In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

MOUNTAINEERING 133
the form of a tension between a subject that bears all the conventional
traits of the Romantic poet and the overwhelming closeness of the mountains,
in which the Romantic subject senses the presence of death. [see
Immanence = Transcendence (Death)] In its proud solitude and its "satanic"
cynicism, the lyrical "I" at first rivals the coldness of the surrounding
nature:
My immoderate satanic pride
finally trod, beneath its triumphant feet,
the apex of the mountain heights, never before tracked,
Not even by golden eagles .. .
The sky laments my pain ... and everything
Is obliterated by darkness and undone by mire,
And above the ice of the summit, standing tall,
My soul is so frozen that it does not notice,
Snarling over the cadaver of my life,
That gigantic black bear-death!
Whereas Crane's poem involves no explicit subjectivity whose imagination
could transform the mountains of North Labrador into an erotic
body, the lethal threat of the mountains in "Desde los Andes" finallyand
paradoxically-warms the icy spaces of the observer's soul. The
menacing presence of nature imbues the poet-observer's view of his own
existence with a pervasive anxiety that heightens and intensifies his
feeling of life:
The darkness spread and became denser,
Almost palpable, like something alive;
And a convulsive anguish shook
The frozen peace of the immense mountain ...
And there was a silence of thoughtful pain
That, thinking, increases its pain ...
Life became more sensitive,
And emotion, deeper and more intense!
Ice and snow, the mountains and the cold, seem regularly and invariably
to trigger such associations with death and sexuality. Even a modest
sonnet on the month of January published in the Madrid weekly Blanco