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<center>https://i.imgur.com/OvPuKnn.jpg?1</center><center><sub> 2016 issue cover of *Secure Prose* [Source](https://www.alianzaeditorial.es/libro/literatura/prosas-profanas-ruben-dario-9788491044222/)</sub></center>

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<div class="text-justify">

To conclude the series dedicated to the poet Rubén Darío (see [I]() and [II]()], we will reproduce some complete poems or fragments of them, with the purpose of illustrating what has been said so far and making brief comments on it. Of course, there are many options presented by such a broad and rich work. We will try to give a representative sample of it.

###### (Unfortunately there are very few editions of Rubén Darío's poetry in English available on the Internet. Those interested can access some of his poems translated into English in this [link](https://www.poemhunter.com/ruben-dario/poems/) and his work in Spanish by [here](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/31590))*

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<center>https://steemitimages.com/450x350/https://i.imgur.com/QtMkM00.jpg?1</center><center><sub>Cover of a selection of poems in English [Source](https://www.target.com/p/selected-writings-dario-ruben-penguin-classics-by-ruben-dario-paperback/-/A-78711539)</sub></center>

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### Ruben Dario about poetry

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The awareness and lucidity that Rubén Darío had about poetry is surprising. Thus, we can read in prologues to his books:

>I think that the gift of art is that which in a superior way
makes us recognize ourselves intimately and outwardly before life. The
poet has the direct and introspective vision of life and an oversight that
goes beyond what is subject to the laws of general knowledge.

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>Poetry will exist as long as the problem of life and
death. The gift of art is a superior gift that allows one to enter the unknown
before and after, in the dream environment or
of meditation. (...) There are no schools; there are poets. The true artist understands all the ways and
finds beauty in all forms. All glory and all eternity are
on our conscience.

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<center>http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52894/52894-h/images/illus-102.jpg</center><center><sub>Blue* editing bullet. [Source](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52894/52894-h/52894-h.htm)</sub></center>

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### Poems and comments

#### The ideal
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>And then, an ivory tower, a mystical flower, a star to fall in love with... It happened, I saw it as if I saw a dawn, fleeing, fast, implacable.

>It was an ancient statue like a soul that looked into the eyes, angelic eyes, all tenderness, all blue sky, all enigma.

>She felt that I kissed her with my eyes and she punished me with the majesty of her beauty, and she saw me as a queen and as a dove. But she passed by me in triumph, like a dazzling vision. And I, the poor painter of Nature and Psyche, maker of rhythms and aerial castles, saw the luminous dress of the fairy, the star of her tiara, and thought of the longed-for promise of beautiful love. However, from that supreme and fatal ray, only a woman's face remained in the bottom of my brain, a blue dream.

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This prose poem -one of Rubén Darío's contributions to Spanish-speaking poetry, brought from French influences- appears in the expanded edition of *Blue* (1890). In it is expressed, with a particular delicacy and suggestion, that "intense absolute love of Beauty", an ideal that, by its very condition, is definitely unreachable, ungraspable in a strict way. From there, the image of the woman, who is seductive and imposing, escapes, and is left alone as a dream. Beauty interviews.

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<center>https://steemitimages.com/500x400/https://i.imgur.com/iFPNwl6.gif</center><center><sub>Cantos de vida y esperanza* 2004 edition cover [Source](https://www.alianzaeditorial.es/libro/literatura/cantos-de-vida-y-esperanza-ruben-dario-9788420658605/)</sub></center>

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#### The swan
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>It was a divine hour for the human race.
The Swan used to sing just to die.
When the Wagnerian Swan's accent was heard
It was in the middle of a dawn, it was to revive.

>On the storms of the human ocean
The swan song is heard; it is not ceased,
Mastering the hammer of old Germanic Thor
Or the trumpets that sing the sword of Argantir.

>O Swan! O sacred bird! If before the white Helena
From Leda's blue egg came forth full of grace,
Being of the Beauty the immortal princess,

>Under your white wings the new Poetry
He conceives in a glory of light and harmony
The eternal and pure Helen who embodies the ideal.

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From *Profane prose*, the book that underpins the modernist aesthetic, this poem, like many others in Dario's work, functions as an "ars poetica" (poetic art), that is, as a poem in which the author states, figuratively or indirectly, his conception of poetry and his way of making it. It is not by chance that he turns to the swan, a figure inspired by Symbolism and which was assumed to be the symbol of Spanish-American Modernism. In a game of similes and metaphors, supported by the mythological vein that nourishes Dario's cosmopolitanism, the poetic voice exposes the change that has occurred in the "new poetry", as occurred with the union of the swan (Zeus) and Leda, which gave birth to Helena, the symbol of pure and immortal Beauty.

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<center>https://steemitimages.com/250x85/http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47650/47650-h/images/head_1.png</center><center><sub>Ball in edition of *Secretive Prose* [Source](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47650/47650-h/47650-h.htm)</sub></center>

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#### Sonatina (fragment)
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>The princess is sad... what will the princess have?
The sighing escapes from her strawberry mouth,
That he's lost his laugh, that he's lost his color.
The princess is pale in her golden chair,
He's mute the keyboard of his sound key;
And in a forgotten vessel a flower faints.

(…)

>Do you think about the Prince of Golconda or China,
Or in which he has stopped his Argentinean chariot
To see from his eyes the sweetness of light,
Or the King of the Islands of Fragrant Roses,
Or the one where he is sovereign over the clear diamonds,
Or the proud owner of Ormuz's pearls?

