100 Poems to Break Your Heart
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Storni’s last poem maintains the eight- and six-line structure of a Petrarchan sonnet, which she divides into two quatrains and two tercets. Like César Vallejo’s surreal sonnet “Black Stone Lying on a White Stone,” this poem is written in fourteen hendecasyllabic lines. Storni’s use of expressive punctuation forces a series of stops and starts as the poem unfolds, continually interrupting the flow of the basic eleven-syllable line, just as Vallejo’s constant shifts in tense disrupt time within and between lines. Though adhering to a conventional stanzaic form and meter, Storni chose not to use rhyme in her sonnet; she thereby creates a feeling of spontaneity and freedom within the prescribed form.
“I’m Going to Sleep” is a poem of leave-taking. The title announces the speaker’s intention to “go to sleep,” by which she means the final sleep, death. The connection between sleep and death goes back to antiquity. In Greek mythology Hypnos, the god of sleep, and Thanatos, the god of death, were said to be children of Nyx, the goddess of night. The Spanish word cementerio (“cemetery”) derives from Greek (koimeterion) and Latin (koemeteriun) words for “sleeping place,” from koiman, “to put to sleep,” and from keimai, “I lie down.” As in many Romantic poems, Storni’s speaker conflates sleep and death; however, here she literalizes the connection to a remarkable degree by depicting an oddly cozy bedroom scene, where a tender nursemaid will put her to bed for her final sleep.
The poem begins with three images that isolate aspects of an implied person—“teeth,” “bonnet,” and “hands”—and modifies each with an image from nature—“flowers,” “dew,” and “grass.” This trio of strange juxtapositions instantly links the as-yet-unnamed person to the pastoral. In the middle of the second line we learn that these objects stand in for, and characterize, an addressee, the “you” of the poem, whom the speaker envisions as a beloved nursemaid. She instructs this woman to prepare a bed for her; it has, however, “earthen sheets” and a “quilt of weeded moss,” which suggest a bed in the ground, or a grave. Because her nursemaid is turning down her bed, the “I” assumes the role of a child, the nurse her caretaker.
After saying that she’s “going to sleep,” the speaker, like a child afraid of the dark, asks the nursemaid to tuck her in and leave a lamp on the headboard. In the next line she mentions another lighting option—“a constellation; whichever you like.” Here the poem casually conflates the human and the cosmic, as if the pastoral nursemaid also has supernatural powers and can wield an entire constellation as easily as a lamp, as she prefers; “both are fine.” Notice this quatrain’s unusual use of semicolons, which create a longer pause than commas do, and isolate each phrase, for emphasis. The octave ends with an additional request: for the nursemaid to “lower the light a little,” as if the speaker wants the room darker so she can fall asleep.
The sestet signals a shift in the tone and the action of the poem. The speaker says, “Leave me alone,” as though she’s ready to fall asleep by herself. A colon follows the word “alone,” indicating another longer pause, and then the imperative (“tuck me in,” “lower the light”) switches to the declarative (“you hear buds bursting open . . .”). The “buds bursting open” evoke shoots emerging from the earthy bed and allude to the flowering of new life, perhaps the afterlife.
The ellipsis at the end of this line again signifies a break in time, a “bursting open” of the poem into what appears to be a switch in point of view. In the next two and a half lines the nurse seems to be addressing the speaker in her bed. As if to comfort a child, the nurse says, “An unearthly foot rocks you from above / and a bird sketches you a few beats // so you’ll forget . . .” Just as the nurse can put a constellation on the headboard, she can also rock the “earthen” bed with an “unearthly foot.” Storni combines a verb, traza, associated with visual art and meaning “trace or draw,” with a musical term, compases, meaning “beats or measures,” to evoke the arcs and the rhythm of a bird’s wings in flight, which will lull the sleeper into forgetfulness.
After another ellipsis in the first line of the final stanza, the point of view seems to switch back to the speaker, who thanks the nursemaid for her soothing words. One last thing occurs to her: “Ah, un encargo” (“Oh, a favor:”). She tells the nursemaid that “if he calls again on the phone / tell him not to insist, that I’ve gone . . .” There’s an informal feeling in this last request, as if the speaker has just gone out for a while. It’s impossible to know the identity of this “he” who suddenly appears at the end of the poem—he could be a specific man or anyone who might call, even life itself—but whoever he is, she wants him to stop insisting, because she has left for good. The sestet ends with another ellipsis as the poem trails off and opens out in the same way that César Vallejo’s self-elegy does.
