Ophelia’s Lyric Body
Myth, Invention, and Water-Eroticism in Latin American Poetry: a Comparative Analysis
Osvaldo Cleger
Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
The body of Ophelia—specifically, the iconic representation of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine—remains one of the most pervasive images of the female body in 19th-century European culture. In the France of Arthur Rimbaud and the England of George Richard Falkenberg, Arthur Hughes, John William Waterhouse, and Ernest Hébert, we witness the rise of a generation of artists and writers who reimagined the myth of this Shakespearean character, transforming her body into a central figure in many of their works. Ophelia’s body became a prevalent theme among Symbolist writers and Pre-Raphaelite painters. Latin American modernism also embraced the theme of Ophelia, drawing inspiration from their frequent encounters with the European Symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite schools. The intertwining of aquatic motifs with the erotic representation of the female body in the Ophelia myth held a powerful allure for Latin American modernist and postmodernist sensibilities. This essay explores the myth of Ophelia through a close analysis of the body in the work of Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz. It begins by situating the significance of this myth and its iconic representations within the European context, followed by an in-depth examination of its echoes in Loynaz’s poetry.
El cuerpo de Ofelia—en particular, la representación icónica de la trágica heroína de Shakespeare—constituye una de las proyecciones femeninas más recurrentes en las concepciones sobre el cuerpo refrendadas por la cultura europea del siglo XIX. Desde la Francia de Arthur Rimbaud hasta la Inglaterra de George Richard Falkenberg, Arthur Hughes, John William Waterhouse y Ernest Hébert, se observa el surgimiento de una generación de artistas y escritores que reimaginaron el mito de este personaje shakespeariano, transformando su cuerpo en una figura central en numerosas de sus obras. Este tema adquirió una relevancia especial entre los escritores simbolistas y los pintores prerrafaelitas. El modernismo latinoamericano también adoptó el tema de Ofelia, influido por su frecuente comercio con la escuela simbolista y prerrafaelita europea. La fusión de motivos acuáticos con la representación erótica del cuerpo femenino en el mito de Ofelia cautivó profundamente las sensibilidades modernistas y posmodernistas latinoamericanas. Este ensayo analiza el mito de Ofelia a través de su estudio en la obra de la poeta cubana Dulce María Loynaz. El ensayo comienza situando la relevancia de este mito y sus representaciones icónicas en el contexto europeo, para luego examinar sus resonancias en la poesía de Loynaz.
I
Ophelia’s body
“Voici plus de mille ans que la triste Ophélie
Passe, fantôme blanc, sur le long fleuve noir.
Voici plus de mille ans que sa douce folie
Murmure sa romance à la brise du soir.”
Arthur Rimbaud, Ophélie [“For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia / drifts, a white phantom, on the long black river. / For more than a thousand years, her sweet madness / whispers her romance to the evening breeze.”] (1)
In Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, written at the height of the Symbolist movement in France, Ophelia is portrayed with all the elements that make her image one of the most lyrical aquatic representations in Western iconography. The specter of the Shakespearean heroine in this text wanders, white and ghostly, downriver, descending through a time that is neither present nor past, but eternal, seasonal, and cyclical. The position of the body is horizontal, not diagonal or reclining, as in the erotic portraits of Leda and Sappho. This is a figure lying down, put to sleep. We can envision the arms and hands linked over the chest; at other times, they might float next to the hips or open in a cross, as if their image evoked an immense compass rose adrift. We are not examining the silhouette of a naked woman; rather, it is a hidden, veiled outline. In fact, the speaker never clearly defines the garments that surround her; he speaks vaguely of “long veils,” possibly referring to the fringes of a dress. “Flotte très lentement, couchée en ses longs voiles…” [“She floats very slowly, lying in her long veils”]. The final veil that envelops this Ophelia, one might say, is the water itself, along with the small branches, tree leaves, or flower petals that cling to her as she navigates the river: “Les nénuphars froissés soupirent autour d’elle.” [“The crumpled water lilies sigh softly around her”]. Her clothing is made from a combination of sheer fabrics and veils, featuring both exposed and hidden elements, and could be described as a large floral design. “La blanche Ophélia flotte comme un grand lys.” [“The white Ophelia drifts like a majestic lily”]. The intervention of the wind in the poem’s third stanza introduces a subtly erotic exchange: “Le vent baise ses seins et déploie en corolle / ses grands voiles bercés mollement par les eaux.” [“The wind kisses her breasts and unfurls in a corolla / her large veils gently rocked by the waters”]. The breasts and veils that cover the corpse swell as the wind touches the nipples, unfurling the sails that keep the body drifting downstream. Ophelia’s is a floating corpse, but a corpse full of nature—an adherent creature whose rough contours cling to the fragments of organisms she encounters in her path. Finally, it should be noted that, although we are confronted with an essentially silent representation, Ophelia’s lips seem to whisper something that could very well be the words of a poem or the echoes of a delirium. “Voici plus de mille ans que sa douce folie / murmure sa romance à la brise du soir.” (Rimbaud 11-12) [“For over a thousand years, her sweet madness / has whispered its romance to the evening breeze”].