(…)

>Shut up, shut up, princess," says the fairy godmother.
On a horse with wings, it's on its way,
In the belt the sword and in the hand the goshawk,
The happy gentleman who adores you without seeing you,
And who comes from afar, victor over Death,
To light up your lips with his kiss of love!

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One of the most widespread and emblematic poems of Modernism, also included in *Profane Prose*. In it, Dario seems to have condensed all the characteristic elements of the proposed aesthetic, from the cosmopolitan and fantastic vision that feeds the plot and theme of the poem, a kind of "fairy tale", the sensual and refined use of language, to the careful elaboration of sonority and rhythm in his verses, particularly with the masterful use of Alexandrian verse. A poem to delight the ear and the imaginative vision.

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<center>https://steemitimages.com/550x400/https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/517M9P4oz3L.jpg</center><center><sub>"Sonatina" cover page [Source](https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Rub%C3%A9n-Dar%C3%ADo/dp/9806450302)</sub></center>

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#### Love your rhythm
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>Love your rhythm and pace your actions
Under his law, as well as your verses;
You are a universe of universes
And your soul a source of song.

>The heavenly unity that you presuppose
It will bring forth diverse worlds in you,
And as your scattered numbers resonate
Pythagorize in your constellations.

>Listen to the divine rhetoric
Of the bird of the air and the night
Geometrical irradiation, guess what?

>Kills taciturn indifference
And pearl and crystal pearl set
Where the truth pours out its urn.

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A poem of great vitality, also from *Profane Prose*, where this conception of poetic rhythm as a universal rhythm is evident, and the occult (pagan) influence on the author can be seen: the analogy between microcosms (individual) and macrocosms (universe); the whole poem in its phonic and morphological constitution does honour to the musicality and rhythm of which it speaks.

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<center>https://steemitimages.com/250x85/http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50341/50341-h/images/illus-019_sml.png</center><center><sub>Songs of Life and Hope* [Source](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50341/50341-h/50341-h.htm)</sub></center>

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#### I'm chasing a way
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>I'm chasing a way that doesn't fit my style,
Thought button that seeks to be the rose;
It announces itself with a kiss that lands on my lips
To the impossible embrace of the Venus de Milo

>Green palms adorn the white peristyle;
The stars have foretold me the vision of the Goddess;
And in my soul lies the light as it rests
The bird of the moon on a quiet lake.

>And I find but the word that flees,
The melodic initiation that flows from the flute
And the dream boat that's in vogue in space;

>And under the window of my Sleeping Beauty,
The continuous sobbing of the fountain jet
And the neck of the great white swan that interrogates me.

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This is another of the most significant and transcendent poems by Dario, with which he closes *Profane Prose*. This is another text of "poetic art", since in it the author, through the lyrical speaker, expresses his arduous relationship with the word and poetic creation; the poem brings into play this tendency towards cultured, autonomous and personal poetry ("my poetry is *my* in me", he had said), inhabited by cultural references and landscapes taken from universal artistic works, whether they be sculpture, painting, music or literature.

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<center>https://steemitimages.com/625x425/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_-_Young_Man_With_a_Skull.JPG</center><center><sub>"Young Man with a Skull" (1896-98), by Paul Cezanne [Source]()</sub></center>

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#### Fatatility
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The tree is happy because it is scarcely sentient;
the hard rock is happier still, it feels nothing:
there is no pain as great as being alive,
no burden heavier than that of conscious life.

To be, and to know nothing, and to lack a way,
and the dread of having been, and future terrors...
And the sure terror of being dead tomorrow,
and to suffer all through life and through the darkness,

and through what we do not know and hardly suspect...
And the flesh that temps us with bunches of cool grapes,
and the tomb that awaits us with its funeral sprays,
and not to know where we go,
nor whence we came! ...


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It constitutes one of the most relevant poems of that vein of existential reflection of Dario, which is present especially from his book *Songs of Life and Hope*. This poem that ends that book is, curiously enough, more marked by the fate of pain and death, as part of that inclination that he recognises in his poetry. "I have meditated on the problem of existence", "I have expressed the expressiveness of my soul"). Without abandoning his taste for sound, rhythm and visual sensoriality, the poem takes on a gravity and depth that confronts us with great human uncertainty.

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### Influences 
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Rubén Darío had a clear vision of the role he had played in the renewal of poetry in Latin America. He said in the preface to *Cantos de vida y esperanza* (1905): "The movement of freedom that I started in America spread to Spain, and both here and there the triumph is achieved", a statement that indicates his knowledge of the irradiation that the aesthetics synthesized by him had reached. Not only did he cement the new poetry that would be made in Hispanic America during the last two decades of the 19th century, but he opened with his influence that innovative spirit that would characterize the first two decades of the 20th century and that would later connect with the literary vanguard. It also infused a renovating air into the Spanish literature that had become stagnant after the Romantic period, which would take shape in authors such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado and Ramón del Valle-Inclán.

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#### Bibliographical references

Darío, Rubén (1977). *Poetry. Venezuela. Ayacucho Library.
Sucre, Guillermo (1985). *? The mask, the transparency? Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%C3%A9n_Dar%C3%ADo
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/31590
https://www.poemhunter.com/ruben-dario/poems/
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### Written by @josemalavem 

  
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