Alfonsina Storni knew when she wrote this poem that she was going to sleep for the last time. Shortly after writing and sending it, she walked into the Atlantic Ocean at Mar de Plata. This strangely peaceful anti-sonnet, which views death as an earthly sleep ushered in by a loving nursemaid, both worldly and otherworldly, turned out to be a tenderly felt and carefully composed suicide note.
Julia de Burgos
* * *
“To Julia de Burgos”
(1938)
Julia de Burgos was a feminist, a civil rights activist, a Puerto Rican independentista, and a committed internationalist in the first half of the twentieth century. She was also a poet of the Americas influenced by Walt Whitman’s inclusive free-verse catalogs, Pablo Neruda’s passionate early love songs, which she memorized, and Alfonsina Storni’s unabashed erotic poems. She referenced the title of Miguel de Unamuno’s famous philosophical tract Del sentimiento trágico de la vida to describe Storni’s “profundity of life and tragic sense of life,” which also describes de Burgos’s passionate sense of herself as a writer.
De Burgos splits herself off into two parts in her highly self-conscious and self-accusing poem “To Julia de Burgos” (“A Julia de Burgos”), which she published in Puerto Rico in 1938. She was twenty-four years old.
To Julia de Burgos
Already people are muttering that I am your enemy
because they say that in verse I give the world your I.
* * *
They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.
What rises in my poems isn’t your voice; it’s my voice,
because you are the trappings and I am the essence;
and the deepest chasm lies between the two.
* * *
You are a cold doll of the social lie,
and I, the virile spark of human truth.
* * *
You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies, not I;
who undress my heart in all my poems.
* * *
You are like your world, selfish; not I;
who risk everything to be what I am.
* * *
You are merely the sickly matronly lady;
not I; I am life, strength, woman.
* * *
You are your husband’s, your master’s; not I;
I’m nobody’s, or everybody’s, because to all, to all,
I give myself in my pure feeling and my thinking.
* * *
You ripple your hair and paint yourself; not I;
the wind ripples me; the sun paints me.
* * *
You are a domestic lady, resigned, submissive,
tied to the prejudices of men; not I;
I am Rocinante running rampant
following horizons of God’s justice.
* * *
You’re not in charge of yourself; everyone’s in charge
of you; your husband, your parents, your relatives,
the priest, the couturier, the theater, the club,
the car, the jewels, the banquet, the champagne,
heaven and hell, and the what-will-they-say social.
* * *
As for me, no, only my heart is in charge in me,
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sp; only my thought; the one in charge in me is I.
* * *
You, flower of aristocracy; and I, flower of the village.
You have everything in you and you owe it to everyone,
while I, my nothing I owe to no one.
* * *
You, stuck to the static ancestral dividend,
and I, a one in the sum of the social denominator,
we are the duel to the death that fatally approaches.
* * *
When the multitudes run riotous
leaving behind ashes of burnt-out injustices,
and when the multitudes run with the torch
of the seven virtues, against the seven sins,
against you, and against all the unjust and the inhumane,
I will be among them with the torch in my hand.
(Translated by Lauren K. Watel)
The title of this poem, “To Julia de Burgos,” immediately signals that the poet is writing to herself, as in a letter, a memo, or an editorial. The poem begins by jumping into the scenario that requires this self-address: “Already people are muttering that I am your enemy / because they say that in verse I give the world your I.” This sets out the basic terms of the poem’s argument, that the writer is seen as her own enemy by giving away her “I” in her poetry. De Burgos intentionally ends this initial couplet with the words tu yo, which mean both “your I” and “you I.” The rest of the poem will go on to dramatize the conflict between the “you” and the “I.”
The next line—“They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.”—is composed of two short declarative sentences. Addressing herself by name twice, as if chastising herself for believing that lie, she protests that the people muttering about her are wrong. She goes on to explain that “What rises in my poems isn’t your voice; it’s my voice.” In this line she clarifies that the “I” is the speaker in her poems, her poet-self, and the “you” is another self. The next line summarizes the difference between these two selves: the “you” is represented by “the trappings,” the “I” by “the essence.” By the fifth line of the poem we understand that on the most basic level she considers the “you” superficial, the “I” profound. To underscore the opposition between them, de Burgos ends the quatrain asserting that “the deepest chasm lies between the two.”
