Piedra del Sol / Sunstone

This is the title of my favorite poem of the 20th century, composed by my favorite poet of the 20th century, the Mexican Octavio Paz (b. 1914 - d. 1998).  As often seems to be the case with Hispanic poets, Paz published his first volume in his teenage years and continued a recognizable arc of development throughout the rest of his life.  It is said that a prophet is never accepted in his homeland, and this seems to be the case with Paz as a poet.  His poetics were shaped by his manifold experiences living in first the United States (during WWII), Paris after the war, Japan, India, back to Mexico, back to Paris, back to India, with his final uncomfortable but permanent return to his homeland coming in 1968.  He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990.

This poem was published in 1957 and it represented a huge leap forward in the visionary topography of Paz's interior and poetic world.  In one sense, it capped everything he had been working on until that time.  And in another, it presaged his mature work which followed.

I would say that for Paz, the most numinous experience, the most significant experience in life and in his poetry, was the coupling of a man and a woman.  He returns to this again and again in his poetry.  In his life, he had a fated meeting with a young French woman in India in 1964, a seemingly chance meeting with her again in Europe the next year, and then they literally spent not a day apart for the rest of Paz's life.

This poem contains 584 lines, in reference to the Mayan calendar and the dance between the planet Venus and the Sun, as there are 584 days denoting Venus's  synodic cycle and then its apparent conjunction with the sun.  This poem, really, is about alternation between conjunction and disjunction.  But more than that, in the quality of the opening lines, Paz captures something I've never before seen in poetry -- it's a perfect cascade of phrases in a single sentence that lasts the entire length of the book.  I'm going to quote the opening fourteen lines:

a crystal willow, a poplar of water,/ a tall fountain the wind arches over,/ a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still,/ a course of a river that turns, moves on,/ doubles back, and comes full-circle,/ forever arriving,/ the calm course/ of the stars or an unhurried spring,/ water with eyes closed welling over/ with oracles all night long,/ a single presence in a surge of waves,/ wave after wave till it covers all,/ a reign of green that knows no decline,/ like the flash of wings unfolding in the sky,...

To me, that is the most lyrical opening or extended passage that I've yet read.  There's a short video of a stanza that occurs later in the poem.  In the hand of another, it would be mere trite romance.  With Paz, it is somehow something much deeper, and more: