happened, past tense, than on what is happening, present tense; less on the initial birth of the romance (“a terrible beauty is born”) than on the fact that the birthed romance is now alive and kicking (“holy and forever alive”). Like Yeats and his roll-call of the Easter rebels, she renders national martyrs out of Puerto Rican militants, celebrating “all the sacred martyred bodies/who fell calling and kissing a star”[16] (l. 27-28).
She runs through a similar martyred roll-call as Yeats does in “Easter 1916,” writing of “the sublime battle cries of Feliú and Suárez Díaz…in the unburied blood of Beauchamp and Rosado…alive in Albizu Campos, solitary among suns/who walks from himself to the world that awaits him/23rd of September, holy and forever alive”[17] (ll. 19-41). For Burgos, the Lares Shout becomes a sort of Second Coming that does not (as in Yeats’s poem of the same name) “slouch towards Bethlehem” as “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (Yeats 187), but instead brings with it a righteous judgment upon the wicked and a deliverance of the Earth to the oppressed. Yeats had been criticized by Maud Gonne for his ambivalence concerning the Easter Rising in his poem; no such ambivalence appears in “23 de septiembre.”
New Furrows
However, there is in reality no true Burgos equivalent to “Easter 1916”; “23 de septiembre” does not memorialize any contemporaneous event, but a failed uprising from 1868, an occurrence as influential yet ultimately irrelevant to her as was the failed Fennian Revolt of 1867 to Yeats.
Yet if “Easter 1916” lacks a true equivalent in Burgos’ oeuvre, its “terrible beauty” is still anticipated in her “Río Grande de Loíza,” which possesses the latent revolutionary potential that “bewildered” elderly Yeats in “Easter 1916.” For even “The Stolen Child” did not foresee the full ramifications of the “terrible beauty”—the stolen child’s lake puts one to sleep, what with its “drowsy water-rats” (l. 5) and “slumbering trout” (l. 32). Burgos’s Río Grande, by contrast, wakes one up: “in a beautiful romance/you awoke my soul and kissed my body”[18] (l. 22), returning one to life, just as the Lares Shout rendered one “holy and forever alive”. In “Río Grande,” she writes, “Life surprised me”[19] (l. 19), for as Frye notes, it is not life but only imagination that is “rigidly conventionalized” (36); life itself is what parallels Romance’s series of “and thens” that surprise and astonish, like the “astonished voices in the mouth of the wind”[20] (l. 8).
The Easter Rising had also surprised Yeats, except that Burgos apparently looks forward to the surprise as opposed to reels from it. She declares, “My pale desires come down your craggy hills/To find new furrows”[21] (l. 15-16), establishing a theme of renovation, refreshment, and rejuvenation of the “pale”[22] and the “craggy”[23], as surely as the Easter Rising renovated the “motley” and the “grey”. The river “bewilders,” makes wild, makes alive.“Who knows”[24] she twice asks in this poem; each of these “who knows” is made in connection to some “far Mediterranean shore”[25] and “far land”[26] (ll. 25-27), as the river carries her along the ever-flowing waters to distant locales far from the jurisdiction of the colonizer. The river not only helps her to find new places—to “find new furrows”—but also helps to create new ones as well, “spilling to open new furrows”[27] (l. 28).
The wilds are not only secured there in the romance of the river, but spill out beyond its borders to transform and “bewilder” the world beyond it, to “change all, change utterly.” The “waters and the wilds,” in this model, are not only a place of escape for Burgos, but a new platform from which to launch a potential revolution. Overall, her poem seeks to resurrect a romantic Puerto Rico than can liberate its “enslaved people”[28] (l. 44).
A Terrible Beauty is [Still]born
One could potentially make the argument that Burgos did actually help to create a romance, of sorts. After years of her fanning the flames of the pro-independence movement, in 1948 a pair of Puerto Rican nationalists attempted an assassination of Harry S. Truman. Like the Easter revolutionaries, they failed miserably; they never even got close to the U.S. President, and were summarily executed. Yet this foiled plot, far from bringing down violent repercussions upon the island, surprisingly had the inverse effect: it set off a series of events that spurred some modest economic development, a degree of autonomous home rule, and eventually transforming Puerto Rico by century’s end from the weakest to the strongest economy in the Caribbean—relatively speaking, anyways.
Those gains always remained precarious; even before Hurricane Maria devastated the island’s infrastructure in September 2017, Puerto Rico had less than half the GDP of Mississippi, a significant debt crisis, crumbling infrastructure, a polarized political climate split between the pro-U.S. PNP party, autonomous home-rule PPD party, a small and increasingly irrelevant cadre of independentistas, and a declining population due to massive emigration. Puerto Rico’s “terrible beauty” was conceived but never born; their “casual comedy” is still in play.
