Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

====Como quien espera el alba (1941–1944)====

This work was begun during his 1941 vacation in Oxford, continued in Glasgow and completed at Cambridge in 1944. The autumn, winter and spring of 1941-2 was one of the most fertile periods of his life and it seems that this collection was one of his favourites.<ref name="Cernuda648" /> He read widely in English poetry and criticism and made acquaintance with the writings of TS Eliot, Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and Keats's letters amongst others.<ref name="Cernuda647"/> He also began to read Goethe and Kierkegaard.<ref name="Cernuda649" /> Whilst this extensive reading does not show through specifically in any poem, his handling of longer poems is more assured.<ref name=Connell207 /> There are poems that suggest a nostalgia for the Seville of his youth - not an emotion that Cernuda often displays, but a longing for bright sunshine and warmth is easily explicable in the circumstances. It is only in such indirect ways that a reader can sense what was happening around him. Glasgow was bombed 5 times by the [[Luftwaffe]] in [[the Blitz]] and suffered extensive damage but it would be impossible to gather this from reading Cernuda. However, this collection does include "Por otros tulipanes amarillos" an elegy to his former lover Stanley Richardson dead in an air raid on London, which echoes an earlier tribute published in ''Invocaciones''.

In an extended poem, "Noche del hombre y su demonio", he reflects on the course of his life and the possibility of being remembered after his death.<ref name=Connell208>:Connell p 208</ref> The ''demonio'' attacks the concept of the poet's vocation and suggests that Cernuda might sometimes have been tempted to try to live a normal life. However, the poet fights back by saying that his poetic vocation is what justifies his life and gives it whatever meaning it might have. Even though he might be wrong or suffering from a delusion, his poetry is absolutely necessary to him and he must commit to it totally.<ref name="Harris A Study117">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 117</ref>

"Góngora" is another poem that takes a historical figure and projects the poet's own psychological state onto him. The poem seems to be a development from a set of notes he made in 1937 and collected under the title ''Góngora y el gongorismo''.<ref name=OCP2137>OCP vol 2 Góngora y el gongorismo p 137</ref> He sees Góngora as a victim of society and surveys the humiliation and incomprehension from which he suffered when alive, the lack of respect accorded to him by critics and his eventual rehabilitation from neglect in 1927.<ref name="Harris A Study110">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 110</ref> In these notes, he briefly discusses a recently published work on Góngora by Dámaso Alonso, which discusses the two types of poetry that Góngora wrote - complex and elaborate works such as "Polifemo" or the "Soledades" as against artless ballads and sonnets. In Cernuda's view, however, there is only one poet and the critic ought to try to resolve these two opposing tendencies and demonstrate them as aspects of a single truth.<ref name=OCP2143>:OCP vol 2 Góngora y el gongorismo p 143</ref> It is characteristic of Cernuda to resist the way society tries to appropriate and sanitise the poet, while showing disdain to him while he was alive. He expresses this resistance with great power and bitter irony in the poem<blockquote><poem>
Ventaja grande es que esté ya muerto
Y que de muerto cumpla los tres siglos, que así pueden
Los descendientes mismos de quienes le insultaban
Inclinarse a su nombre, dar premio al erudito,
Sucesor del gusano, royendo su memoria.</poem>

(it is a great advantage that he is now dead and that he lasted three centuries dead, for now the very descendants of those who insulted him may bow to his name, give a prize to the scholar, successor to the worm, gnawing away at his memory)</blockquote>

The title of the collection alludes to the atmosphere of Britain during the Second World War when "it was only possible to hope for an end to the world's retreat into a primitive world of darkness and terror, in the middle of which England was like the ark in which Noah survived the flood."<ref name="Cernuda649"/>