The Black Heralds (also published as The Black Messengers) expresses the metaphysics of human pain and suffering that informed much of César Vallejo’s poetry. In contrast to Romantic writers who considered poetry a means to commune with the sublime, Vallejo disrupts poetry’s “beauty” to force it to express doubt, hesitation, and disbelief—not in abstract terms but in physical, bodily ones.

In this poem, the violence of life’s “bloodstained blows” slashes “the fiercest face” and “the strongest back” and is as “barbaric” as the infamous Huns. More than expressing philosophical angst, this poem paints life as a series of unprovoked, disconcerting, incomprehensible misfortunes. The source of the assaults might even be God himself in his hatred of humanity, and the poet says, “I don’t know”—that is, this all makes no sense to me.

Life itself, then, makes no sense, and that is one of Vallejo’s main poetic themes: that there is no rational design to life. We are destined to suffer and will never know why, since rationality, in seeking to define causes and effects, provides no answers. Religion is of even less use than reason, when “some adored faith” can be negated or “blasphemed by Destiny.” Because the blows are undeserved, humanity is pictured as a passive victim, unable to provide self-protection, even through faith—and this destiny might reflect God’s will. Death holds no hope for escape or salvation, because the blows could be an announcement of what death has in store for us.

This poem is a scream, a crying out, but expressed in mainly colloquial language (“I don’t know!”) and common images, such as the bread burning in the oven (also, perhaps, an allusion to lack of salvation through Christ). Vallejo turns on its head the traditional metaphor of life flowing like a river; here, the water is repeatedly stopped in its course: “undertow,” “suffering welled up in the soul,” “everything lived wells up, like a pool of guilt,” expressed in man’s crazed, frightened eyes.

The fourth stanza in Spanish is a deep wailing, repeating the “o” vowel equivalent to the English “oh”: “Y el hombre . . . ¡Pobre . . . pobre! Vuelve los ojos como / cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada,” followed by thirteen other “o” sounds in the next two lines. The ellipses slow the presentation and suggest hesitation, doubt, and fear.

Works Cited

Vallejo, César. “The Black Heralds.” Los heraldos negros, 1918. Translated by Clayton Eshleman, American Poetry Review, vol. 34, no. 3, May–June 2005, p. 25.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Spanish Literature

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