In December of 1870, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, key proponent of the literary revival in nineteenth-

century Spain and arguably the most in uential Spanish poet of the modern era, passed away at
the age of thirty-four. He left behind him an unpublished manuscript, El libro de los gorriones,
wherein more than seventy poems were found. In a short preface to the manuscript, entitled
‘Introducción sinfónica’, Bécquer details his poetic philosophy. According to Bécquer, the only
subject matter that warranted poetic transcription were those eeting instances of profound,
emotional or existential experience common to everyone, particularly those concerning love, death,
the subconscious, dreams and the search for self-ful lment. It was these subjective encounters
with one’s own conscious mind that he often referred to as ‘poesía’. On the surface, then, Bécquer
shared numerous thematic similarities with his Romantic contemporaries, such as Victor Hugo in
neighbouring France. However, there is one key issue to which Bécquer drew particular attention in
his preface that distinguishes him from such writers: whereas the Romantics fully believed in the
ability of language to accurately articulate these complex moments of qualia, Bécquer had no such
faith. In his ‘Introducción sinfónica’ he laments: ‘Pero ¡ay! que entre el mundo de la idea y el de la
forma existe un abismo que solo puede salvar la palabra, y la palabra tímida y perezosa se niega
a secundar sus esfuerzos!’.1 In Bécquer’s eyes, the rigid, delineating nature of language existed in
total contrast to the uidity and in nitude of the inner life, and thus he deemed language inept at
capturing the essence of the preverbal ‘mundo de la idea’.
As evidenced by almost all of his writing, including both his correspondence and his poetry
itself, this problem of language was one with which Bécquer was very much preoccupied. In the
very rst poem of his Rimas, for example, Bécquer openly bemoans the shortcomings of the
written word: ‘Yo sé un himno gigante […] del alma […]. Yo quisiera escribirle […]. Pero en vano es
luchar, que no hay cifras / capaz de encerrarle’.2 Nevertheless, and as he announces in ‘Rima V’,
Bécquer felt that it was his vocation as a poet to at least attempt to bridge this gap between the
preverbal and the verbal, despite the alleged ineptitude of language. Thus we nd in Bécquer’s
Rimas a continual struggle between poet and poetic medium wherein the poet must draw on a
number of different poetic devices in order to circumvent the dif culties of language and, ultimately,
render the ineffable effable.
This essay will rst of all highlight a selection of the various literary techniques — such as
exploiting language’s potential for gurative expression, mobilising the power of silence, the
manipulation of poetic metre and rhyme scheme, the use of metaphor — to which Bécquer took
recourse in his attempt to achieve this goal. Secondly, it will explore the function of the
aforementioned techniques by analysing how they operate in relevant poems selected from the
collection. Lastly, and upon having gathered suf cient evidence from the previous two stages, it will
determine the extent to which Bécquer was successful, if at all he was, in his attempt to overcome
the limitations of language in his seminal work, Rimas.

As previously mentioned, Bécquer had little faith in the expressive capabilities of language. He
rejected the notion that a system of communication which aimed above all to specify and de ne
could ever provide more than a loose approximation for something that was, by nature, imprecise
and unde nable — poesía. As Díaz argues: ‘La forma, para Bécquer, sólo fue un ropaje de la

1Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, ‘Introducción sinfónica’, in Rimas, ed. by José Pedro Díaz (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1963), pp.
1-7 (p. 2).

2Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rimas, ed. by Rafael Montesinos (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995), p. 109. Note to the reader: all
subsequent citations from the Rimas will be made in reference to this edition.
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 idea’.3 Thus it was Bécquer’s belief that any attempt to incarcerate the chaos of poesía within the
con nes of a xed form such as language was counterproductive, because in doing so the true
essence of ‘la idea’ would inevitably be lost and all that would remain thereafter would be, as Díaz
put it, its vacuous outer garments. Díaz’s remark, however, also alludes to the one of the ways in
which Bécquer tries to surmount this problem: a recourse to the symbolic power of language.
Though he may have deplored language’s ability to denote — that is, to signify in a literal
manner — Bécquer nonetheless saw great potential in the written word for connotative expression
— that is, to evoke and to suggest. Thus it is that his poetry is heavily inundated with an array of
recurring symbols, such as the ocean, the wind, shadows, light, dusk and sepultures, all of which
have become more or less synonymous with the speci c concept or mental state they represent. In
‘Rima VII’, for example, we rst encounter one of Bécquer’s most important symbols: the harp. In
this particular poem, the speaker addresses the dif culty of realising one’s full potential. He
compares the inability to outwardly express hidden genius to the image of a harp that is ‘silenciosa
y cubierta de polvo’ and whose strings await ‘la mano de nieve / que sabe arrancarlas’ (p. 117). For
Bécquer, this ‘genio’ that ‘duerme en el fondo del alma’ (p. 117) was also a form of poesía.
In contemporary Romantic literature, the harp was a symbol of harmony, elegance and
therefore beauty, but in Bécquer’s poetry it takes on another dimension, ultimately becoming the
physical embodiment of poesía itself. As magni cent as the music of the harp may be, it remains
unheard (and thus not very magni cent at all) so long as there is no one with the skill to play it. So
too is the case with poesía: the stunning complexities of subjective emotional experience count for
nothing unless there exists an artist or an artistic medium capable of externalising them. In this
instance, the symbol of the harp succeeds in effectively communicating the problems of expressing
poesía precisely by reason of being a symbol — that is, by not being restricted to literal
signi cation. As a vessel of connotative expression, the symbol allowed Bécquer to infuse many
complex notions — that would otherwise have required a convoluted, periphrastic and therefore,
one may presume, unsuccessful literal description — into just a single utterance. This was
something for which Bécquer himself often yearned: ‘Quería menos signi cados establecidos y
más capacidad de encarnar’ (Díaz, p. 190). The symbol allows for this incarnation. When it
appears in a poem, all that it symbolises is instantly evoked in the reader, and it thereby bypasses
the hinderances of language.
Another aspect of symbolic language that appears exceedingly often in Bécquer’s Rimas is
metaphor and, in particular, metaphors involving nature. According to Bécquer, one of the most
problematic obstacles on the poet’s quest to transcribe poesía was the fact that these intense
emotional experiences were, by de nition, ephemeral and transient, and thus resisted written
reproduction, which implied permanency. Bécquer once claimed that ‘Nunca se vierte una idea con
tanta vida y precisión como en el momento en que ésta se levanta’.4 How would one go about
capturing the essence of something that, once captured, ceased to exist? As Díaz states: ‘Son
creaciones que existen antes de tener forma, y que mueren con ella’ (p.183). One of the ways in
which Bécquer attempted to eternalise the eeting experiences of poesía was through metaphor
and, more speci cally, through identifying similarities between the perennial elements of nature
and the experiences themselves. We may nd an example of this in ‘Rima LIII’, where the speaker
laments the end of a relationship. The ‘golondrinas’ (p. 145) — birds commonly associated with
affection — that frequent the beloved’s window come to stand for the love once shared between

3 José Pedro Díaz, G.A. Bécquer: vida y poesía (Uruguay: La Galatea, 1953), p. 191

4 Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Cartas literarias a una mujer (New York: Booklassic, 2015), p. 7
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 the couple.5 On the one hand, their playful uttering and learning of the lovers’ names suggests the
frolic and intimacy of a loving relationship. On the other hand, however, they also symbolise the
fragility and precariousness of love, since the swallows that return in the second strophe are not at
all the same ones described in the rst. (It is through this detail that the speaker differentiates
himself from his beloved’s future lovers). In a similar fashion, the honeysuckles of strophes three
and four that still continue to scale the walls of the beloved’s garden with their ‘hermosas oras’ —
and despite their ‘gotas’ that ‘caen como lágrimas’ — bring to mind the deep-seated and abiding
suffering caused by love lost. In both instances, we can see how nature has more or less become
a vehicular language in and of itself for expressing the ineffable experiences (both positive and
negative) of love. By creating these metaphorical links between nature and ‘el mundo de la idea’,
Bécquer anchors the evanescence of poesía in something real, concrete and enduring, thereby
avoiding a situation where it would otherwise exist only within the ambiguous semiotic labyrinth of
language. The connotative power of the metaphor therefore allows for the evasive subject matter
of poesía to successfully cross the abyss from poet to reader.

