His collection of poems has always been mentioned in connection with the figure of Leopoldo Panero. Written at every momentThe most extensive of all and the one that has deserved more attention and recognition, thanks to which his other books of verses have gained some interest from readers and scholars of his lyrical work. But within Written...a collection of poems -among others, the title poem of the book The empty temple-have been definitive to unravel the poetic thought of the author from Astorga.
He died prematurely at the age of 53, his first poetic production opened the way with a poetry of avant-garde style in which the breath of his personal universe could already be guessed with poems wrapped in the fog, in beautifully vivid skies and in the beauty of the landscape. It was the publication, in 1944, of the long poem The empty roomin the magazine EscorialThis gave him a prestigious name in the poetry of his time, to the point that literary personalities such as Jorge Guillén ended up considering him as the best poet after the civil war. However, this appreciation was not only due to his first poetic delivery but, as we have pointed out before, to Written at every momentwhich, at the time of its publication in 1949, came to close the liveliness of a few splendid collections of poems by other authors of his generation also printed in that decade: Dark News (1944) e Sons of wrath (1944) by Dámaso Alonso and, in parallel, The lighted house (1949), of Luis Rosales, all within the same atmosphere full of unknowns and enchantment, and focused on the mystery of the most elemental realities of human existence, marked in turn by the imprint of Machado, Unamuno, and even by the stoicism of some poets of the XVII century.
Word in time
Written at every momenta unique book, of great expressive rigor, with many poems elaborated prior to The empty roomwas the one that gave him the stature of the great poet that Leopoldo Panero is. In it are intertwined the keys of a temporalist poetry, full of affectivities: his wife, his children, his grandparents, his parents, sisters, friends, neighbors, enemies, Macaria the chestnut seller of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, the streets of his childhood, various landscapes contemplated and, of course, God, on which Panero projects an intense loving gaze that gives reason that his verses are based on lived experiences, which makes them always taste true. Thus, in the delicate three sonnets that he dedicates to his wife, it is worthwhile to extract the final tercets of Of your deep lightThe beloved is a guarantee of the rejuvenation of both of them towards the future, as Luis Felipe Vivanco points out, because only one of them gets old soon: "...the beloved is the guarantee of the rejuvenation of both of them towards the future, because only one of them gets old soon: "...".With a new destiny and a purer will, / and a clearer truth than the one dreamed of, / you refresh my past in your oblivion / towards a virgin future youth / that sleeps darkly in your gaze.". Along with them, it is worth mentioning other sonnets such as the one he wrote to his sisters, or to his brother Juan -also a poet, who died in a traffic accident in 1937-, or to Dolores, the seamstress of his house, literary pieces of enormous charm that reveal an authentic emotional autobiography of the poet, capable of touching anyone thanks to their humanity and verbal exquisiteness.
Poetry anchored in pain
However, apart from this vital lyric, endearingly kind and domestic, Leopoldo Panero is an existential poet of pain, of the clamorous mystery of pain, where the deaths of his loved ones and the ineluctable evidence of the passing of time converge; he is also a poet of solitude, which he continually turns into prayer, in search of God. In both cases, his poetry is still explicitly religious, or prayerful poetry.
As for the theme of pain, the poem quoted at the beginning of this article is famous The empty temple written in alexandrines and integrated in the Liturgy of the Hours (the first sixteen verses are recited on the vespers of Sunday IV). It contains the poet's own compunction after having been "he who is cold of himself"that is, the proud, the haughty. Again and again he expresses it in different ways, as if in a loop, in a continuous return to personal conversion -in the collection of poems there are more compositions in which he expresses this incessant return to the presence of God, such as the one titled "Thou who walkest in the snow"when he writes: "Now that I lift up my heart, and lift it up / turned to You my love."-At the same time, he discovers the value of grace at work in his soul: "You gave me the grace to live with you.". In this context, the word pain - "The best thing in my life is the pain."he repeats on several occasions as a refrain - seems to refer more to the affliction of love, that is, to repentance, than to any other kind of sorrow. In fact, the author announces: "My pain kneels, like the trunk of a willow, over the water of time, where I come and go."The poem is a constant that prevails throughout the poem and in many others of the poem. Written at every momentThus, Panero feels the need of God to settle his restless and dissatisfied life: "I am the guest of time; I am, Lord, wayfarer / who blurs in the forest and in the shadow stumbles."You can't say it any clearer poetically.
Experience of God
At the same time, pain is the result of the frequent losses that mark his existence and lead him to that disconcerting loneliness or emptiness from which his most personal lyrical creation bursts forth. Loneliness or emptiness, moreover, linked to the experience of God as a being whom he certainly does not know, but which he intuits as essential for the poet to know himself: "Now that the stupor lifts me from the soles of my feet, / and I lift up to Thee my eyes, / Lord, tell me who Thou art, / illuminate who Thou art, / tell me who I am too, / and why the sadness of being a man?".
Already in The empty room wrote in the homonymous poem: "I am alone and I hide in my innocence / God has passed through my life (...) / I am alone, Lord, on the shore / reverberating with pain (...) / I am alone, Lord. I breathe blindly / the virginal scent of Your word. / And I begin to understand my own death; my original anguish, my brackish god."The poet's inner itinerary is to some extent summarized in this thought, which, from his solitude, and from the absence of the most loved ones who occupied his childhood life, he discovers God. As Manuel José Rodríguez stated in his study God in postwar Spanish poetry: "The loneliness that Leopoldo Panero sings is revealed as an essential condition to realize that God is man's destiny, even if he does not understand it and even makes it increasingly incomprehensible"..
Fervent thanksgiving
A loneliness or emptiness that neither springs from sin, but from the bewilderment of having lost original innocence, nor remains infertile because, when the poet assumes his condition of man in complete meekness, he surrenders to God in a fervent thanksgiving: "Lord, I owed you / this song bathed / in gratitude... You could / You always can, always- / take me in a gust / as one uproots a tree / to burn it still green (...), / You did not want to uproot me.". It is the culmination of Panero's poetic, metaphysical and human thought after realizing that, in his passage through life, he has the generous, though incomprehensible, hand of God extended to him; hence his acceptance of his limitations; hence his understanding that all love is the shadow of a living God.
