Gabriela Mistral’s Exploration of Loss, Sorrow and Passionate Longing in Select Poems from Desolacion

Abstract

Mistral always felt poetry or song to be a manifestation of the wound dealt by love, and Desolacion (Desolation), published in 1922 under the supervision of Fredrico de Onis, Professor of Spanish at Columbia University, breathes the wounds of love quite profusely, celebrating the intimate tete-a-tete that sorrow has with life, experienced by every human soul. This collection of prose and prose-poems, as Mistral confessed later in her life, was an outcome of this wound of love dealt by the suicide of Romelio Ureta. Being a woman who never shied away from defining love in her own terms, the lines in Desolacion speaks of a world principled by Mistral’s sensibility that would reconfigure the identities of Latin American women in the context of nation formation in the years to come. Despair, passionate longing, solitude, and search for identity amalgamate harmoniously with a peculiar sense of loss in Mistral’s writings, and Desolacion stands out to be one of the earliest treatises that she hurled at the world right in 1922, carving a niche for herself. The pieces in Desolacion borders on being philosophical, probing into the unknown fabric of emotions brewed by personal loss, yet firmly grounded within the bounds of reality. Pieces like “I am crying”, “The Sacred Dust”, “The Four-Petaled flower”, “Thrown out”, “The Eternal Grief”, “Hide me” all collaborate to consolidate a very personal experience of philosophising loss, love, despair and sorrow which this paper would attempt to analyse, shedding light on the synergic interactions of the darker aspects of life with the mundane, displaying an uncannily organic blending with ordinary human activities. This paper, therefore, would also attempt to delve deeper into the immeasurable depth of her lyrics in order to trace the varied strains of human emotions that Mistral explored quite surreptitiously, drawing inspiration from the intricate nuances of her lived experiences, while also consolidating her feminine identity.