Lo inefable

Cantos de la mañana, 1910

Yo muero extrañamente...No me mata la vidano me mata la muerte, no me mata el amor;muero de un pensamiento mudo como una herida...¿No habeis sentido nunca el extraño dolor?

De un pensamiento inmenso que se arraiga en la vidadevorando alma y carne, y no alcanza a dar flor?¿Nunca llevasteis dentro una estrella dormidaque os abrazaba enteros y no daba un fulgor?...

¡Cumbre de los martirios!...llevar eterrnamentedesgarradora y árida, la trágica simienteclavada en las entrañas como un diente feroz!

Pero arrancarla un día en una flor que abrieramilagrosa, inviolable...¡Ah más grande no fueratener entre las manos la cabeza de Dios!...

From Cantos de la mañana (1910), via the Spanish Wikisource transcription. No emendation was made.

Public domainThis poem is in the public domain. You may read it, copy it, recite it and publish it without asking anyone.

About the poem

«Lo inefable» is one of Delmira Agustini's most intense sonnets. The speaker says she dies «strangely»: she is killed not by life or death or love, but by a silent thought that grows inside her like a wound, something that has no word and so cannot be brought to birth.

The closing image is fierce: it would be «divine» to burst and die of that thought, like someone trying to hold in their hands «a star» that burns and will not fit. Agustini was the great female voice of modernismo, and here she takes her language — sensual, exalted — to name precisely what will not be named: the inner life that overflows the body.

The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.