“Caracol”. Darío's response to the sonnet “Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx” Stéphane Mallarmé’s

Abstract

It is possible to see in the seashell of Darío’s sonnet “Caracol”, published for the first time in 1903 and included in Cantos de vida y esperanza, the symbol of poetry. The story told by the lyrical voice of the verses can be interpreted from the background of the myth of the Argonauts cited in the poem, as a variation of the translatio poesis from Europe to America of Bello’s “Alocución a la poesía”. But this possible understanding does not end here. On the basis of the seashell and its symbolic meaning, Darío’s sonnet seems to answer Stéphane Mallarmé’s sonnet “Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx”, well known by Darío. In Mallarmé’s poem, the “ptyx”, which can be identified with the absent seashell in the room mentioned by the lyrical voice, represents the poetry of silence, which Mallarmés tried to found. Unlike the French poet, who nevertheless he admired, Darío proposes with his poem a poetic renewal in Spanish language, capable to overcome the risk of muting, which poetry as such ran with the subtleties of French Symbolism.