The poems of modernism (or also called "modernist poems" or "modernist poetry") are texts that follow the classical structure of poetry but located within the cultural and literary current called Modernism..
Among the most prominent authors of modernist poetry we can point to figures such as Leopoldo Lugones, Tomás Morales Castellano, Rubén Darío or Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño.
Literary modernism tends to be located between the years 1888 and 1910. Among the main characteristics of the poems of modernism we can stand out:
Among its main themes, the search for harmony within an inharmonious world stands out, together with the desire for fullness and perfection. In addition, the following thematic nuclei stand out:
There are many modernist poets, both in Spain and in Latin America. The fame of some of them was relegated to the national territory while others were known globally, as is the case of Rubén Darío.
Author: Leopoldo Lugones (Argentina)
Drop the roses and the days
once again, sure of my garden.
There are still roses in it, and they, by the way,
better perfume when they are late.
When shedding your melancholy,
when I seem more naked and stiff,
has to keep you under his dead gold
noblest and darker violets.
Do not fear the fall, if it has come.
Although the flower falls, the branch remains.
The branch remains to make the nest.
And as now when it blooms it ignites,
dry log, your plants lit,
burning roses will cast you into the flame.
Author: Leopoldo Lugones (Argentina)
When your intact adolescence surrendered,
emerged, with naive sloppiness,
your delicate neck, of the bodice
broadly flowered. In opulence,
from the lonely living room, my darling
he offered you his equivocal indulgence
feeling the presence very close
of the familiar elf, rose and ermine.
Like a changing tape fails,
spread its color on the beach
the afternoon. Dissolve your blushes,
in insidious honeys my sophistry,
and from the fraternal sky, the same
star looked into our eyes.
Author: Leopoldo Lugones (Argentina)
The insinuating musk of bramas
scattered in the wind, and the opportune
jungle was smelly like a
woman. Of the strange sights
you emerged in your bruna gauze cendal,
black lace and argentine lamas,
with your bare arms that the branches
they licked as they passed, drunk on the moon.
The night mixed with your hair,
your eyes were flooded in sparkles
of sacred love; the breeze from the hills
enveloped you in the coolness of the far away
springs, and all the aromas
from my garden synthesized in your hands.
Author: Enrique Larreta (Argentina)
It is an immense, limitless mystery
that follows him, moves away, precedes him,
as the same horizon. Nothing can
restrain your swift, your torn
run, when it seems that a winged
wind carries you. When he goes on and gives in
to that brutal enjoyment, and deliberately releases
soften the rein to the runaway colt.
Fury that lingers and slides
about the other rage. He is life
all, all luck, good or bad,
of the great loneliness. Infinite dream
that shoots before itself, as if lost
boleadora, her eagerness, her love, her cry.
Author: Enrique Larreta (Argentina)
Go, go, gypsy, the one with the red combs.
Gypsy, the gypsy, the one with the impure smell.
Vase of carnations. Zacatín of lice.
But no, don't go. Here you have the hard.
Here is my hand. Nail, nail your eyes,
stick them in mine, if you want. I swear to you
about your charms and lockbreakers
and stolen chusquines, that I do not fear the spell
of your eyelashes, although everyone knows what you put
in them a certain soot dengue, a certain doom
smudge of lamps, with their invocations.
Ah! syrup gypsy, sticky and far away
like your voice, ah, go, go as soon as possible. But
don't go yet, don't go, gypsy.
Author: Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia)
Son I am of my race; runs in my veins
blood of the proud conquerors.
My grandparents raised towers and battlements;
the troubadours celebrated his glory.
In that blood there are red and blue waves;
my shield is luster and decorum from a solar.
(In cambo de sinople, girdle of gules
engoled with fierce dredgers of gold).
They wake up in my mind, with the compliments
of his rough nobility, the chronicles,
misty atavisms, vague memories
and a flock of confused evocations.
They light me up suddenly, with a fleeting glow,
lightning that I want to fix, in vain ...
what do you fight, in what cloisters, in what castle
sword, cross or lyre I had in my hand ... ?
Author: Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia)
Pilgrim imaginary pigeon
that you inflame the last loves;
soul of light, music and flowers
pilgrim imaginary pigeon.
Fly over the lonely rock
that bathes the glacial sea of sorrows;
there is, at your weight, a beam of brilliance,
on the grim lonely rock ...
Fly over the lonely rock
peregrine dove, snow wing
like a divine host, such a slight wing ...
Like a snowflake; divine wing,
snowflake, lily, host, haze,
pilgrim imaginary dove ...
Author: Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia)
The trembling rose
came off the stem,
and the breeze swept her away
over the murky waters of the swamp.
A runaway wave
opened her bitter bosom
and narrowing the trembling rose
undid her in his arms.
They floated on the water
the leaves as mutilated limbs
and confused with the black mud
black, even more than mud, turned,
but in the pure and serene nights
it felt like wandering in space
a slight smell of rose
over the murky waters of the swamp.
Author: Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (Bolivia)
Frizzy waves adhering to the manes
of the rough steeds of the winds;
lit by reddish glows,
when on anvil of mountains his hammer beats the thunder.
Crepe waves that the clouds obscure
with their torn and bloody bodies,
that slowly fade into twilights,
cloudy eyes of the night, surrounded by mystery.
Crispy waves that shelter the loves
of the hideous monsters in her bosom,
when the great voice of the storms sings
his wild epithalamium, like a gigantic hymn.
Crepe waves that are thrown to the beaches
topped by huge snowdrifts,
where they disturb with convulsive sobs
the indifferent silence of the night of the ice.
Author: Carlos Pezoa Veliz (Chili)
You have abyss eyes, hair
full of light and shadow, like the river
that sliding its wild flow,
the kiss of the moon reverberates.
Nothing more rocking than your hip,
rebel against the pressure of dress ...
There is summer in your enduring blood
and on your lips eternal spring.
Beautiful outside to melt in your lap
the kiss of death with your arm ...
Breathe out like a god, languidly,
having your hair as a garland,
so that the touch of a burning flesh
the corpse shudders in your skirt ...
Author: Carlos Pezoa Veliz (Chili)
On the field the withered water
falls fine, graceful, light;
with the water anguish falls:
Rains
And then only in a large piece,
I lie in bed, I lie sick,
to scare away sadness,
i sleep.
But the water has whimpered
next to me, tired, light;
I wake up with a start:
Rains
So, dead of anguish
before the immense panorama,
while the limp water falls,
I think.
Author: Carlos Pezoa Veliz (Chili)
With a corpse in tow,
cemetery road,
meditative advance
the poor angarilleros.
Four lanterns descend
by Marga-Marga towards the town,
four melancholic lights
that makes his reflections cry;
four oak timbers,
four old companions ...
A tired voice pleads
for the eternal peace of the dead;
wandering noises, silhouettes
of dark trees, sinister.
Far away in the shadow,
the howling of dogs
and the ephemeral grumbled
of the nostalgic echoes ...
Blow the puelche. A voice says:
-The downpour is coming brother.
Another voice murmurs: -Brothers,
we pray for him, we pray.
Calla in the crooked skirts
the howling of dogs;
immense, strange, descend
silence over the night;
rush their responses
the poor angarilleros,
and someone repeats: -Brother,
the downpour no longer lingers;
it's four o'clock, the water is coming,
we pray for him, we pray.
And how the rain starts,
I say goodbye to that funeral,
spur peak to my horse
and in the mountain I go inside.
And there on the dark mountain,
Who was he? Crying I think:
-Some poor anonymous devil
who came one day from afar,
someone who loved the fields,
who loved the sun, who loved the path,
where does life go,
where he, poor peasant,
one afternoon found oblivion,
sick, tired, old.
Author: Pablo Neruda (Chile)
BETWEEN shade and space, between garnishes and maidens,
gifted with a singular heart and dire dreams,
hastily pale, withered on the forehead
and with the mourning of an angry widower for each day of life,
Ay, for every invisible water that I sleepily drink
and of every sound that I embrace trembling,
I have the same absent thirst and the same cold fever
an ear that is born, an indirect anguish,
as if thieves or ghosts arrived,
and in a deep, fixed extension shell,
like a humiliated waiter, like a little bell
hoarse,
like an old mirror, like a smell of home alone
in which guests enter at night madly drunk,
and there's a smell of clothes thrown on the floor, and an absence of flowers
-possibly otherwise even less melancholic-,
but, the truth, suddenly, the wind that whips my chest,
the nights of infinite substance fallen in my bedroom,
the noise of a day that burns with sacrifice
they ask me what is prophetic in me, with melancholy
and a knock of objects that call without being answered
there is, and a relentless movement, and a confusing name.
Author: José Asunción Silva (Colombia)
Your rosy and pure complexion, your graceful forms
Of statues of Tanagra, your smell of lilacs,
The carmine of your mouth, of smooth lips;
The burning glances of your pupils,
The rhythm of your step, your veiled voice,
Your hair that usually, if you mess them up
Your fine white hand all dimpled,
Cover you like a fine queen's cloak;
Your voice, your gestures, you do not be surprised;
All that is already crying out for a man.
Author: José Asunción Silva (Colombia)
In your room you have,
In a fragile urn,
Nailed butterflies,
What if brilliant
Sunbeam touches them,
They look like mother-of-pearl
Or pieces of heaven,
Afternoon skies,
Or opaque glitters
Soft-winged;
And there are the blue ones
Daughters of the air,
Fixed forever
The agile wings,
The wings, pilgrims
Of unknown valleys,
That like the wishes
Of your loving soul
At dawn they seem
Resurrect,
When from your windows
The leaves open
And the sun shines in your eyes
And in the crystals!
Author: José Asunción Silva (Colombia)
If in your memories you see one day
In the mist of the past
The sad memory of mine arises
Half erased by the years,
Think that you were always my desire
And if the memory of love so holy
Move your chest, cloud your sky,
Fill your green eyes with tears;
Ah, don't look for me here on earth
Where I have lived, where I have fought,
But in the realm of graves
Where peace and rest meet!
Author: Guillermo Valencia Castillo (Colombia)
There is an instant of twilight
where things shine brightest,
fleeting throbbing moment
of a delinquent intensity.
The branches are velvety,
the towers polish their profile,
a bird buries its silhouette
on the sapphire ceiling.
The afternoon changes, concentrates
to forget the light,
and a don süave penetrates her
of melancholic stillness,
as if the orb were picking up
all its good and its beauty,
all his faith, all his grace
against the shadow that will come ...
My being blooms in that hour
of mysterious blossoming;
I have a twilight in my soul,
of dreamy placidity;
the shoots burst in it
of the spring illusion,
and in it I get drunk with aromas
of some garden that is beyond! ...
Author: Guillermo Valencia Castillo (Colombia)
Of what was a love, a sweetness
unparalleled, made of dream and joy,
only the cold ash remains
that retains this pale envelope.
The orchid of fantastic beauty,
the butterfly in its polychrome
yielded their fragrance and gallantry
to the fate that fixed my misfortune.
Over oblivion my memory prevails;
from her grave my pain tears her away;
my faith the appointment, my passion awaits,
and I return it to the light, with that frank
spring morning smile:
Noble, modest, loving and white!
Author: José Martí (Cuba)
Since I touched, lady, your hand
White and naked at the sparkling party,
In the faithful heart I try in vain
The echoes turn off from that orchestra!
Of the devastating waltz the impure note
That in his arms of flame suspended
Rauda took you - to the heart without cure,
Repeat it loving my ears.
And how much chord vague and murmured
Offer the audacious soul the beautiful land,
Fake them the dark spirit-
Faint changing of the note that.
I hear it without ceasing! To the shine, blind,
Around me I look at her vagrant
Moving slowly are wings of fire
And my forehead to girdle to lie anxious.
