SOURCE: Jiménez-Fajardo, Salvador. “Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn: The Gaze Within.” In Luis Cernuda, pp. 70-95. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

In the following essay, Jiménez-Fajardo examines Cernuda's themes of the relationship between the poet and his work, the opposition of desire and time, and notions of death and cosmic unity in Como quien espera el alba.

I Introduction

Como quien espera el alba (Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn) was included in the 1958 edition of Reality and Desire, but it had been published independently in 1947 by Losada in Buenos Aires. Of its title Cernuda says in “History of a Book”: “The conclusion of the war reached me in Cambridge, and the title, Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn, alludes to those years, since at that time it seemed possible only to wait, to wait for the end of that retrocession to a primitive world of obscurity...