de la vieja ventana se asiò a la barra
Per la antigua ventana que de sobre al jardin—
... del espacio la negra sombre
flitran por la ventana rayos de luna ...
I think of him as the poet of windows. I wonder why they fascinated him so? Were they symbols of escape? Or did they spread out vistas for him? Always in his lines, for me, there is some maddening, unseizable beauty, which holds me helpless like a magnet, makes me a speechless, but willing prisoner.
His little posthumous book of verse (The greater number of his poems together with all his short stories and most of his prose, were lost in shipwreck on the Venezuelan coast.) is a musicale diary of his days, alas! so few. Here transformed, then preserved in beauty, we find fact.
A new use of recurrent sound, with him wholly personal, spots phrases with weird echoes, insistent wild, wayward emotion. There slips over us continually the sad shiver of faint, far fairy bells.
There are rhythms like the clash of armor-resonant; and rhythms like the shrill song of little yellow birds at dawn. He says that among verse-forms, the sonnet is king.
He can give perfectly the aroma of the season of the year. A few words.... I smell the winds of autumn in a high mountain-land and taste the purpling grape. All from three chained words of Silvá! Then I see white mist distort the meadows and feel the frost. He witches back the spirit of what has vanished, and with a lordly gesture. The past, perhaps, perfumed his dreams. The trembling fragility of his sensations is something almost beyond comprehension. I have received tremendous emotion from the haunting beauty of old windows, in old grey, stone-stucco, tinted, crumbling palaces of the conquistadores—after Silvá has taught me to see.