Oh! my trembling hand would know well
In the air steal the winged boiling note
And, with the art of sweet sorcery,
Hanging oleanders to the burning cup,
In my thirsty arms passed out
Give yourselves, lady, killer perfume:
But I rush the poisoned cup
And the love that consumes me ends in me.
Author: José Martí (Cuba)
She is blonde: loose hair
Gives more light to the Moorish eye:
I go, since then, wrapped
In a whirlwind of gold.
The summer bee that buzzes
More agile by the new flower,
It does not say, as before, "grave":
"Eva" says: everything is "Eva".
Low, in the dark, to the dreaded
Cataract stream:
And the iris shines, lying
On the silver leaves!
I look, frowning, at the wild
The pomp of the irritated mount:
And in the azure blue soul
Sprouts a pink hyacinth!
I go, through the forest, for a walk
To the neighboring lagoon:
And between the branches I see her,
And through the water he walks.
The garden snake
Whistle, spit, and slip
Through its hole: the clarion
He holds out his wing, trilling.
I am harp, I am psaltery
Where the Universe vibrates:
I come from the sun, and to the sun I go:
I am the love: I am the verse!
Author: Julian del Casal (Cuba)
The tamed fever no longer consumes
The burning of the blood in my veins,
Not the weight of their warm chains
My weak body on the bed numbs.
Now that my spirit boasts
Be free from deadly penalties,
And that you can ascend through the serene
Regions of light and perfume,
Make, oh God, that they no longer see my eyes
The horrible reality that saddens me
And let him march in the immense caravan,
Or that the fever, with its red veils,
Hide forever from my sight
The nakedness of human misery.
Author: Julian del Casal (Cuba)
Smiles of the deceased virgins
In a white velvet coffin
Topped with gold; hands together
That you rise towards the blue of the sky
Like lilies of flesh; white touches
Of pale absorbed novices
By heavenly dreams; frank
Laughter of blond children; goodbyes
That the dying old men send
To loved ones; blush
Of the fine wandering clouds
By the waves of the ether; iridescent
That doves flaunt on their wings
When flying towards the Sun; green palm trees
From the African deserts; rubbers
Arabs in which chimeras sleep;
Glances of the pale insane
Among the flowers in the garden; crepes
With which their snowy foreheads are hidden
The virgins; swarms of illusions
Pink color that it contains
The soul that did not hurt misfortune;
Snatch me to the point of the earth,
That I'm sick and lonely and weary
And I wish to fly up,
Because there must be what I have loved.
Author: Ernesto Naboa y Caamaño (Ecuador)
You were on the ship as one
sentimental exiled princess
that regretted, sad and forgotten,
the fickleness of fortune.
With nostalgia for love in his eyes
and chromatic moonstones,
you spent long hours in some
romantic and winged rambling.
And in the light of twilight in defeat,
maybe you evoked spring
of our love so sweet and so remote!
And your memory, oh pale traveler!
Got lost, with the last seagull
who came sobbing to my shore ...
Author: Ernesto Naboa y Caamaño (Ecuador)
To calm the serious hours
Calvary of the heart
I have your sad soft hands
that perch like two birds
on the cross of my affliction.
To ease the sad hours
of my quiet loneliness
it is enough for me ... to know that you exist!
and you accompany me and assist me
and you instill serenity in me.
When the asp of boredom gnaws at me,
I have some books that are in
the bloody hours myrrh, aloe,
the support of my weak soul:
Heine, Samain, Laforgue, Poe
and above all, my Verlaine!
And so my life slides
-without object or orientation-
suffering, quiet, submissive,
with sad resignation,
between a sigh, a smile,
some imprecise tenderness
and some real pain ...
Author: Ernesto Naboa y Caamaño (Ecuador)
There are evenings when one wishes
embark and leave aimlessly,
and, silently, from some port,
go away while the day dies;
Go on a long journey
and then get lost in a desert
and mysterious sea, undiscovered
by no boater yet.