Likewise Burgos, rather than dying some revolutionary martyr like the many she sang about, instead passed away in obscurity in New York City in 1953. Her friends would later track down her pauper’s grave to give her a proper burial in her native Carolina, Puerto Rico, where there is a monument erected in her honor and a bridge named for her that spans the Río Grande de Loíza. Yeats also died abroad (in France) in 1939, and his remains were likewise repatriated and buried discreetly in County Sligo, the land of the stolen child.
Yet at the time of his death, there was little doubt concerning Yeats’s canonical status, at least in the Anglosphere. Today entire shelves of U.S. university libraries are filled with Yeats scholarship and commentary. Burgos by contrast, even amidst her current critical resurgence, is scarcely celebrated outside of Caribbean studies; when she does get anthologized, it is typically as a “third world feminist of color”—which, while also important, still problematically elides her status as a national poet.
Possibly this canonical elision is a function of the fact that Puerto Rico, unlike literally every other Latin American country, has never enjoyed full political independence. Perhaps if Puerto Rico ever enjoys, say, a Boricua revival on par with the old Celtic revival, then its own poets will receive their full due in the Western literary canon. But then again, I suspect Burgos would be suspicious of a canonization that would defang her politically as it often has Yeats. In the meantime, Burgos is left still awaiting Yeats’s “terrible beauty,” for the impossible romance, an event that feels even less likely to occur in Puerto Rico in 2017 than was the Easter Rising in 1916. She was the last romantic.
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[1] Douglas Archibald clear back in 1984, for example, tested Yeats’ romantic bona fides through a comparison of his poem “A Prayer for My Daughter” against Coleridge’s similar “Frost at Midnight”, in a book chapter significantly entitled “The Last Romantic: Yeats and Coleridge.” More recently in 2010, A.V.C. Schmidt’s “Texture and Meaning in Shelley, Keats, and Yeats” embeds Yeats in the English Romantic tradition, while in 2012 David Toh Kusi performs an engaging ecocritical comparison between Yeats and Wordsworth in “Traditional Pieties and Transcendental Realities in William Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats: An Eco-Spiritual and Cultural Revaluation.”
[2] “‘¿De dónde sale usted?’ Me restalló una lección: ‘Como usted; de la nada’”. Gareth Price translation.
[3] “Campesino noble/tu tragedia tiene solo una respueta:/afila tu azada/afeita el machete/y temple tu alma”.
[4] “¡Ya no somos esclavos!/Anunciemos el grito del presente/ ¡Somos puñas cerrados!”
[5] “deja que mi alma se pierda en tus riachuelos”
[6] “el que de mí se sale/por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo”.
[7] “Llanto grande/El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños”.
[8] “fui tuya mil veces”
[9] “En ese contexto el mar es parte de la patria dilatada”. Translation my own.
[10] “es la construcción de un espacio en el que la distancia es coordenada fundamental. No olvidemos que Burgos es una escritora en tránsito de una isla a otra, que recala finalmente en Manhattan. Su poesía es también ese transitar de un mundo a otro, fluir que se representa en la confluencia de las metáforas río/mar”. Translation my own.
[11] “confúndete en el vuelo de mi ave fantasia/y déjame una rosa de agua en mis ensueños”
[12] “un río en el poema de mis primeros sueños”
[13] “vivo en todos los muertos vivos e inagotables/que cada día renacen en sagradas protestas”
[14] “vivo”
[15] “vivo en el hombre nuevo”
[16] “todos los sagrados martirizados cuerpos/que cayeron llamando y besando a una estrella”
[17] “los gritos sublimes de Feliú y Suárez Diaz…en la sangre sin tumbas de Beauchamp y Rosada…vivo en Albizu Campos, solitario entre soles/que desde sí camina al mundo que lo espera/23 de septiembre, santo y por siempre vivo”
[18] “en un bello romance/me despertaste el alma y me besaste el cuerpo”
[19] “Me sorprendió la vida”
[20] “voces de asombro en la boca del viento”
[21] “contigo se bajaron desde las rudas cuestas/a buscar nuevos surcos, mis pálidos anhelos”
[22] “pálido”
[23] “la ruda”
[24] “Quién sabe”
[25] “remoto pais mediterráneo”
[26] “tierra lejana”
[27] “buscar nuevos surcos”
[28] “esclavo pueblo”