So well are the _Cantares_ known in Galicia, that every one of them has become a part of the folklore of the province. “We hear them sung,” writes Failde, “in the most lonely villages on the most distant heights, and in the largest towns.” Yet Rosalia was not Galicia’s only poetess; contemporary with her were Sofia Casanova, who is still living, Narcisa Perez de Reoyo, “whose life was that of a flower,” Avelina Valladares, and Filomena Dato Muruáis, whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making during my visit to Orense.
Failde speaks of Rosalia as “an Æolian harp made of Celtic oak,” and “Galicia’s nightingale,” and he tells us in his little biography of the poetess that she was a model daughter, wife, and mother. She came of an old and noble Gallegan family, a family that had already produced many poets. Rosalia was born at Santiago on 21st February 1837. She was always “very delicate,” and the greater part of her life was a martyrdom through ill-health. In some of her poems she complains of the damp and cold of the long Santiago winters.
Rosalia’s poems are not in sympathy with the socialistic agrarianism that is spreading so fast in Andalusia; she liked to think that there was not a family in Galicia, however poor, that did not possess its own home and its own bit of land.
were words breathed from her very soul, and we English can translate them by our own equivalent--
Thierry said of the Ancient Britons that they lived upon poetry, and their poets had but one theme, the destiny of their country, its sorrows and its hopes. The Gallegans come of the same Celtic stock, and their love of poetry and their passion for home are quite as intense. “A Gallegan sticks to his native land,” says Failde, “like meat to the bone.”
Rosalia’s poetry, though full of majestic sadness, is by no means pessimistic; she is full of Christian resignation, but she is not devoid of Christian hope. “Rosalia,” wrote Emilio Castelar, “by her Gallegan lyrics has become a star of the first magnitude in the vast horizon of Spanish art.” There is nothing more tender or more full of feeling to be found in Spanish poetry than her lyric, “Padron, Padron.” One of the most striking characteristics of this poetess was her insight into the relationship between the exterior and the interior world. To her the earthly horizon was an emblem of the horizon that spreads before the human mind, the light of the stars spoke to her of the light of the eyes; a shower of rain reminded her of human tears, electricity in the clouds brought to her poetic mind the electric current of human sympathy. Nature spoke to her, and she listened. There is no effort about her verses; they are the outpourings of a poetic soul, candid and pure and simple and sparkling as the limpid waters of her native streams. “I have only had a village education,” she says naïvely in one of her prefaces, and in another she says, “We women are like a harp with only two strings, imagination and sentiment”;[200] and she adds that if a woman touches science she impregnates it with her innate debility.(!!) Rosalia writes because she cannot help writing; she is like a musical instrument that sounds because the strings are touched.