Volverán las oscuras golondrinas

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer(1836–1870)

Rimas, 1871

Volverán las oscuras golondrinasEn tu balcón sus nidos á colgar,Y, otra vez, con el ala á sus cristalesJugando llamarán.

Pero aquellas que el vuelo refrenabanTu hermosura y mi dicha á contemplar,Aquellas que aprendieron nuestros nombres...Esas... ¡no volverán!

Volverán las tupidas madreselvasDe tu jardín las tapias á escalar,Y otra vez á la tarde, aun más hermosas,Sus flores se abrirán;

Pero aquéllas, cuajadas de rocío,Cuyas gotas mirábamos temblarY caer, como lágrimas del día...Esas... ¡no volverán!

Volverán del amor en tus oídosLas palabras ardientes á sonar;Tu corazón de su profundo sueñoTal vez despertará;

Pero mudo y absorto y de rodillas,Como se adora á Dios ante su altar,Como yo te he querido... desengáñate,Así no te querrán!

This is Rima LIII. The text follows the 1885 edition of Bécquer's Obras, from the Spanish Wikisource transcription; the Rimas were first published in 1871, a year after their author's death. It keeps that edition's period spelling — the accented «á», «aquéllas» — which is the original, not an error.

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

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer died in Madrid in 1870, thirty-four years old, poor and almost unpublished as a poet. His friends gathered the Rimas and brought them out in 1871, drawn from a manuscript notebook; the order they are numbered in today — this is the fifty-third — is the one those friends gave them. Modern Spanish poetry begins with that small posthumous book.

The poem is built on one promise kept and one broken. Three times it announces that something will return — the swallows to the balcony, the honeysuckle to the garden wall, the ardent words of love to the ear — and three times, in the same breath, it sets aside the only thing that mattered: those swallows that learned our names, those dewdrops we watched tremble, that way of loving. What returns is the kind; what does not return is what was ours.

And it saves the blow for the end. After three stanzas of nature coming back, the last one kneels and tells the whole truth: like this, the way I have loved you — undeceive yourself — no one will love you. It is not a poem about swallows. It is a poem about what does not come again.

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