Bcquer's "Disembodied Soul"

Authors(s): Julian Palley

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 BECQUER'S "DISEMBODIED SOUL"

THE myth or image of the disembodied soul, leaving the body

during sleep or in a death-like trance, is a pervasive motif of

classical, medieval and romantic thought and art. It is taken up

by Plato, Cicero and Macrobius, and becomes the basis for the

dream-vision of medieval literature, whose paragon is Dante's

Divine Comedy. In Western tradition it was Plato who first wrote

of the winged and soaring soul, that of the "pair of winged horses

and a charioteer." "When perfect and fully-winged she soars

upward, and orders the whole world." 1 In Book x of the Republic,

the myth of Er relates how the son of Armenius was slain in battle,

but later returned to life and "told them what he had seen in the

other world. He said that when his soul left the body and went on a

journey with a great company ... they came to a mysterious place

at which there were two openings in the earth." 2 In romanticism,

the dream and its soaring soul return in Young, De Quincey, No-

valis, Schiller and Becquer.

Cicero, in De Divinatione,3 presumes to attack the practice of

oneiromancy, but while doing so engages in perspicacious reflection

on the nature of dreams. "For in sleep the soul is vigorous, and

free from the senses . . . and, since the soul has lived through all

eternity ... it therefore beholds all things in the universe, if only

it preserves a watchful attitude." Later, speaking of ecstasies

1 Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and

Huntington Cairns (New York, 1963), p. 493.

2 Phaedrus, p. 839.

3 Cicero, De Divinatione, from The Treatises of Cicero, trans. C. D. Yonge

(London, 1887), p. 192.

185

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 Julian Palley HR, 47 (1979)
186

and dreams: "Those, therefore, whose minds, as it were, despising

their bodies, fly forth, and wander freely through the universe,

being inspired by certain divine ardour, doubtless perceive things

which those who profecy predict." Plato's idea of a free and dis-

engaged soul during sleep is therefore reinforced, and returns

again in Cicero's famous account of "Scipio's Dream" (preserved

and elaborately interpreted by Macrobius),4 in which the younger

Scipio dreams of reuniting with his grandfather, Scipio Africanus,

on a "lofty perch, dazzling and glorious, set among the radiant

stars." The older man's philosophical discourse includes a vision

of the cosmos, and of the insignificance of Rome in that eternal

setting; the genre is not unrelated to the Menippean satire, as

cultivated by Lucian and others, although the intent is serious

rather than comic.

The idea of the disembodied soul was taken up again by the

early romantics and pre-romantics. Edward Young's Night

Thoughts (1745) enjoyed a spectacular popularity in his lifetime,

and inspired the Spanish pre-romantic Cadalso, but fell later into

disrepute and is read now primarily for the splendid engravings

by Blake that embellish it. Yet this discredited work contains

some lines of exceptional beauty, lines that introduce the romantic

theme of the wanderings of the soul in dream:

While o'er my limbs sleep's soft dominian spread:

What, though my soul fantastick measures trod

O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom

Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep

Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool;

Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds

With many antick shapes wild natives of the brain?

(Night Thoughts, Part I)

This flight of the self appears in the visions of those great romantic

dreamers, Novalis and De Quincey. Novalis, who had been a stu-

dent of Schiller, imagined vast cosmic voyages within the self

(Polen, 1798). His unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen,

opens with a description of the hero's wild and far-ranging dreams:

He wandered over oceans with inconceivable ease; he saw strange crea-

tures; he lived with many kinds of people, in war, in wild tumult, in quiet

4Macrobius, A Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. W. H. Stakl

(New York, 1952).

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 Becquer's "Disembodied Soul" 187

huts. He fell into captivity and into most ignominious affliction . . He

went through an infinite variety of experiences; he died and came to life

again, loved most passionately, and was then separated from his loved

one forever.5

Novalis' novel was published posthumously in 1802; two decades

later, Thomas De Quincey described his passionate, feverish, "cos-

mic" dreams. He was "every night .. . transported into Asiatic

scenes." 6 In other dreams his alter ego traverses vast lakes and

oceans, some populated by a human face, infinitely repeated.

This particular kind of oneiric experience, in which the dis-

embodied soul rises, soars, travels vast distances, in an indetermi-

nate time, becomes one of the characteristic forms that dreams take

in Becquer's Rimas. It is, of course, a variation of the dream of

flight, the imagination of ascension and verticality whose phenome-

nology has been delineated with poetic insight by Gaston Bachelard

in his L'Air et les songes. Bachelard insists, rightly, that ascen-

sion and verticality always imply, metaphorically, a movement to

higher moral and spiritual values; and that they express a kind of

nostalgia for a state of lightness that we have lost: "Is it not the

timeless and immense memory of an aeriel state, of a state in

which all is weightless, where our material has an innate light-

ness?" ' Yet in Becquer's dreams, as well as in those of Novalis

and De Quincey, the flight itself (so common in recorded dreams)

is subordinated to an effortless transportation to higher or distant

regions; they do not give us the sensation of flight, but rather its

result. This "transportation" is similar in form to those dream

experiences among "primitive" peoples described by anthropolo-

gists. In the Chumash culture of southern California, the eating

of the datura or jimsonweed produced colorful hallucinations, and

"Shamans under its influence thought themselves transported

through space and time." 8 Albert Beguin refers to a similar ob-

servation by Levy-Bruhl: "Pour les 'primitifs' de Levy-Bruhl, le

5 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (New York, 1964),

pp. 18, 19.

6 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (New York,

n.d.), p. 178.

7 Gaston Bachelard, L'Air et les songes. The passage quoted is from the

Spanish version, El aire y los sueiios (Mexico, 1958), p. 47.

8 Dean R. Snow, '"Rock Art and the Power of Shamans," in Natural His-

tory, 86, No. 2 (1977), 44.

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 188 HR, 47 (1979)
Julian Palley

sommeil est un veritable voyage au royaume des morts, ou l'ame,

liberee, s'en va retrouver les esprits; et c'est la le sens le plus

litteral. " 9

Charles T. Tart l and others have reported scientific research

and experimentation in what Tart calls Out-of-the-Body-Experi-

ences (OOBE'S), in which the "second body" or the "astral soul"

leaves the body of the subject to view itself from the ceiling or to

visit distant places. It is speculated that the belief in the soul

leaving the body at death derives from such experiences. Tart

claims evidence to support the veracity of his subjects' accounts

of their OOBE'S. It would appear that Plato's myth of Er narrates

an OOBE, occurring at near-death. Some of the subjects claim that

they are not dreaming while undergoing an OOBE, but Tart admits

that it could be a "lucid dream," or a dream-within-a-dream, in

which the subject is aware of himself dreaming. Becquer's out-

of-the-body dreams seem to fit within a pattern of these experi-

ences, especially Rima lxxv.

This flight of the soul is to be found also in the first of Becquer's

leyendas, the curious "El caudillo de las manos rojas," based on

oriental sources:

Cuando la materia duerme, el esplritu vela. En tanto que el cuerpo

del caudillo permanece inm6vil y sumergido en un letargo profundo, su

alma se reviste de una forma imaginaria y huye de los lazos que la

aprisionan para lanzarse al eter; alli la esperan las creaciones del Suenio,

que le fingen un mundo poblado de seres animados con la vida de la idea.1-

Rima lxxv is the most perfect embodiment of this experience.

But this motif and related ones occur in several other of the rimas.

The idea of flight and weightlessness is present almost from the

start: in Rima v, the self (yo metaphorically equals poetry) soars

in a whirling cosmos: "Yo sigo en raudo vertigo / los mundos

que voltean. 12 In Rima viii, the poetic speaker is overcome by a

desire for ascendence, for pure verticality and aneantissement:

Cuando miro de noehe en el fondo

oscuro del cielo

9 Albert BWguin, L'Ame romantique et le reve (Paris, 1960), p. 80.

10 Charles T. Tart, "Out-of-the-Body Experiences," in Psychic Explora-

tion, ed. Edgar Mitchell (New York, 1974), pp. 349-74.