As evidenced above, Bécquer’s Rimas aimed primarily to unlock language’s potential for
gurative expression through the use of symbols and metaphors. Yet he also strove after another,
seemingly contradictory goal: to mobilise the expressive power of silence. As Bécquer saw it, the
absence of language could be just as, if not more, demonstrative and meaningful than its
presence, and thus what is verbalised in his Rimas is oftentimes a great deal less signi cant than
what is not. For example, in ‘Rima XVII’, the speaker narrates a brief encounter with his beloved.
Whereas the rst two verses are complete, the third features two sets of ellipses (a common
indicator of silence in Bécquer): ‘Hoy la he visto… La he visto y me ha mirado…’ (p. 125). Clearly,
the speaker is in love with this woman, but he does not seem capable of articulating the magnitude
of her divine beauty nor his feelings toward her. In this poem, however, it is in fact the ellipses that
take on the role of language: they themselves constitute an accurate linguistic representation of the
overwhelming sensations of infatuation, awe and wonder that have left the speaker speechless.
Thus, the means by which the maelstrom of experiencing love is expressed (i.e. using silence)
mirrors the experience itself, and so offers the most authentic description of what Bécquer referred
to as ‘esos instantes rapidísimos en que la sensación fecunda a la inteligencia’.6 In ‘Rima XXIII’,
similar dif culties are encountered in attempting to articulate affection. In the third verse, an
aposiopesis truncates the speaker’s train of thought, and he lapses into silence: ‘Por una mirada,
un mundo; / por una sonrisa, un cielo; / por un beso…’ (p. 127). Whilst serving a similar purpose to
the one outlined above, this momentary pause also produces other effects. The fragmentation that
the aposiopesis causes in an otherwise terse and well-structured poem re ects the tumult of the
inner life itself, wherein thoughts appear in a haphazard manner, appearing and disappearing with
no regard for whether or not they have yet been fully formed. Furthermore, the sudden break-off in
speech resembles the spontaneity of an everyday conversation, which elicits an intimate,
confessional tone and thereby lends further credibility to the emotions expressed. In both
examples, it is quite clear that Bécquer’s use of silence in his Rimas is highly effective — the
ellipses employed in both instances evoke sensations in the reader that correspond with those
experienced by the speaker, and thus it is that the limitations of language become negligible.

5 It should also be noted, however, that since swallows rarely y far from land, seafarers often considered them to be
indicative of the end of a journey (in this case, perhaps, the end of the relationship).

6 Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Desde mi celda (Madrid: Editorial Minimal, 2015), p. 56

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 Up until this point, we have analysed how Bécquer made recourse to various literary
devices that operate solely on the level of content. However, these were not the only tools in his
arsenal — he also made great use of poetic devices relating to form, namely those of poetic
structure, metre and rhyme. It is generally agreed that Bécquer’s formal technique took inspiration
from two main sources: his German contemporaries, men such as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig
Uhland, from whom he learned to write concisely and with precision, and the folk songs of
Andalusia, from which he borrowed assonant rhyme and structures of repetition (Díaz 1953,
p. 151). Poetic form, for Bécquer, was of critical importance in the quest to transcribe poesía,
seeing as it functioned with a certain degree of independence from language and so was not
undermined by its aws. In his eyes, and in contrast to many of his Romantic contemporaries, it
was imperative that the formal aspects of the poem served only to further the comprehension of
the subject matter. Any feature that did not contribute thusly was ruthlessly discarded. This
conviction resulted in poetry that rarely followed a set metre but rather, one that was continually
readjusting to suit the demands of the content — sometimes even within a single poem. For
example, Díaz (1953, p. 169) draws our attention to the fact that in ‘Rima XLIII’ the last verse of
each of the three strophes is, in order, heptasyllabic, pentasyllabic and nally, hendecasyllabic.
This oscillating variation in metre reinforces the already disorientating atmosphere of the poem,
which deals with dream experience: ‘¿Qué tiempo estuve así? No sé…’ (p. 140). Furthermore,
Bécquer’s choice of rhyme scheme in this poem also underlines the importance of this content-
form relationship. The resonant vowels ‘e’, ‘o’, ‘a’ and ‘u’ — which appear repeatedly throughout
the poem but particularly in the rst and last strophes — create an assonance that mimics the
muf ed, drawling sounds of the dream world. Notably, he does not indulge in popular syllabic
rhyme, possibly because he thought it to be lyrical embellishment that added nothing to the
expressive force of the poem.
Returning now to the topic of overall structure, other instances of carefully selected metre
occur in poems such as ‘Rima IX’ (p. 119). This poem deals with the beauty of nature — which, it
must be noted, is above all a traditionally Romantic theme — and follows a metre known as the
‘octava real’. According to José Carlos de Torres, the ‘octava real’ has strong classical af liations
and was particularly well-liked by writers of romantic poetry such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Luis
de Góngora during the Spanish Golden Age.7 Once again, then, we see that form serves to echo
the content. An exceedingly strong example of this echoing — indeed, possibly the strongest —
occurs in ‘Rima XXI’. The rst three verses are dodecasyllabic, divided into two hemistichs of six
syllables each, and according to which the words ‘poesía’ and ‘tú’ are always kept on opposing
sides.8 Then, in the last line of the poem, the speaker claims that his interlocutor and poesía are
one and the same: ‘Poesía… eres tú’ (p. 126). As Blanc notes, this assertion coincides with the
collapse of the alexandrine structure into a heptasyllabic verse with no dividing caesura (p. 54).
Thus, both terms not only become one on the semantic level of the poem, but are literally brought
together on the formal level, too.

