Antonio Machado collected Recuerdo infantil ("Childhood Memory") in Soledades. Galerías. Otros poemas (1907), the book of his first manner — intimate and symbolist, before the austere Castile that would make him famous. The poem remembers an ordinary afternoon at school: the grey winter, rain on the windows, a poster of Cain and Abel on the wall, an old teacher "gaunt and dry", and a chorus of children chanting the multiplication table.
Nothing happens, and that is the point. The tedium is both the subject and the form: the lines are short, the rhyme as regular and hammering as the lesson, and the last stanza repeats the first almost word for word — only "behind the panes" becomes "on the panes" — so that the poem closes on itself the way an afternoon that will not end closes. The stopped time of childhood is caught in that circle.
Machado, the major voice of Spain's Generation of 98, made monotony a precision instrument. Under the schoolroom scene beats his lifelong theme: memory, the passing of time, and those "thousand times a thousand" a child chants without suspecting how much time fits inside the sum.
The verse is kept in Spanish. Translating it in passing would replace the work with a paraphrase of it.