For the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite school, Ophelia was more than just a spectral creature of the waters. She was also the fragile girl who, sitting on the trunk of a willow tree at the river’s edge, monologued with the riverbed or threaded flowers into her hair in the moments before her plunge into the cold currents and her death. This portrayal of Ophelia is different—alive, more humanized.
She is torn between Hamlet’s contempt and the seduction of the river, between the life of the palace and the call of nature. She became the icon of madness par excellence. This is how she was captured in the paintings of artists such as George Richard Falkenberg Arthur Hughes, John William Waterhouse, and Ernest Hébert, among others. Sometimes, she appears full-length with a crown of rushes on her head, abstractedly contemplating the descent of the waters (see Figure 2); other times, it is just a close-up –a face with staring eyes furrowed by thick dark circles, a makeup style popular at the fin de siecle, and disheveled hair covered in lilies (see Figure 3)
The intervention of the wind in the poem’s third stanza introduces a subtly erotic exchange: “Le vent baise ses seins et déploie en corolle / ses grands voiles bercés mollement par les eaux.” [“The wind kisses her breasts and unfurls in a corolla / her large veils gently rocked by the waters”]. The breasts and veils that cover the corpse swell as the wind touches the nipples, unfurling the sails that keep the body drifting downstream. Ophelia’s is a floating corpse, but a corpse full of nature—an adherent creature whose rough contours cling to the fragments of organisms she encounters in her path. Finally, it should be noted that, although we are confronted with an essentially silent representation, Ophelia’s lips seem to whisper something that could very well be the words of a poem or the echoes of a delirium. “Voici plus de mille ans que sa douce folie / murmure sa romance à la brise du soir.” (Rimbaud 11-12) [“For over a thousand years, her sweet madness / has whispered its romance to the evening breeze”].
For the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite school, Ophelia was more than just a spectral creature of the waters. She was also the fragile girl who, sitting on the trunk of a willow tree at the river’s edge, monologued with the riverbed or threaded flowers into her hair in the moments before her plunge into the cold currents and her death. This portrayal of Ophelia is different—alive, more humanized. She is the one torn between Hamlet’s contempt and the seduction of the river, between the life of the palace and the call of nature. She became the icon of madness par excellence. This is how she was captured in the paintings of artists such as George Richard Falkenberg Arthur Hughes, John William Waterhouse, and Ernest Hébert, among others. Sometimes, she appears full-length with a crown of rushes on her head, abstractedly contemplating the descent of the waters (see Figure 2); other times, it is just a close-up –a face with staring eyes furrowed by thick dark circles, a makeup style popular at the fin de siecle, and disheveled hair covered in lilies (see Figure 3)
What did all these Ophelias mean within the erotic iconography of the late 19th century? What prompted poets and visual artists to dedicate a significant portion of their texts and artistic works to Ophelia’s body, or to her mythical representation? According to Bram Dijkstra, the popularity achieved by the Shakespearean heroine in Pre-Raphaelite and French Symbolist circles was due to her status as “an example of the love-crazed, self-sacrificial woman who most perfectly demonstrated her devotion to her man by descending into madness” (42). That is, Ophelia as an idol of madness unleashed by amorous frustration; a heroine similar to Giselle, brought to the stage in 1841 by Théophile Gautier and Jules Perrot, or to Elaine in the poems of Alfred Tennyson. These female figures sought to satisfy “the nineteenth-century male’s fondest fantasies of feminine dependency” (Dijkstra 42).
