Enrique González Martínez’s Wring the Swan’s Neck

Wring the swan’s neck who with deceiving plumage
inscribes his whiteness on the azure stream;
he merely vaunts his grace and nothing feels
of nature’s voice or of the soul of things.

Every form eschew and every language
whose processes with deep life’s inner rhythm
are out of harmony…and greatly worship
life, and let life understand your homage.

See the sapient owl who from Olympus
spreads his wings, leaving Athene’s lap,
and stays his silent flight on yonder tree.

His grace is not the swan’s, but his unquiet
pupil, boring into the gloom, interprets
the secret book of the nocturnal still.

A sonnet published early in Enrique González Martínez’s fertile poetic output, which appears in both Los senderos ocultos (Hidden Paths, 1911) and in La muerte del cisne (The Death of the Swan, 1915), “Tuércele el cuello al cisne”* is one of the most frequently referenced and anthologized poems in Latin American literary studies. It is also one of the most misunderstood and restrictively interpreted.

In his exhortation to “wring the swan’s neck,” González Martínez advocates an abandonment of the falsity of modernism, a putting aside its “engañoso plumaje” (deceiving plumage), and a turning away from its aesthetic frivolity. He suggests that the swan, symbol of elegance and the external, abstract beauty of the symbolists, be replaced by the owl, an allegorical representation of wisdom and knowledge. He also asserts that the detached Parnassian eloquence and metrical formality, which ignore and are discordant with the rhythm of the universe, be discarded: “Huye de toda forma y de todo lenguaje / que no vayan acordes con el ritmo latente / de la vida profunda . . .” (Every form eschew and every language / whose processes with deep life’s inner rhythm / are out of harmony . . .).

The poetics he sets forth reflect a sensibility to the complex nature of life and respect for the physical world. He also points out that elucidating the cosmic enigmas is a significant undertaking as the “inquieta pupila (del buho) . . . interpreta / el misterioso libro del silencio nocturno” (the owl’s unquiet pupil . . . interprets the secret book of the nocturnal stillness).

The publication of the sonnet in 1911, a year after the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, has led to its also being viewed as a component of a new literary pattern of consciousness (awareness of the concerns of the people), issues ignored completely by modernists.

Regardless of the varied interpretations of the sonnet, “Tuércele el cuello al cisne” positioned the poet in Latin American literary history as the first Spanish-American poet to break with the modernist movement. Certainly, González Martínez rejected the flashiness, excess, and unessential emphasized and manifest in the poetry of the modernists who imitated Rubén Darío.

Likewise, Rubén Darío in Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope, 1905) came to terms with what was regarded as synthetic modernism. Ultimately, what is seen as overt hostility to modernism in “Tuércele el cuello al cisne” is a qualified criticism of the movement specifically for its lack of gravity and its superfluous elements.

Bibliography
González Martínez, Enrique. “Tuércele el cuello al cisne.” In Anthology of Mexican Poetry, translated by Samuel Beckett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.

Categories: Literature

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