SOURCE: "Rosalía de Castro's En las orillas del Sar: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation," in Symposium, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, Winter, 1972, pp. 363-75.

In the following essay, Schwartz explores the destructive, libidinal, and neurotic themes and imagery of En las orillas del Sar.

Poets have always been concerned with death, the world's greatest mystery. With its own special function in an ordered universe, death has been viewed as something of infinite horror yet at the same time as something desired, the final answer to incomprehensible truths, as a new experience, and as a peaceful end to pain. In En las orillas del Sar (1884), written over a period of years,¹ Rosalía de Castro elevated death (for her not a conventional metaphor) to a poetic as well as external reality. It represents her most exalted concentration on and contemplation of death. Whether as the result of traumatic events or because of...