In his analysis of Bécquer’s ‘Rima III’, in which the speaker juxtaposes the chaos of poesía with the
order of its written expression, Díaz concludes that: ‘Sus materiales expresivos exigen una lucidez,
una conciencia y un rigor que no pueden ser favorecidos por el impacto emocional del poema

7 Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rimas, ed. by José Carlos de Torres (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1976), p. 58

8As Blanc argues, although the third line is not strictly dodecasyllabic, it would be if one were to remove the words ‘y’
and ‘lo’, without which the verse would work perfectly ne (on a semantic level) and would then contain the appropriate
amount of syllables. [Mario A. Blanc, Las Rimas de Bécquer: su modernidad (Madrid: Pliegos, 1997), pp. 53-54].
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 (1953, p.181). And yet, in spite of this unfavourable medium, anyone familiar with Bécquer’s work
will testify that indeed the greatest triumph of his poetry is precisely that: its uncanny ability to
capture the most complex and enigmatic aspects of emotional experience in their most raw and
unre ned state. His use of symbology and pantheistic metaphor establishes a theoretical space
that operates independent of the words written on the page, and in which forged direct conceptual
links are forged between the inner life of the poet and that of the reader. Thus, the problems of
language are bypassed, with language itself serving as little more than a veiled cage from which
erupt the ‘chispas eléctricas’ of ‘el mundo de la idea’.9 Bécquer’s use of silence in his Rimas is
equally as fruitful because it evades the rigid order of language altogether, thereby imitating poesía
itself and offering a much more accurate account of its nature. In a similar fashion, his manipulation
of poetic metre and rhyme scheme allows for communication that also functions independent of
language, and so is neither subject to, nor hindered by, its imperfections. In conclusion, then,
Bécquer’s profound introspective subject matter coupled with his exact control over poetic devices
leads to a unique blend of both pathos and logos in his short collection of poetry, Rimas, wherein
he has undeniably, in light of the evidence presented in this essay, fully overcome the limitations of
language.

9Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, ‘Prólogo’, in Augusto Ferrán, La Soledad, ed. by Francisco Robles (Seville: Signatura
Ediciones, 1998), p. 27
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Bibliograph

Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo. 1963. Rimas, ed. by José Pedro Díaz (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe

—— 1976. Rimas, ed. by José Carlos de Torres (Madrid: Editorial Castalia

—— 1995. Rimas, ed. by Rafael Montesinos (Madrid: Cátedra

—— 2002. Rimas, ed. by Francisco Torrecilla del Olmo (Madrid: Ediciones AKAL

—— 2015. Cartas literarias a una mujer (New York: Booklassic

—— 2015. Desde mi celda (Madrid: Editorial Minimal

Blanc, Mario A. 1997. Las Rimas de Bécquer: su modernidad (Madrid: Pliegos

Díez Taboada, Juan María. 1965. La mujer ideal: aspectos y fuentes de las rimas de G.A. Bécquer
(Madrid: CSIC

Ferrán, Augusto. 1998. La Soledad (Seville: Signatura Ediciones

González-Gerth, Miguel. 1965. ‘The Poetics of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’, MLN, 80, 2: 185-20

Pedro Díaz, José. 1953. G.A. Bécquer: vida y poesía (Uruguay: La Galatea
y