SOURCE: “Sleep Images in Gabriela Mistral's ‘Canciones de Cuna,’” in CLA Journal, Vol. 37, No. 9, 1993, pp. 94–103.

In the following essay, Dewberry discusses the imagery and associations surrounding sleep in Mistral's lullabies.

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet known by her pen name of Gabriela Mistral, wrote very subjective poetry and prose which expressed values essential to contemporary man. She gained popularity and literary fame to the extent of earning the highest literary award in the world, the Nobel Prize for Literature, presented to her in Sweden on November 15, 1945. She was both the first woman and the first Hispanic-American writer to receive this high, universal recognition.¹

Mistral was born into a poor family on April 7, 1889, in the Chilean village of Vicuña on the River Elqui. As a child, she lived in the small town of Montegrande, where her father was a schoolmaster and where she, in turn, became a...