This interpretation is undoubtedly valid insofar as it helps to clarify one of the central ideological motivations behind the appropriation of the icon of Ophelia. The close link between the feminine iconography promoted in the arts at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the values of Victorian and Decadent culture, is a fact that has already been firmly established. In Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siècle Culture, Dijkstra has conducted a very insightful investigation to unravel this ideological framework. However, this interpretation still fails to explain the significance of the Ophelian body on an aesthetic level, nor does it account for the predilection that many female artists had for this icon and its expressive possibilities.
Ophelia, as I aim to demonstrate in this essay, transcends her role as a mere representation of the phallogocentric imaginary of Victorian culture. She embodies an image rich with undeniable artistic values inherent to her character. Her myth reconfigures and revitalizes a variety of themes and motifs drawn from traditional poetry, infusing them with fresh content: madness and suicide; the motif of floral arrangements; the depiction of the pale, helpless maiden (often portrayed in a sleeping posture evocative of fairy tales); scenes of romantic despair by the water; the philosophical meditation on the eternal flow of the current; nature’s complicity with the rejected lover; the sensual interplay of water with a semi-exposed body; and the vision of the river as a personified lover. Each of these themes and motifs, even when considered individually, possesses the potential to endow this icon with profound lyricism and evocative representational power. Yet the myth of Ophelia unites, reorders, and reimagines them, producing an icon that epitomizes the process of invention of the lyric body. (2)
It should not be surprising, then, that the representation of the Ophelian body has become one of the favored themes of fin-de-siècle European art and that it has, through this route, entered Spanish-language literature.
In the works of Spanish-speaking writers, such as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer—who dedicated his “Rima VI” to Ophelia (Flores 198) and made her his mythical ideal of beauty (3)—Ophelia embodies the dual meaning previously mentioned: an icon that expresses feminine dependence, allegorized through images of suicide and madness (Dijkstra), and a mythical cycle that offers an interpretation of the concept of the “lyric body.” The lyric body here should be understood as an empty body, devoid of inherent meaning yet adherent, that is: capable of attracting a chain of signifiers veiled in the consciousness of the speaking subject.
This last aspect accounts for the appropriation of the Ophelian body by a group of female writers, including Alfonsina Storni, Julia de Burgos, and Dulce María Loynaz. These writers see in the contemplation of the insane young woman who commits suicide in the river (a motif they draw from the Ophelian myth, even when Ophelia is not explicitly identified in their texts) and in the portrayal of the river as the lover of this ghostly figure, something more profound than a mere pretext to express their subordinate status within the social hierarchies of the time. For the writers I have mentioned, the Ophelian body serves a dual purpose: 1) it acts as a poetic-mythical resource that allows them to engage with various traditions of Western iconography related to the representation of the lyric body (including the aforementioned motifs of madness, suicide, floral imagery, and aquatic eroticism); and 2) it represents an empty body that, nonetheless, possesses the ability to magnetize and refract—without ever fully revealing—the repressed contents of the lyrical subject’s consciousness.
In the following pages, I propose an approach to the Ophelian body framed within the parameters outlined above, based on an analysis of the work of one of the authors who best represents it in Spanish: the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz. As I will demonstrate in the subsequent sections, the mythical cycle of Ophelia serves as the underlying element that shapes Loynaz’s exploration of the water motif. Even in those poems where the lyrical voice does not explicitly reference Ophelia, our critical examination of these texts will reveal that the archetypal components of the Ophelian myth provide unity and meaning to the imaginative whole crafted by the speaker’s discourse. In this regard, my work aims to complement other investigations into Loynaz’s aquatic imagery conducted by researchers such as Asunción Horno-Delgado in her book Margen acuático: poesía de Dulce María Loynaz and María Lucía Puppo in La música del agua: poesía y referencia en la obra de Dulce María Loynaz. While both authors undeniably offer coherent investigations of some of the primary tropes associated with water imagery in Loynaz’s poetry, they do not consider the close connection this imagery has with the mythical cycle of Ophelia. This essay is primarily directed toward establishing such a link.
