Bécquer's Extrapolation to Express the Ineffable

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was a poet of profound sensibility with keen insight into the human heart. His verses strive to convey the deepest sentiments of love, loss, rejection, and nostalgia. Yet, Bécquer always felt that language was unable to express his message; he struggled with the limitations of words to communicate.¹ In the "Introducción sinfónica" to his works, Bécquer wrote: "Pero ¡ay, que entre el mundo de la idea y el de la forma existe un abismo que solo puede salvar la palabra; y la palabra, tímida y perezosa, se niega a secundar sus esfuerzos!" (Obras completas, Aguilar 50).

In his Rimas Bécquer also laments this imprisonment within the constraints of language. In his famous Rima XI,² which many editors place first in his collection of poems, he exclaims:

        Yo sé un himno gigante y extrañoque anuncia en la noche del alma una aurora,        y estas páginas son de ese himnocadencias que el aire dilata en las sombras.

        Yo quisiera escribirle, del hombredomando el rebelde mezquino idioma,        con palabras que fuesen a un tiemposuspiros y risas, colores y notas.

        Pero en vano es luchar; que no hay cifracapaz de encerrarle, y apenas, ¡oh hermosa!,        si teniendo en mis manos las tuyaspodría al oído cantártelo a solas.³

Poets who preceded Bécquer and others who have written after him have labored under the same sense of the inadequacy of language. The most prominent example is the sixteenth-century mystic San Juan de la Cruz. In the nineteenth century German and Spanish Romantics also complained of the confinement of language (Díaz 270-71, 327), and in the twentieth century Jonathan Mayhew pointed to "the major current in modern poetry that emphasizes the limits of language" (1151).⁴

In his Rima XI (I), cited above, Bécquer sees the only way of communicating completely and authentically as a person to be "apenas … teniendo en mis manos las tuyas, podría al oído cantártelo a solas." But as a poet he is left with the tools of his craft – words. In this Rima Bécquer also lists some of the attributes of the elusive words that would have the power to express his message. First is musicality – "cadencias" in line four, and "cantar" in the last line. He longs for words that would simultaneously be sounds and colors in lines seven and eight – "palabras que fuesen a un tiempo suspiros y risas, colores y notas." Suspiros, risas, and notas are oral but not verbal, and colores are visual. In other Rimas Bécquer makes use of the poet's customary oral devices, such as alliteration (e.g., "paso perezoso" in Rima LXVI [XL]) and onomatopeia (e.g., "balbucear breves palabras" in Rima XVI [XLII] and "suspirando pasa el viento murmurador" in Rima XLIII [XVI]), to enhance his words.

However, the musicality, plasticity, and rhetorical devices of Bécquer's poetry are not the focus here. Bécquer employs another technique that I will explore, a technique that has not been adequately studied by critics and one that speaks not to the senses of hearing or sight, but instead directly to the intellect – the technique of extrapolation.

This is an uncomplicated but effective stratagem. A solution to the challenge of conveying the ineffable is to extend the use of rational equations and calculations to express what is beyond reason and is incalculable. Bécquer, one of the most ethereal of poets, is not adverse to using the mathematical formula a is to b as c is to d, represented as a:b :: c:d. Bécquer's expansion of the parallel a:b :: c:d to parallels beyond human ability to express, or even apprehend, can transcend the confinement of language. It is essentially a magnification, an extrapolation, of a second (or third) parallelism over the first to the immeasurable.⁵ Bécquer did not invent this technique; earlier poets and even folkloric poetry already contained it,⁶ but Bécquer uses it...