The fatal

Rubén Darío

Blessed is the tree that is barely sensitive,

and the harder the stone, because it no longer feels,

Well, there is no greater pain than the pain of being alive,

there is no greater sorrow than conscious life.

To be, and to know nothing, and to be without a certain direction,

and the fear of having been and a future terror...

And the certain fright of being dead tomorrow,

and suffer for life and for the shadow and for

what we do not know and barely suspect,

and the flesh that tempts with its fresh clusters
and the grave that awaits with its funereal branches,
and not knowing where we are going,

we don't know where we come from...!

Biographical Review of the Author

The poet Rubén Darío, whose real name was Félix Rubén García Sarmiento, was born
and died in Nicaragua (1867-1916). He was first a journalist and then a diplomat, for
who traveled extensively through Europe and America. He was the foremost representative of modernism.
literary in the Spanish language and is, possibly, the poet with the greatest and most enduring
influence on 20th century poetry in the Hispanic sphere.
Rubén Darío was strongly influenced by the French romantics like Victor
Hugo and Alfred de Musset, the Parnassians like Leconte de Lisle and José María
Heredia; and symbolists like Paul Verlaine. This ideological confluence led him to have
a new and brilliant style, giving a new musicality to traditional rhythms
castellanos. His main works are: Azul... (1888), Profane Proses (1896) and Songs
of life and hope (1905).

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Literary current of the author
It is difficult to give a concrete definition of the movement to which Darío belonged.
first, because this movement did not leave any manifesto and second, because it can be
seeing within its representatives the existence of broadly divergent styles. A
Despite this, scholars define Modernism from two fundamental positions:
The most restrictive one considers it a literary movement that developed between
1888 and 1910.
The broadest view considers that modernism is not just a literary movement,
it was a whole era and the attitude that served as its foundation.

Whether one stance or another is adopted, and despite this divergence of styles, there exist
common characteristics that allow us to group these artists within the
modernist movement such as:
The rejection of everyday reality, from which the writer can escape in the
time or in space.
An aristocratic attitude and a certain preciosity in style, as well as the
search for formal perfection that is appreciated not without some individualism.
Alternation between the melancholic tone and vitality.
Adjective formation with a predominance of color and with images related to everyone
the senses, as well as with the musicality produced by the abuse of alliteration,
the marked rhythms and the use of synesthesia.
The use of large classical stanzas as variations on the molds
metrics, using medieval verses such as the Alexandrine, the dodecasyllable and the
heptasyllable; with contributions of new variations to the sonnet.
The use of mythology and sensualism.
A lexical renewal with the use of Hellenisms, cultured terms, and Gallicisms, which does not
I sought not so much precision but the prestige or rarity of the word.

Metric and stylistic analysis of the poem

The poem 'Lo Fatal' belongs to the major work of Rubén Darío 'Cantos de vida y...'
Hope (1905). This work is from the author's final stage where he reaches his peak.
of his literary maturity and in which his anguish before the approaching begins to manifest itself.
of old age and death. The features of modernism that characterized its first stage
and that are observed in poems like Sonatina, are tempered here to give way to a tone
more reflective and intimate. The poet who took refuge in luxury, dream, the ideal, the
exoticism and the aristocratic, can no longer deny a reality that hurts and distresses him.

The poem metrically has a characteristic structure of formal renewal that

Darío contributed to poetry in Spanish. It is composed of thirteen verses distributed in three
stanzas
The first two stanzas are serventesios of alexandrine verses of major art with rhyme.
consonant (ABAB) and alternate (CDCD), respectively. The last stanza is another
major art servant, but with the particularity that the last verse, instead of

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being an Alexandrine, it is divided into two verses: one enea-syllable (major art) and a
heptasyllable (minor art). This hemistich divides this stanza into a tercet (EFE) and
a paired rhyme (Ef).
About this curious structure, the famous Argentine literary critic, Amado commented.
Alonso, the following: "Rubén has not been pleased here with that perfection either.
rhetoric of rhythm that makes the march of many of its poems wonders of
regularity and symmetry. [...] From the fifth verse to the end there is a pure
enumeration of a type more declamatory. Or better, clamorous, than metric. And right there
the poem ends as if it never ended, without formally concluding or enclosing its meaning.
enumeration
Rubén Darío develops the topic in a way that we could almost qualify as essayistic.
the human fragility in the face of the fatality of a destiny where alongside pleasure is
suffering and death.
In the first stanza, it introduces a contrast between the ideas that capacity
of consciousness and feeling is equal to pain versus unconsciousness and lack of
sensitivity as happiness. This is expressed through personification and epithets.
Blessed is the tree that is barely sensitive, / and even more so the
hard stone, because it no longer feels. One can notice here an alliteration of the Sen
blessed, barely, sensitive, but, this, feels, that plays with the sibilant sound to
suggest the silence of not feeling. There is also a gradation between the barely of
tree and elya do not feel the stone. The two verses in which this part concludes allude
to the suffering of being alive (feeling) and being aware (not being able to ignore the pain). From
in such a way that consciousness, that attribute which modernity from Descartes
it was considered the center of identity and dominance in man, now it turns against
He. This idea is expressed through the hyperboles that are evident in the use of
expressions like larger and greater sorrow.
In the second stanza of the poem, what was anticipated in the first stanza is explained. The
the poetic I unfolds the content of this condition that goes against the reality of the
human and connecting it with the erratic nature of existence that escapes the dominion of the
man: To be, and to know nothing, and to be without a certain course, achieving this through a
hyperbole and a play of assonances of the know-how of the Senserysaber. The text now contrasts
past and future in a connotatively negative way, using more hyperboles
using the conjunction and as an anaphora and alliteration: and the fear of having been and a
future terror...with an intensification that leads to fearterror. Man is
caught between what he has done in his past and what he cannot know about his future
future. This last point is explained in the last two verses of the stanza in a vision with
nihilistic shades of existence expressed through a hyperbole: And the guaranteed horror
of being dead tomorrow, / and suffering for life and for the shadow and for, in which it uses
also the resource of zeugma that unites elements syntactically and semantically
incongruent.
Here the only enjambment present in the poem takes center stage, which connects the
last verse of the second stanza with the first of the third and mark their connection, to
make the verse cuts and syntactic structure not match in a masterful use of the

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esticomitia (coincidence of the metric pause and the syntactic-semantic pause).
Resuming the negative vision of human life by emphasizing what is not
we know and barely suspect. In the next two verses, he continues to juxtapose
ideas: and the meat that tempts with its fresh clusters / and the grave that awaits with its
funeral wreaths. This contrast is based on the antithesis flesh-tomb,
funeral fresco and bunches-branches.

Finally, at the end of the poem, we can see the vision of a man trapped between
two voids or questions, since human existence appears enclosed between the
ignorance of the origin that expresses the crisis of the idea of God in modernity and the
ignorance of the final destiny beyond death.

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REFERENCES

− Micó, J. M. [MOOC UPF Channel]. (2017, November 17). 5.4- "The Fatal"
[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=xn20SUgVIsQ

González Maestro, J. [Jesús G. Maestro]. (2017, April 25). Interpretation of

fatal poem by Rubén Darío from the Critique of Literary Reason [Archive of
video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63V-E1cCh6s

− Franco, J. (1975). History of Hispano-American literature from the

independence. Retrieved from https://archive.org

− Poetic Analysis (n.d.). Retrieved from

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%20Po_tico.pdf

− Colon Marist School of Huelva. (n.d.). Notes on Poetics. Retrieved from

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ethics.pdf

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