GUSTAVO ADOLFO BÉCQUER

Rima LIII: Volverán las oscuras galondrinas
http://ia360609.us.archive.org/0/items/rima7_837/rimaLIII_becquer_64kb.mp3

Rima IV: No digáis que agotado su tesoro
http://ia341337.us.archive.org/0/items/rimas1/rima-IV_becquer_64kb.mp3

Rima XI: Yo soy ardiente, yo soy morena
http://ia341212.us.archive.org/2/items/Rimas2/rimaXI_becquer_64kb.mp3

Few of the poets led comfortable lives, and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-70) was no exception. He was one of eight children born in Seville to the genre painter José Domínguez Bécquer, but was progressively orphaned at 5 and 11, being then brought up by his uncle, Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer, another painter. Becquer wrote his first (and accomplished) poem in 1848 and was having work published in local newspapers by 1853. A year later Bécquer left for Madrid, there supporting himself by writing for the theatre and light opera. In 1859 appeared the first of what would become Rima XIII, and in 1860 Rima XV in the Album of fashionable young ladies and couriers. Later in the same year he wrote Rimas LXI, XXIII and LXII, and married Casta Esteban from Soria, whom he met during his travels around Spain. Theirs was a turbulent affair: several children resulted but Casta left him for good in 1868 and Bécquer's health deteriorated. Bécquer continued to write his Rimas and considerable prose. The minister González Bravo offered to finance the publication of the Rimas, but the manuscript was lost when his house was ransacked in the 1868 Revolution. Bécquer partially recovered the text from memory, the poems appearing as the Book of the Sparrows, but the manuscript itself was then all but lost in the National Library in Madrid from its acquisition in 1896 until 1914. In September 1870, his equally impoverished and much loved brother Valeriano died, and Bécquer stopped caring. His wife returned for a brief reconciliation, but Bécquer died on 22nd December in Madrid of pneumonia and hepatitis.

Only Rima IV was formally published in Bécquer's lifetime. In 1871, to help the surviving family, Bécquer's writings were collected into two volumes, where the Rimas made a small showing. Three other Rimas appeared in the Book of the Sparrows, which was seen through the press by his friend Ramón Rodríguez Correa. But whatever his personal misfortunes, and the uncertain history of the manuscripts, Bécquer's poems were recited from memory by his contemporaries, and greatly influenced the generations thereafter. Hauntingly brief, rigorously modelled in strict stanza forms, deeply musical, with ethereal images and ineffable longings, often plangently erotic, Bécquer's 98 Rimas amount only to a few thousand lines, but became the foundation of modern Spanish poetry. Darío was the great invigorator, but his gifts were all his own. Bécquer taught poets two things: to look deeply into their own inchoate feelings, and to realise that popular folksongs expressed something universal in human existence.