II
Dulce María Loynaz: Ophelian Body and Aquatic Reveries
In 1947, Dulce María Loynaz published her second poetry collection, Juegos de agua. Versos del agua y del amor (Water Games. Verses of Water and Love). As the title implies, the book revolves around playful, water-themed imagery imbued with a sense of eroticism. A glance at the table of contents reveals the intricate aquatic cartography Loynaz meticulously charts throughout her poems. Consider some of the evocative titles: Isla (Island), Los peces (The Fish), La mujer y el mar (The Woman and the Sea), Marinero de cara obscura (Dark-Faced Sailor), Estribillo del amor de mar (Refrain of the Love of the Sea), Infancia del río (River’s Childhood), El agua revelada (Revealed Water), El remanso (Backwater), Domingo de lluvia (Rainy Sunday), Manantial (Spring), and Agua en el parque (Water in the Park). These titles evoke vivid scenes of shipwrecks, port arrivals, unanchored journeys, riverbank strolls, and water’s innocent play with itself. The collection stands as one of Loynaz’s most structurally and thematically cohesive works. In musical terms, it could be likened to a theme with variations, while conceptually, it invites us to consider it as a phenomenology of the liquid element.
Horno-Delgado explores this idea by stating that in Juegos de agua, “[se] elabora una continua metaforización del mundo líquido, en el que se destaca una diversificación de matices con respecto a los diferentes accidentes geográficos involucrados en el proceso retórico” (162) [“a continuous metaphorization of the liquid world is developed, in which a diversification of nuances stands out with respect to the different geographical accidents involved in the rhetorical process”]. Through her critical filtering of this rhetorical universe, Horno Delgado concludes that: “El análisis de la poética de Loynaz plantea un diseño múltiple que tiene en cuenta los siguientes factores: el sometimiento al silencio, la recuperación de la voz, la conciencia de cercenamiento, la liquidificación como estrategia de autorrecuperación de identidad y el establecimiento de imágenes plurales que condensan aire y agua” (152) [“The analysis of Loynaz’s poetics proposes a multiple design that takes into account the following factors: submission to silence, the recovery of the voice, the awareness of severance, liquidification as a strategy of self-recovery of identity, and the establishment of plural images that condense air and water”].
In sum, Horno-Delgado offers a psychology-based approach, emphasizing themes like the “awareness of severance” and “liquidification as a strategy for self-recovery of identity.” This reading delves into the internal dynamics of Loynaz’s poetics, interpreting the imagery of water as a reflection of personal emotional states. Concepts such as silence and voice are tied to psychological processes of suppression and liberation, while severance is read as a metaphor for fragmentation or loss, and liquidification as a regenerative act. For Horno-Delgado, Loynaz’s work reveals a psyche negotiating its relationship with fluidity as both a condition of identity and a medium for transformation. My approach to Loynaz’s texts departs from this psychologically grounded framework, focusing instead on the mythical and archetypal cycle of Ophelia. I argue that Loynaz’s metaphorical universe, while rich in its psychical dimensions, achieves narrative unity and visual coherence by drawing on one of the most iconic aquatic myths of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
A definition of Loynaz’s poetry that focuses primarily on the distinct expressions of the liquid universe in Juegos de agua would be incomplete. Water in Loynaz’s text is never isolated; it is always inseparably linked to the dimension of the body. The body watches from the shore, roams or prowls along the banks, contemplates the flowing or stagnant currents, and experiences water’s embrace. It is bathed, overwhelmed, submerged, swept away by a wave, resurrected, or extinguished. In essence, it is the Ophelian body.
This Ophelian body, as I outlined earlier, has two fundamental representational positions: vertical and recumbent. The vertical position dominates the first half of the mythic cycle when Ophelia, still alive, wanders madly through the forest. This image is iconographically captured in the paintings of Hughes and Waterhouse. Conversely, the recumbent position predominates in the second half, or the outcome, of the story: it is the spectral Ophelia, the floating corpse depicted by Rimbaud and Sir John Everett Millais. The first representation overwhelms with its cathartic vigor, evoking in the spectator a sensation of fragility and helplessness that permeates the young woman’s body. The second representation, however, carries an ambiguous meaning; it conveys both the impression of liberation as the body decides to drown and merge with nature, and a morbid eroticism, which fails to conceal its aestheticized dose of necrophilia.
In the poetry of Dulce María Loynaz, we encounter both Ophelian representations: the maiden wandering through the forest and the spectral figure frozen in the waters. Poems like Mal pensamiento emerge from a fusion of these two images:
Qué honda serenidad
el agua tiene esta noche…!
Ni siquiera brilla:
Tersa,
obscura, aterciopelada,
está a mis pies extendida
como un lecho…
No hay estrellas.
Estoy sola y he sentido
en el rostro la frescura
de los cabellos mojados
de Ofelia… (201).
