Elementos marinos en Ramón López Velarde: un poeta que no conoció el mar

Maritime elements in the oeuvre of Ramon Lopez Velarde,a poet who ‘never knew the sea’Considered by many as the ‘national poet’ of Mexico, cantor of a province traumatized by the 1910 Revolution, Ramon Lopez Velarde Jerez writes poetry abounding in maritime metaphors: boat, vessel, islands, among many other images match the voice of a poet who equated his own personality to a lamp: a sailboat-shaped vessel, which hangs in the Cathedral of San Luis Potosi. In a poetic horizon that extends between the ends of a marked dualism, Lopez Velarde aspires, as he says in one of his most celebrated poems, to ‘drop anchor in the last treasure of love’. Similarly, he speaks of a ‘curly tide’, in which ‘the sea smiles’ and ‘unstable foam is eternity’. His are wonderful, crystal-clear, images: no small thing in the case of a poet who, as they say, ‘never knew the sea’.