Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Trilce: 63" by César Vallejo is a journey through the terrain of existential melancholy. The poem begins with the advent of dawn, but this is no ordinary morning; it arrives "raining," setting an atmosphere of heaviness. The "morning drips fine hair," a phrase that serves as a vivid personification of rain as well as a metaphor for emotional weight. These opening lines immediately place us in a world tinged with sadness and introspection, hinting at the looming presence of "melancholy" that is "lashed fast."

The imagery of "misasphalted oxident of Hindu furniture" stands as one of the more enigmatic lines. The notion of "misasphalted" could refer to an imperfect or flawed surface, perhaps as a metaphor for the emotional landscape. "Oxident," an invented term, evokes both 'oxidation' and 'orient,' signaling both decay and geographical markers. The Hindu furniture brings in cultural exoticism, but it's presented as destabilized, unsettled, indicative of a "destiny" that "hardly settles."

The mention of "Skies of the puna" shifts the geographic locus to the Andean plateau, a place marked by its sparse vegetation and high altitude. These skies are "disheartened by great love, platinum skies, torvous with impossibility." They stand as witnesses to immense but doomed passion. Their 'platinum' quality emphasizes their precious but distant nature-valuable yet cold, untouchable.

The "flock ruminates" and is "underscored by an Andean whinny." Here, we see a juxtaposition between the natural world of animals and the ambient sounds of the landscape, another layer in this intricate mosaic of images and senses. The flock's rumination could mirror the speaker's own deep thinking or stewing emotional state.

The line, "I remember myself," is the pivot of the poem, the moment when the speaker turns inward explicitly. This introspection, however, doesn't seem to bring clarity or resolution. Instead, we encounter the "cricket of tedium and jibbous unbreakable elbow." The natural world, with its seemingly endless cycles, exacerbates the speaker's tedium, and the "unbreakable elbow" symbolizes a kind of immutable reality, an obstinate condition that cannot be bent or changed.

The poem closes with a description of "morning suffices with loose tresses of precious, sierran tar." The landscape is once again personalized, its elements like "loose tresses" of hair, but made of "sierran tar"-dark, sticky, and heavy. This culminates in the final lines, where the speaker looks for "eleven o'clock," but finds "only an untimely twelve." This is not just about missing an hour; it encapsulates the poem's essence of dislocation and unfulfilled expectations. Time itself is "untimely," a concept devoid of promise, and the emotional asynchrony between the speaker and the world becomes palpable.

"Trilce: 63" thus takes its readers on an emotional odyssey, making use of complex, often opaque language to navigate the inexpressible dimensions of existential discomfort. Vallejo captures this discomfort not as a static state but as a dynamic interplay of disparate elements-nature, time, geography, and memory-each contributing to the poem's intricate architecture of melancholy.

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