The return to childhood in the poetry of Asturias

Abstract

Only a very few poets have escaped to the topic we are going to deal with in this study: the return to childhood, the attempt to rescue and reflect, through literature, and more specifically through poetry, that lost paradise, the childhood Arcadia, the longing for scenes related to nature, to the intimate harmony with nature, and to innocence; places where time hardly existed, neither pain nor anguish, always protected by the main family figures, grandparents, parents, siblings. Only a very few works do not return to the origins and recall that coexistence with the rural world and everything derived from it: timelessness, light, freedom, greenery, carefreeness.

We are therefore going to review the most representative figures of our literature, that of Asturias, in search of the rich and very different images with which the poets bring us closer to that time, and that time when they felt they were happy dwellers of those places, absolute protagonists of a world that becomes ever larger as we grow up, and which is all the more present the further we leave it behind. A common place, from the Latin classics onwards, which sometimes becomes a way of condemning the abandonment of villages and the destruction of traditional and simple life, as opposed to the coldness of the cities: in other words, it serves the authors to introduce other clichés such as the beatus ille, locus amoenus, or the endearing paternal home.

Childhood, a stage which, for almost all those who write, corresponds to a time of adventure and magic, of infinite possibilities and dreams, years of happiness in a space as privileged as it is idealised.