Poetry

Because of this Modest Style

by Ramón López Velarde

September 14, 1915

It's how she spreads, without a sound, her scent

of orange blossom on the dark of me,

it is the way she shrouds in mourning black

her mother-of-pearl and ivory, the way

she wears the lace ruff at her throat, and how

she turns her face, quite voiceless, self-possessed,

because she takes the language straight to heart,

is thrifty with the words she speaks.

It's how

she is so reticent yet welcoming

when she comes out to face my panegyrics,

the way she says my name

mocking and mimicking, makes gentle fun,

yet she's aware that my unspoken drama

is really of the heart, though a little silly;

it's how, when night is deep and at its darkest,

we linger after dinner, vaguely talking

and her laughing smile grows fainter and then falls

gently on the tablecloth; it's the teasing way

she won't give me her arm and then allows

deep feeling to come with us when we walk out,

promenading on the hot colonial boulevard. . .

Because of this, your sighing, modest style

of love, I worship you, my faithful star

who like to cloud yourself about in mourning,

generous, hidden blossom; kindly

mellowness who have presided over

my thirty years with the self-denying singleness

a vase has, whose half-blown roses wreathe with scent

the headboard of a convalescent man;

cautious nurse, shy

serving maid, dear friend who trembles

with the trembling of a child when you revise

the reading that we share; apprehensive, always timid

guest at the feast I give; my ally,

humble dove that coos when it is morning

in a minor key, a key that's wholly yours.

May you be blessed, modest, magnificent;

you have possessed the highest summit of my heart,

you who are at once the artist

of lowly and most lofty things, who bear in your hands

my life as if it was your work of art!

O star and orange blossom, may you dwindle

gently rocked in an unwedded peace,

and may you fade out like a morning star

which the lightening greenness of a meadow darkens

or like a flower that finds transfiguration

on the blue west, as it might on a simple bed.

Translated from the Spanish by Michael Schmidt

Translator Notes:
Ramón López Velarde fascinated me in my late teens and early twenties. I was urged to read him by Octavio Paz, who was aware of my love for Eliot and through Eliot for Laforgue. He wanted me to find resources in my own culture. (I was born and raised in Mexico.) There is common ground between the provincial poet of northern Mexico and Laforgue (born, after all, in Uruguay). There are tonal similarities, allusive narratives, wry and then wan romance, at home in the provinces, in the heat of the day and the cool of the evening. My mentor may have felt that Velarde would harden up my flabby verse, for Velarde is all concentration, his slow and self-reflective pace is never monotonous but always alive and spoken. "His imagination," Octavio wrote, "did not lead him to flare up in blazes of artifice, but rather to go deeper into himself and to express with ever greater fidelity what he had to say." Fidelity is the deepest feeling for him. He forged "a personal language‚" because he "had something personal to say." He lives a daily life and it is the meat and matter of his poetry because he lives it in a distinctive way. "We cannot write our way back to the poetry of Velarde because it constitutes our unique [Mexican] point of departure."

Velarde is more formal, more buttoned up than Laforgue, his Catholicism severe, his libido certainly evident, but attenuated. In "Por este sobrio estilo," which I marked with three enthusiastic asterisks and a question mark when I first read it, I was beguiled by the intimacy of Velarde's speech, yet puzzled by the relationship the poem evokes. Was a precociously Oedipal child addressing his mother? But the flirtatiousness, the muted eroticism, and the relative youthfulness of the woman addressed, made it elusive to a modern reader. Velarde's "she," who becomes "you‚" in the second half of the poem, is in fact an idealised version of his relative Josefa de los Ríos, whom he met in his early teens and adored until she died. The first lost love, the impossible one, Fuensanta: if she was not to be his, she should be chaste until she withered, until her light went out.

Velarde concentrates particularly on two images in this poem, the orange blossom and the star. They recur, they develop. The blossom breathes out its scent and the star rises in the sky; the blossom withers and the star sets. These two mark the times of the poem and its moods. It keeps a tense, even pace. The syntax repeats its patterns and builds, but the verse does not move towards song. It is spoken, intensely spoken. Its irregularities keep it within the world of colonial avenues, mother-of-pearl and ruffs, tablecloths and evening gardens. It is a world rich with restraint, touched with regret because the woman and the time are gone beyond recall. Not only has she perished; the Revolution has altered everything.

One feels that in Velarde's heart there is a tension between his moral refusal to countenance physical intimacy and his palpable desire. The reading that the almost-lovers share: is that his poems? And the panegyrics that she must face: surely poems not unlike the one we are reading. Perhaps this is the very one to which she is responding, quiet and wry and teasing.—MS