“Lamentos de un poeta”

“Lamentos de un poeta” - from El Mester de Clerecía y la literatura didáctica / Jesús Cañas Murillo by José Joaquín de Mora; estimated to be written around 1820.

I deny the faulty star,

Whose hidden influence

Condemned me to the love of poetry

That already cursed my temper.

I would have further benefited if I had

Studied forensic formulas,

And filled my mind with the jumble

Of gloomy legal theory.

With this, and speaking from the throne of pretension,

And with a little overseeing,

The rich lived splendidly

At the expense of stolen people;

That in this vast valley of tears

Lives the sordid greed-

The truth has no devoted followers,

Morality is a hollow fraud;

And in the bellowing sea

Of roaring passion,

It’s fishing without fear of the vicious southern wind

In a lawyer’s gondola. 

   Or in the markets, 

multiply cheap wares a hundred times over,

Choking every conscience with icy math

Your tears, fragile conscience. 

Or make me a devout pacifist member

Of our Catholic church

If faith allowed, I’d be a saint

Of Cartagena or Córdoba.

Or send me off in to the army;

Imagine if in the horrid bloody battles

They unleash mass hell upon us-

The bayonet and gun powder.

  Faceless figures without courage nor strategy,

Wearing golden braids;

If not in the battlefield, in the opera.

   It suffices to flatter the noble,

and reap the monetary rewards,

be it from the people, the prince,

or some aristocratic faction.

   Better to imitate a satrap

of the Babylonian kin,

than to emulate the courage

of Themistocles, Cimon, or Pelopidas

   The infamous fables 

Were granted in the timeless chronicles

To the renowned Spartan of valor

That met his end at Thermopylae;

    But who is the fool today

Who, aspiring to posthumous fame,

Anticipatingly awaits the finality of death,

Which has already robbed us infinitely?

Or would you denounce me a settler,

And with diabolical complications tangling a web,

Plundering the bested Monarch and his disciples 

Inevitably, the rise of the Spanish economy needs its decline, balancing out. In this instance, there were a culmination of factors that led to a worsening of the Spanish financial infrastructure, primarily war, loss of colonies, and political instability. 

Firstly, the Napoleonic Wars (1808-1814) devastated the economy for a significant period. In this poem, specifically, this factor for decline manifests through the loss of compensation for occupations not directly needed for survival, such as literary professions. This poem, through romanticizing other, often monotonous jobs for their comfort, shows the immense hardship, especially financially, that professions like poets were subjected to. In this era, the buildup of the workforce shifted, with more people flocking to steadier careers, slowing the literary and artistic progression and evolution in Spain during this era. Just emerging from the trenches of war, the Spanish people prioritized the cushioned barrier from poverty that was provided to them through stable work; this, often undesirable, work acted as an inflatable raft protecting them from the roaring waters of the river below: a temporary lifeline protecting them, yet fragile enough to be penetrated once and leave them to drown in the unconquerable, suffocating lack of resources in an unforgiving society such as this era of Spain.