EXTINCTION

EXTINCTION

by Jorge Guillen

Translated by Cola Franzen

When love is extinguished little by little,
without the jolt of a rupture,
it is difficult to recount vicissitudes,
to carry the story to its pathetic
knot,
to stop the instant when love
turns into not love
beneath a summer's light,
a slow slow summer across skies
still glowing though the sun's now hidden,
when a barely perceptible negligence
gives the late step of the strollers
a calm of neutral peace,
and while the attention
wander among intimate fogs,
sketches of abandonment
dissolve in the dusk,
and though inspiring to the soul
those hours deeply branded
by that love remain extinct.

Jorge Guillen, one of the greatest Spanish Poets of last century, was a poet of luminous intelligence and possessed a metaphysical passion for reality. He was a poet of spacial and temporal essences, which he delineates in his passionately smart poems. " I am decidedly in favor of compound, complex poetry," the poet said in 1926, "of the poem made of poetry and other human things." 

His  ideal has always been to create pure poetry. Much of Guillén's work explores the relationship of form to matter while delighting in sensuality and clarity of perception. 

This is a lovely poem . The slow atrophy, sometimes unknowingly, of a noble emotion like love can sometimes be more catastrophic than a sudden rupture in relationship. The poet then turns his eyes into the nature with lines that speaks of summer with the Sun hidden. The poem has a meditative quality, which is a hallmark of many of his poems. He is  always concerned about the underlying essence of the cosmos.

Source : Horses in the Air and other Poems by Jorge Guillen. Translated by Cola Franzen. Publisher City Light Books