Although one knows that even the remote
confines of the unknown foothills
the courtship of their sorrows will follow,
and that, when the mirage vanishes,
from the glaucous waves of the abyss
the last sirens will tempt you.
Author: Ernesto Naboa y Caamaño (Ecuador)
You have a haughty, mysterious and sorrowful air
of those noble ladies that Pantoja portrayed:
and the dark hair, the indolent look,
and the imprecise mouth, luciferian and red.
In your black pupils the mystery lodges,
the blue bird of sleep is fatigued on your forehead,
and in the pale hand that a rose leaves,
the pearl of the prodigious east shines.
Smile that was a dream of the divine Leonardo,
hallucinated eyes, hands of Fornarina,
bearing of Dogaresa, neck of Maria Estuardo,
that seems formed - by divine vengeance-
to roll mowed like a tuberose stalk,
like a bouquet of lilies, under the guillotine.
Author: Ernesto Naboa y Caamaño (Ecuador)
Freezing afternoon of rain and monotony.
You, behind the windows of the flowery balcony,
with the shipwrecked gaze in the gray distance
you slowly defoliate the heart.
The petals roll withered ... Boredom, melancholy,
disenchantment ... they tell you tremulous when falling,
and your uncertain look, like a gloomy bird,
take flight over the ruins of yesterday.
Sing the harmonic rain. Under the gloomy afternoon
your last dream dies like a flower of anguish,
and, while, in the distance, the prayer preludes
sacred of twilight the voice of a bell,
you pray the suffering Verlenian litany:
how it rains in the streets, in my heart.
Author: Arturo Borja (Ecuador)
Oh! painful afternoon that with your golden sky
you fake the joys of a summer decline.
Late! The dry leaves in their mourning chorus
they are filling my soul with an anguished cold.
The laughter of the fountain seems to me to be crying;
the perfumed air has the breath of lilies;
longings come to me from some old martyrdoms
and my mind leans into eyes that I adore ...
Black eyes that arise like lakes of death
under the tragic shadow of obsidian hair,
Why this stubbornness in leaving my soul inert,
Author: Arturo Borja (Ecuador)
Mother Madness! I want to put on your masks.
I want in your bells to drink the incoherence,
and to the sound of rattles and tambourines
frivolize life with divine unconsciousness.
Mother Madness! Give me sardonic grace
of the perorations and the broken words.
Your children belong to the high aristocracy
of the laughter that cries, dancing joyful jacks.
Only bitterness costume from the country of Citeres ...
I know that life is hard, and I know that the pleasures
They are vain dragonflies, they are yawning, they are boredom ...
And for this, Madness, I long for your remedy,
that dissipates sadness, erases melancholy,
and populate the spirits of forgetfulness and joys ...
Author: Arturo Borja (Ecuador)
My youth becomes grave and serene as
an evening piece of landscape in the water:
the sound boiling of that first glimpse
spring, slowly unraveled in my forge ...
Your laugh of gold, of glass, of silver,
recalls a distant scherzo ...
in your laugh there is an echo of sonata,
Tzigan violin pizzicato.
Frolicking in the nest of your mouth,
your fine laugh is proud rhythm
that reminds me of a crazy fountain,
and the Tzigan violin pizzicato.
Clean, sonorous, crystalline,
they are cadences of the Venetian trio;
they have Argentine reminiscences
Tzigan violin pizzicato.
Author: Arturo Borja (Ecuador)
The pain ... The melancholy ...
The sinister and gloomy afternoon ...
The relentless and endless rain ...
The pain ... The melancholy ...
Life so gray and so mean.
Life, life, life!
The black hidden misery
gnawing at us without compassion
and the poor lost youth
who has lost even his heart.
Why do I have, Lord, this sorrow
being as young as I am?
I have already fulfilled what your law orders:
even what I don't have, I give ...
Author: Manuel Machado (Spain)
Until the people sing them,
the verses, verses are not,
and when the people sing them,
no one knows the author anymore.
