Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain

by Annette M. B. Meakin

True hearts are worn with waiting
Through long and weary years;
Widow and wife together weep,
And none can dry their tears.”

A strain of exalted sadness runs through all the poetry of Rosalia Castro, and its nature is essentially elegiac. Rosalia suffers with those who are afflicted, and speaks for those who are dumb. Rich and poor alike repeat her verses to express their deepest and most tender thoughts; there is not a Gallegan who does not quote her, not a peasant girl who does not love her name. All Galicia’s sorrows find an echo in her poems, and her sorrow of sorrows, the pain of parting, the anguish of absence, the throb of home-sickness—the sorrow of emigration, is felt in almost every line.[197]

Rosalia’s lyrics are sweet and simple idyls of Galicia’s pastoral life. As we read them we wander among the green valleys and beside the clear waters of her myriad brooks; we hear the singing of the wooden cart wheels in the country lanes, and feel the humidity of the mist-laden air. We rejoice with her in the warm spring sunshine, and when the summer comes we share with her the aroma of the abundant fruits and flowers; we hear the peasant boy singing to the accompaniment of his beloved gaita; we watch the white sails of the boats as they glide upon the calm blue surface of her glorious rias; we see the ocean foam dash mountain high against her rocky coast, and through all we feel the throbbing presence of Galicia’s pain and sorrow.

The beautiful hills and valleys of Galicia inspire her children with such a wild and passionate love of home as I have never met with elsewhere. Emigrants from all countries suffer more or less from home-sickness, but it is only the emigrants of Galicia who die of it. Yes, many and many a Gallegan peasant has died of sadness because he could not return to his native land. This home-sickness is a real malady, it has a special name in the Gallegan language; it is called morriña.[198] It is not surprising, then, that Galicia’s sons far away in Cuba should have collected money to raise a monument to the memory of a poetess who expressed their woes with such idyllic sweetness, and in the melodious dialect of their dear native province that they had learned as children at their mother’s knee. And this fervent appreciation of the poetess is no mere local cult; it goes wherever a Gallegan goes, it accompanies the emigrants as they embark for other shores, and the name of Rosalia Castro is honoured wherever Gallegans are to be found.

Rosalia Castro was brought up at Padron, and it was there that she breathed her last; a tablet on the house that she lived in bears the date of her death, 15th July 1885. Her earliest work, and perhaps her best, was a small volume of popular poems entitled Cantares Gallegas: she also wrote a book entitled As Viudas d’os vivos e as viudas d’os mortos (“The Widows of the Living and the Widows of the Dead”). Rosalia began to write poetry at the age of eleven. At the age of twenty she was married to Señor Murguia. Her death occurred in her forty-eighth year. She published several novels, and wrote a great deal more poetry than was ever published, but before her death she expressed a wish that all her unpublished writings might be burned—and her friends respected this wish.

Follas Novas is perhaps her most popular volume; it consists of a collection of short lyrics. I tried hard to buy a copy, but it has long been out of print, and was not to be had even in Madrid. Failde[199] relates that a man who possessed a copy, being asked to sell it, replied that he would not part with it for its weight in gold. The only one of Rosalia’s books which reached a second edition is her first, Cantares Gallegas, but that, too, is now out of print. Both of these volumes were, however, lent to me during my stay in Galicia, and from them I copied a few of the lyrics that pleased me most.

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.

“Miña cariña, meu lar,”