11 Gustavo Adolfo B6cquer, Obras completas (Madrid, 1961), p. 75.

2 Becquer, Rimas, ed. Jos6 Pedro Diaz (Madrid, 1963). All quotations

from the Rimas will refer to this edition.

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 Becquer's "Disembodied Soul" 189

las estrellas temblar como ardientes

pupilas de fuego;

me parece posible a do brillan

subir en un vuelo

y anegarme en su luz, y con ellas

en lumbre encendido

fundirme en un beso ...

The persistent theme of the disembodied eyes of the beloved (as

in the leyenda "Los ojos verdes") takes the form of a dream-

visitation in Rima xiv: "Cuando duermo los siento que se ciernen

/ de par en par abiertos sobre mi." Like a benign incubus, the

poetic speaker visits the beloved in dream or sleep, in Rima xvi:

Si se turba medroso en la alta noche

tu coraz6n,

al sentir en tus labios un aliento

abrasador,

sabe que aunque invisible al lado tuyo

respiro yo.

And in Rima lxxxvi (attributed) he once more asks the beloved

if she felt his presence in dream, as he, in dream, was certain that

he left his body to visit her alcoba:

,No viste entre suenios

por el aire vagar una sombra,

ni sintieron tus labios un beso

que estall6 misterioso en la alcoba

Pues yo juro por ti, vida mia,

que te vi entre mis brazos, miedosa,

que senti tu aliento de jazmin y nardo,

y tu boca pegada a mi boca.

In Rima lxxi, whose two first strophes describe what Freud

called the hypnagogic state (between dreaming and awakening),

the poetic speaker later suggests that he had a telepathic or pre-

cognitive dream:

Y oi como una voz delgada y triste

que por mi nombre me llam6 a lo lejos,

y senti olor de cirios apagados

de humedad y de incienso.

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 HR, 47 (1979)
190 Julian Pallcy

Entro la noche y del olvido en brazos

cai cual piedra en su profundo seno;

Dormi y al despertar exclame: "I Alguno

que yo queria ha muerto!"

Here the dreamer is visited by the "disembodied soul" of a recently

departed friend, suggesting an experience which can be traced

back to the myth of Er and to a variety of primitive beliefs. Martin

Ebon 13 presents a balanced and objective view of parapsychological

studies referring to the telepathic or precognitive dreams, and

offers tentative evidence for their existence.

In Rima lxxv, Becquer provides us with the most thorough

rendering of the oneiric experience of the "disembodied soul."

This poem, one of Becquer's finest and best known, is quoted in

its entirety:

j Sera verdad que cuando toca el sueino

con sus dedos de rosa nuestros ojos,

de la carcel que habita huye el espiritu

en vuelo presuroso ?

^ Sera verdad que huesped de las nieblas,

de la brisa nocturna al tenue soplo,

alado sube a la regi6n vacia

a encontrarse con otros?

IY alli desnudo de la humana forma,

alli los lazos terrenales rotos,

breves horas habita de la idea

el mundo silencioso?

Y rie y llora y aborrece y ama

y guarda un rastro del dolor y el gozo,

semejante al que deja cuando cruza

el cielo un meteoro?

Yo no se si ese mundo de visiones

vive fuera o va dentro de nosotros:

Pero se que conozco a muchas gentes

a quienes no conozco.14

13 See Martin Ebon, "Parapsychological Dream Studies," in The Dream

and Human Societies, eds. G. E. Von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois (Berkeley-

Los Angeles, 1966), pp. 163-78.

14 This rima may have been influenced by Byron's " The Dream'":

. .. and dreams in their development have breadth,

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 Becquer's "Disembodied Soul" 191

It is noteworthy that Becquer presents these ideas and images

relating to the "disembodied soul" as questions, in the first four

strophes. The anaphora iserd verdad? reinforces the hypothetical

quality of his meditations. The poet is reluctant to assert as truths

the whisperings of his intuition, in an age in which science was

already challenging the domain of poetry and myth. Only in the

final strophe does the interrogation cease, when the speaker insists

on a kind of "knowing" that is the sole province of intuition, and

not of science.