Such is the glory, Guillén,
of those who write songs:
hear people say
that nobody has written them.
Make sure that your verses
go to town to stop,
even if they stop being yours
to be of the others.
That, by melting the heart
in the popular soul,
what is lost in name
earns eternity.
Author: Manuel Machado (Spain)
I feel sad sometimes
like an old autumn afternoon;
of saudades without a name,
of melancholic sorrows so full ...
My thought then,
wander by the graves of the dead
and around the cypresses and willows
that, dejected, they bow ... And I remember
of sad stories, without poetry ... Stories
that my hair is almost white.
Author: Manuel Machado (Spain)
It was a languid, loud sigh
the voice of the sea that afternoon ... the day,
not wanting to die, with golden claws
from the cliffs it lit up.
But its bosom the sea raised powerful,
and the sun, at last, as in a superb bed,
the golden forehead sank in the waves,
in a fiery ember undone.
For my poor aching body,
for my sad lacerated soul,
for my wounded heart,
for my bitter weary life ...
The beloved sea, the desired sea,
the sea, the sea, and think nothing ... !
Author: Eduardo Marquina (Spain)
To you, for whom I would die,
i like to see you cry.
In pain you are mine
in pleasure you leave me.
Author: Manuel Reina Montilla (Spain)
If when the lush spring arrives
I contemplate in the meadow,
divine roses and red carnations,
I remember your cheeks and blushes.
If the summer when arriving the treasure shines
of the golden ears,
and the bright blue nights,
I remember your hair and your looks.
If when autumn comes, I hear the breeze,
that wandering indecisive
among the pale leaves, he murmurs,
I remember your voice melodious and pure.
And if winter wears the white veil
of snow and ice,
and from the mists the gloomy hood,
your heart I remember black and cold.
Author: Manuel Reina Montilla (Spain)
They gazed at your sparkling eyes
the crystal palm, the lymph
pure from the spout that pours into the thicket,
its sapphire and diamond dust,
when ill, with hesitant steps,
a woman approached, all sad,
and asked you for alms with sweetness
fixing on you pleading glances.
The pearl that shone in your hand
you gave that poor and suffering woman,
who walked away, crying with joy.
I, then, moved and reverent,
I did not kiss you on the lips which I used to,
But on the noble and luminous forehead!
Author: Manuel Reina Montilla (Spain)
Sitting in the gothic window
there were you and me, my old lover;
you, of beauty and pleasure, radiant;
I, absorbed in your sovereign beauty.
Seeing your fresh lush youth,
a lascivious whispering bee
nailed his concealed piercing dart
in your gentle bosom of snow and scarlet.
Viva drop of transparent blood
on your rosy and enchanting skin
shone like a glowing ruby.
My eager lip on the little wound
I stamped eagerly ... I never would!,
that that drop poisoned my life!
Author: Manuel Reina Montilla (Spain)
Of blue and ornate silver
there is the swift waterfall;
blue the broad horizon;
green the beautiful bower,
and the meadow and the mountain.
The lush flower shines
their perfumes and their finery;
and sing songs of love
that poem with wings
that we call nightingale.
The gloomy groves
they are covered with green veils;
and bathe, in harmonies,
those nights that are days
and those days that are heaven.
The air is inflamed,
and the beautiful with her beloved,
to the rays of the moon,
crosses in pearly vessel
the shining lagoon.
Everything is light, breezes, colors,
atmosphere, sweetness, calm,
birds, notes and flowers.
Only in my chest are there pains
and disenchantment in my soul.
Author: Manuel Reina Montilla (Spain)
A flower can be seen
in the dark battlefield,
and its leaves, moved by the wind,
of smoke and blood are enameled.
A galloping steed approaches,
and soon he will step on it;
plus a strong and vigorous hand
stops it, and the flower is saved!
Today that's how it looks
in the dark field of my soul,
a pure white flower:
the flower of my hope.
The flying steed of passions
is about to destroy it.
Woe to her if your blessed hand
does not stop its march!
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