[“What a profound serenity / water holds tonight…! / It doesn’t even shine: / Smooth, / dark, velvety, / it stretches at my feet / like a bed… / No stars. / I am alone and have felt / on my face the coolness / of Ophelia’s / wet hair…”].
In most of Loynaz’s texts, Ophelia is not evoked as explicitly as she is at the end of this poem. Instead, she is a fractured referent that the reader must reconstruct through the fragmentary evidence provided and through a reading focused on unveiling the archetypes within the discourse. However, the explicit reference to Ophelia in this text and the clear identification articulated between the lyrical speaker and the Shakespearean heroine help establish the centrality of this icon and its mythic cycle within the Loynazian universe.
The poem opens with the lyrical speaker contemplating the stillness of a backwater. The entire first part focuses on recreating the nocturnal environment with great economy of resources, highlighting the liquid textures that the speaker contemplates from her vertical, privileged position by the riverbank. The allusion to water as a “dark, velvety” presence, almost tactile in its density, foreshadows the appearance of Ophelia’s wet hair at the end of the scene. The speaker is herself Ophelia or an Ophelian body, a young woman who wanders at night along the riverbank until she experiences a death drive. The title Bad Thought, the somber atmosphere of the night, the vertiginous sensation experienced by the reader when observing the young woman poised above the water, and the final appearance of Ophelia’s floating corpse all make it unmistakable that we are witnessing the recreation of a suicide scene.
This “bad thought” seems to seduce rather than torment the young woman. The assembly of the two parts of the mythical cycle recreated in the poem, in which Ophelia is both the young woman contemplating the water and the one floating on the current, establishes the cyclical and timeless nature of the heroine’s destiny, condemned to repeat the scene of her suicide and her final journey downstream indefinitely.
In the prose poem “La tragedia” (The Tragedy), the full image of the Ophelian myth, hinted at in the condensed style of the poem “Bad Thought,” is not fully realized. Instead, “The Tragedy” concentrates on evoking the initial stage of the mythical cycle: Ophelia’s body as that of a young girl venturing into the forest and drifting toward the waters:
Camino del río va la niña cantando. El río tiene muerte en su fondo de limos verdinegros, en su lecho de guijas brilladoras…
Camino de los limos, llamada por las guijas, va la niña cantando y su canción se quiebra gota a gota sobre el agua.
Camino del agua en acecho, del agua que se lleva su canción, va la niña cantando…
Cantando llegará a la orilla – al filo de la orilla – y se inclinará a coger unas florecitas… (185)
[“On the way to the river, the girl goes singing. The river has death in its depths of greenish-black silt, in its bed of glittering pebbles… / On the way to the silt, called by the pebbles, the girl goes singing, and her song breaks drop by drop over the water. / On the way to the lurking water, the water that takes her song, the girl goes singing… / Singing, she will reach the shore – the edge of the shore – and she will bend down to pick some little flowers…”].
The tension in this text emerges from the stark contrast between the girl’s naive progression toward the river and the inevitable tragedy that awaits her at the end of her journey: “The river has death in its depths of greenish-black silt, in its bed of glittering pebbles.” This scene depicts the body seemingly moving toward its dissolution in the current. By carefully analyzing the scene’s progression, we can observe that the lyrical speaker designs the poem’s setting as a mobile landscape, endowed with elasticity and a sense of motion. This impression is achieved by gradually breaking down and bringing closer, from stanza to stanza, the geographical features that compose the image: the river, the green-black silt, the shining pebbles, the lurking water, the shore, and the edge of the shore. In each stanza, the girl appears to move toward a different feature or image, creating a scenographic movement that generates the sensation of mutual approach between the objects and the girl, between the vitality of her walk and the mortuary scene awaiting her at the riverbank’s edge. Consequently, the reader perceives that it is not only the girl who moves in the text but also the river landscape and the riverbank. This animistic representation of the river and the landscape is a central aspect of Loynaz’s discourse, reaching its climax in texts where the river ultimately emerges personified as the figure of the lover, Ophelia’s husband.
In other poems in this series, the third-person narration gives way to a lyrical speaker who recounts her pilgrimage to the waters in the first person:
Al atardecer iré
con mi azul cántaro al río,
para recoger la última
sombra del paisaje mío.
Al atardecer el agua
lo reflejará muy vago;
con claridades de cielo
y claridades de lago… (193).