The poem then goes on to elaborate on the opposition between the “I” and the “you.” After the second stanza each subsequent unrhyming stanza consists of one sentence that adds to the terms of this contrast. The third stanza poses “you” as “a cold doll of the social lie” and “I” as “the virile spark of human truth,” making it explicit that the “you” stands for the compromised societal self, while the “I” represents the poetic self who is committed to truth. Given the terms of this comparison, a “cold doll” and a “virile spark,” one begins to see “To Julia de Burgos” as a radically gendered poem. Each subsequent stanza depicts the conflict between the “you” of the social persona, seen as variously trapped and disempowered by feminine passivity and conventional feminine roles, and the “I” of the writer persona, seen as aligned with Romantic ideals beyond the stereotypically feminine, such as virility, purity of thought, strong womanhood, the natural world, and struggles for justice.
As the high rhetorical language and stark oppositions of each stanza begin to accumulate, the sense of a fierce struggle between two irreconcilable selves becomes more and more apparent. The “I” consistently criticizes and rejects her social identity as a performance of womanhood, “honey of courtesan hypocrisies,” while she valorizes her writer identity, the truer, freer self that is expressed in her poems. The poem categorizes the “you” as deceitful, selfish, weak, vain, and the “I” as honest, self-affirming, strong, attuned to nature. The “I” seems disgusted by her submissive domesticity and compares her artistic self to Don Quixote’s legendary horse, Rocinante, who has unseated his rider and is now “running rampant” on the hunt for justice. There is an inside joke here, since when de Burgos was growing up, Rocinante was the name of her father’s horse; her own horse, Nacional, goes unmentioned. The poem returns repeatedly to the issue of control, of ownership of the female self. Whereas the “you” belongs to a husband, a master, the “I” belongs to nobody. One might even say that the speaker conceives of the “you” as her body, her physical self, which must operate in the social world and submit to control by external forces, which she enumerates in a list:
You’re not in charge of yourself; everyone’s in charge
of you; your husband, your parents, your relatives,
the priest, the couturier, the theater, the club,
the car, the jewels, the banquet, the champagne,
heaven and hell, and the what-will-they-say social.
In contrast, the speaker prizes her inner spirit, the “I” of her own feeling and mind, the lyric “I” of the poem, which can operate in the world of the imagination without restrictions and must submit to no one: “As for me, no, only my heart is in charge in me, / only my thought; the one in charge in me is I.”
As the poem draws to a close, de Burgos’s appraisal of bourgeois manners, trappings, and values expands to a broader commentary on class and wealth inequality. She aligns the “you” of the self with the aristocracy, the “I” with the village. In the penultimate stanza she continues this economic critique, envisioning herself as a society of one, split between “You, stuck to the static ancestral dividend, / and I, a one in the sum of the social denominator.” She is all too aware that a revolution, a “duel to the death,” is coming between these opposing forces. As if to signal formally the culmination of her argument, in the original Spanish de Burgos triple-rhymes this tercet. The final six-line stanza, which in Spanish consists of three rhyming couplets, ends on a vision of this revolution, in which the “multitudes run riotous / leaving behind ashes of burnt-out injustices.” “You” makes her last appearance in the penultimate line, an object of the multitudes’ wrath, associated with “all the unjust and the inhumane.” The “I” in the last line, conversely, stands in their midst, like the Statue of Liberty, with a torch in her hand.
What is most powerful, even revolutionary, about de Burgos’s poem is its unflinching probing of the self, which is imagined as a battleground; the conflict splits the writer in two while offering a systematic social critique. This ingenious poetic move influenced many Spanish-language poems, including Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges and I” (“Borges y yo,” 1957) and Jaime de Biedma’s “Against Jaime Gil de Biedma” (“Contra Jaime Gil de Biedma,” 1968). Vanessa Pérez Rosario points out that similar confrontations between warring aspects of the self will appear in Gabriela Mistral’s “The Other” (“La otra,” 1954), Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind” (1960), and Sylvia Plath’s “Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices” (1962). Julia de Burgos, a fierce innovator, provided a model for incisive feminist self-critique that forcefully equates the personal with the political.
Anna Akhmatova
* * *
“In Memory of M. B.”
(1940)
This elegy by Anna Akhmatova honors the memory of Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian doctor turned writer who composed plays, fiction, nonfiction, and various forms of journalism. He is most famous for his comic masterpiece The Master and Margarita, a fantastical modernist novel about, among other things, the devil’s visit to the Soviet Union. Akhmatova wrote “In Memory of M. B.” just after Bulgakov’s death in March 1940, during the nightmares of the Stalinist terror. The poem is part of the elegiac cycle “Wreath to the Dead” (1938–61):
In Memory of M. B.
Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and staye
d with her alone.
Now you’re gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have believed that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday, it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.
(Translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward)