Rosinante to the Road Again Part 10

Cold Soria, clear Soria, key of the outlands, with the warrior castle in ruins beside the Duero, and the stiff old walls, and the blackened houses.

Dead city of barons and soldiers and huntsmen, whose portals bear the shields of a hundred hidalgos; city of hungry greyhounds, of lean greyhounds that swarm among the dirty lanes and howl at midnight when the crows caw.

Cold Soria! The clock of the Lawcourts has struck one.

Soria, city of Castile, so beautiful under the moon.

IX

AT A FRIEND'S BURIAL

They put him away in the earth a horrible July afternoon under a sun of fire.

A step from the open grave grew roses with rotting petals among geraniums of bitter fragrance, red-flowered. The sky a pale blue. A wind hard and dry.

Hanging on the thick ropes, the two gravediggers let the coffin heavily down into the grave.

It struck the bottom with a sharp sound, solemnly, in the silence.

The sound of a coffin striking the earth is something unutterably solemn.

The heavy clods broke into dust over the black coffin.

A white mist of dust rose in the air out of the deep grave.

And you, without a shadow now, sleep.

Long peace to your bones.

For all time you sleep a tranquil and a real sleep.

X

THE IBERIAN G.o.d

Like the cross-bowman, the gambler in the song, the Iberian had an arrow for his G.o.d when he shattered the grain with hail and ruined the fruits of autumn; and a gloria when he fattened the barley and the oats that were to make bread to-morrow.

"G.o.d of ruin, I worship because I wait and because I fear.

I bend in prayer to the earth a blasphemous heart.

"Lord, through whom I s.n.a.t.c.h my bread with pain, I know your strength, I know my slavery.

Lord of the clouds in the east that trample the country-side, of dry autumns and late frosts and of the blasts of heat that scorch the harvests!

"Lord of the iris in the green meadows where the sheep graze, Lord of the fruit the worms gnaw and of the hut the whirlwind shatters, your breath gives life to the fire in the hearth, your warmth ripens the tawny grain, and your holy hand, St. John's eve, hardens the stone of the green olive.

"Lord of riches and poverty, Of fortune and mishap, who gives to the rich luck and idleness, and pain and hope to the poor!

"Lord, Lord, in the inconstant wheel of the year I have sown my sowing that has an equal chance with the coins of a gambler sown on the gambling-table!

"Lord, a father to-day, though stained with yesterday's blood, two-faced of love and vengeance, to you, dice cast into the wind, goes my prayer, blasphemy and praise!"

This man who insults G.o.d in his altars, without more care of the frown of fate, also dreamed of paths across the seas and said: "It is G.o.d who walks upon the waters."

Is it not he who put G.o.d above war, beyond fate, beyond the earth, beyond the sea and death?

Did he not give the greenest bough of the dark-green Iberian oak for G.o.d's holy bonfire, and for love flame one with G.o.d?

But to-day ... What does a day matter?

for the new household G.o.ds there are plains in forest shade and green boughs in the old oak-woods.

Though long the land waits for the curved plough to open the first furrow, there is sowing for G.o.d's grain under thistles and burdocks and nettles.

What does a day matter? Yesterday waits for to-morrow, to-morrow for infinity; men of Spain, neither is the past dead, nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written.

Who has seen the face of the Iberian G.o.d?

I wait for the Iberian man who with strong hands will carve out of Castilian oak The parched G.o.d of the grey land.

_XII: A Catalan Poet_

_It is time for sailing; the swallow has come chattering and the mellow west wind; the meadows are already in bloom; the sea is silent and the waves the rough winds pummeled. Up anchors and loose the hawsers, sailor, set every st.i.tch of canvas. This I, Priapos the harbor G.o.d, command you, man, that you may sail for all manner of ladings._ (_Leonidas in the Greek Anthology._)

Catalonia like Greece is a country of mountains and harbors, where the farmers and herdsmen of the hills can hear in the morning the creak of oars and the crackling of cordage as the great booms of the wing-shaped sails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts of the fishermen's boats. Barcelona with its fine harbor nestling under the towering slopes of Montjuic has been a trading city since most ancient times. In the middle ages the fleets of its stocky merchants were the economic scaffolding which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the great sea kingdom of the Aragonese. To this day you can find on old buildings the arms of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in Mallorca and Manorca and Ibiza and Sardinia and Sicily and Naples. It follows that when Catalonia begins to reemerge as a nucleus of national consciousness after nearly four centuries of subjection to Castile, poets speaking Catalan, writing Catalan, shall be poets of the mountains and of the sea.

Yet this time the motor force is not the sailing of white argosies towards the east. It is textile mills, stable, motionless, drawing about them muddled populations, raw towns, fattening to new arrogance the descendants of those stubborn burghers who gave the kings of Aragon and of Castile such vexing moments. (There's a story of one king who was so chagrined by the tight-pursed contrariness of the Cortes of Barcelona that he died of a broken heart in full parliament a.s.sembled.) This growth of industry during the last century, coupled with the reawakening of the whole Mediterranean, took form politically in the Catalan movement for secession from Spain, and in literature in the resurrection of Catalan thought and Catalan language.

Naturally the first generation was not interested in the manufactures that were the dynamo that generated the ferment of their lives. They had first to state the emotions of the mountains and the sea and of ancient heroic stories that had been bottled up in their race during centuries of inexpressiveness. For another generation perhaps the symbols will be the cluck of oiled cogs, the whirring of looms, the dragon forms of smoke spewed out of tall chimneys, and the substance will be the painful struggle for freedom, for sunnier, richer life of the huddled mobs of the slaves of the machines. For the first men conscious of their status as Catalans the striving was to make permanent their individual lives in terms of political liberty, of the mist-capped mountains and the changing sea.

Of this first generation was Juan Maragall who died in 1912, five years after the shooting of Ferrer, after a life spent almost entirely in Barcelona writing for newspapers,--as far as one can gather, a completely peaceful well-married existence, punctuated by a certain amount of political agitation in the cause of the independence of Catalonia, the life of a placid and recognized literary figure; "_un maitre_" the French would have called him.

Perhaps six centuries before, in Palma de Mallorca, a young n.o.bleman, a poet, a skilled player on the lute had stood tiptoe for attainment before the high-born and very stately lady he had courted through many moonlight nights, when her eye had chilled his quivering love suddenly and she had pulled open her bodice with both hands and shown him her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, one white and firm and the other swollen black and purple with cancer. The horror of the sight of such beauty rotting away before his eyes had turned all his pa.s.sion inward and would have made him a saint had his ideas been more orthodox; as it was the Blessed Ramon Lull lived to write many mystical works in Catalan and Latin, in which he sought the love of G.o.d in the love of Earth after the manner of the sufi of Persia. Eventually he attained b.l.o.o.d.y martyrdom arguing with the sages in some North African town. Somehow the spirit of the tortured thirteenth-century mystic was born again in the calm Barcelona journalist, whose life was untroubled by the impact of events as could only be a life comprising the last half of the nineteenth century. In Maragall's writings modulated in the lovely homely language of the peasants and fishermen of Catalonia, there flames again the pa.s.sionate metaphor of Lull.

Here is a rough translation of one of his best known poems:

At sunset time drinking at the spring's edge I drank down the secrets of mysterious earth.

Deep in the runnel I saw the stainless water born out of darkness for the delight of my mouth,

and it poured into my throat and with its clear spurting there filled me entirely mellowness of wisdom.

When I stood straight and looked, mountains and woods and meadows seemed to me otherwise, everything altered.

Above the great sunset there already shone through the glowing carmine contours of the clouds the white sliver of the new moon.

It was a world in flower and the soul of it was I.

I the fragrant soul of the meadows that expands at flower-time and reaping-time.