In the first strophe is announced that vertical flight, common

to most dreams of this nature, which Bachelard associates with a

movement to higher moral or spiritual values. The dream experi-

ence of lightness, freedom and flight is suggested in the third and

fourth verses, in which the soul, like that of Saint John of the

Cross, is freed from the carcel it inhabits. Like the casa of Saint

John, the carcel refers, of course, to the body. In the second

strophe, the soul, "winged" like Plato's metaphor of the horses

and charioteer, "soars upward" to meet other souls freed from

other bodies. The third strophe suggests an even closer affinity

to the Platonic tradition: here, the spirit inhabits the "silent world

of the idea." The soul, although "naked of human form," never-

theless laughs, loves and hates, and leaves a trail, in the beautiful

comparison with the meteorite. In the last strophe, the speaker

admits that he is uncertain of the real nature of his dream. The

spirit could leave the body, as he suspects, or it could all occur

within the unconscious, "dentro de nosotros." The final lines are

an almost prosaic statement of belief in a region of spiritual activ-

ity which science is never likely to explain, a region which he

alluded to in Rima iv: "Mientras ... en el mar o en el cielo haya

un abismo / que al calculo resista." These lines also suggest the

possibility of a deja vu. At times we have the sensation that an

activity or image of the present waking moment may have oc-

curred before in dream.

Martin Ebon thus concludes his article on the telepathic dream:

And tears and tortures, and the touch of joy:

They leave a weight upon our waking thought . .

(from first stanza)

See W. S. Hendrix, "Las rimas de Becquer y la influencia de Byron," Boletin

de la Academia de la Historia, 98 (1931), 850-94.

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 HR, 47 (1979)
192 Julian Palley

"Beyond this, however, man's dreams have retained, even in our

supposedly rational civilization, an aura of the unworldly; man,

dreaming, is somehow believed to be in touch with worlds outside

his daily ken, even if these be the worlds of his own unconscious.

In dreams, we meet the archaic language of symbols; we are in

touch with our ancient tradition of myth, or with childhood wishes

and fears." '5 These oneiric experiences are common enough to

suggest some basis in reality. Becquer, hardly cognizant of prob-

lems of verifiable evidence, felt himself in tune with, and gave

expression to, those ancient myths and "archaic symbols" which

are part of our common heritage.

The dream and daydream are fundamental to Beequer's percep-

tion of reality, and of his attempts to transform these perceptions

into poetry. "Aquel fino y profundo Gustavo Adolfo Becquer,"

wrote Jorge Guillen in his study of dreams in the poet, "es el

espaiiol que asume del modo mas autentico el papel de poeta visio-

nario. 'Cuando la materia duerme, el espiritu vela.' " 16 The line

that separates reality from dream is often impossible to delineate:

thus the Calderonian equation life-dream reappears, transformed

but pervasive, in this romantic context. Seldom are night dreams

recounted; but they are alluded to with great frequency, and in

the leyendas the dream-vision plays a significant role. At least

twenty-five of the ninety or so rimas attributed to Becquer are

directly concerned with the state of dream, daydream or sleep.

The dream motif reaches its culmination in Rima lxxv; the poet

here recapitulates the myth of the "disembodied soul," conveying

it in his particular style and world view. The diaphanous, ethereal,

airy images and metaphors, which are characteristic of nearly all

of Becquer's rimas, can thus be better understood as relating to

the central dream vision of the "disembodied soul," with its ascen-

sion and weightlessness.

JULIAN PALLEY

University of California, Irvine

15 Ebon, "Parapsychological Dream Studies," p. 174.

16 The subject of dreams in Becquer's poetry has been treated in depth

in Jorge Guill6n 's essay called "B6cquer y lo inefable soflado," in his Lenguaje

y poesia, pp. 111-42. The present essay is directed toward expanding a single

aspect of Guillen's interpretation.

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