[“At dusk, I will go / with my blue jug to the river, / to gather the fading / shadow of my landscape. // At dusk, the water / will reflect it softly; / with the glow of the sky / and the glow of the lake…].
Rather than being inspired by the Ophelian cycle, these stanzas seem to draw from the romances and carols of traditional Spanish poetry, which tell stories of young women who go to the river at dusk for their love encounters. The jug mentioned in the text is a distinctive element of this literary tradition and is entirely foreign to Ophelia’s iconography. According to Egla Morales Blouin, in traditional poetry, the jug symbolizes the young woman’s sexuality or womb, with a broken jug generally associated with the loss of virginity and/or the moment of conception: ““El cántaro quebrado permite el fluir del agua que es la fecundidad.” (Morales Blouin 47) [“The broken jug allows the flow of water that is fertility”]. If Loynaz’s poem “El cántaro azul” (The Blue Jug) adheres to this symbolism, its meaning is quite the opposite: preserving virginity and the impossibility of pregnancy. This aligns with her “Canto a la mujer estéril” (Song to the Sterile Woman) from her first book Versos (1938). In this text, the motif of the jug is re-semanticized as the container that preserves the waters intact or as the mirror on whose surface a landscape is reflected.
Por última vez el agua
reflejará mi paisaje:
Lo cogerá suavemente
como quien coge un encaje… (193)
[“For the last time, the water / will mirror my landscape, / cradling it softly, / like one holds delicate lace…”].
On the other hand, expressions such as “recoger la última / sombra del paisaje mío” or “por última vez el agua / reflejará mi paisaje” imbue the poem with a sense of impending fatality, a tragedy in progress, closely mirroring the tone of the previously discussed texts. Gradually, it becomes clear that the speaker in El cántaro azul is not the young girl of traditional Iberian folklore, and the pilgrimage to the river is not in pursuit of a conventional love encounter. If a lover awaits, it is the river itself—Ophelia’s seducer. This is another tale of seduction and death by water, where the aquatic motifs of traditional erotic folklore are layered over the underlying structure of the Ophelian myth—an archetype that, whether consciously or unconsciously, shapes the representations of water in the author’s universe.
III
The River’s Torso: Stagnant Waters, Elusive Waters
The river holds diverse meanings within Loynaz’s symbolic universe. Some are deeply tied to the mythical cycle of Ophelia, while others push this myth beyond its conventional boundaries. In this section, I will provide a concise commentary on several of these meanings, analyzing excerpts from Juegos de agua that vividly illustrate the semantic range associated with the signifier “river” as articulated in Loynaz’s poetic discourse.
The river, as I have noted, carries multiple meanings. On one hand, it is the lethal seducer, the Don Juan of riverside villages—the terror of mothers who dread waking to find their daughters’ lifeless bodies entangled in the mangroves along the riverbank. On the other hand, the river (like the sea in coastal cultures) symbolizes the allure of the unknown, the promise of transformation, escape, a different life, and the recovery of lost freedom:
Madre, yo quisiera irme
con el río…
- Es que el río va muy lejos
y yo no puedo seguirlo… (184)
[“Mother, I would like to go / with the river… / But the river goes very far / and I cannot follow it.”].
The desire to “irme con el río” in these verses, rather than reflecting the suicidal impulse evident in earlier texts, reimagines the river as an incomprehensible mystery. It is the expansive riverbed—brimming with accidents, surprises, and potential adventures—that fuels the lyrical voice’s curiosity and longing, ultimately justifying its pilgrimage to the waters. (4)
The river can also serve as a locus amoenus. In this serene and idyllic setting, the speaker, in a contemplative gesture, seeks to unravel the intricate dialectics of the perishable and the eternal, of change and permanence:
A veces, yo quisiera vivir en una casa de esas que se ven en los cuadros, de balcón descolgado sobre un río. […]
Me asomaría muchas horas a este balcón envuelto en las neblinas de la corriente, para ver pasar el agua sin fin y sin principio… El agua que puede ser fugitiva y eterna. (199)
[“Sometimes, I wish I could live in one of those houses you see in paintings, with a balcony suspended over a river. […] / I would spend hours leaning out on that balcony, shrouded in the mist of the current, watching the water flow—without end, without beginning. Water that is at once fleeting and eternal.]
The tension between two segments of the Ophelian myth—the young woman living a palatial life and the one who, driven mad by love, descends to the waters—is resolved in the previous poem by situating the young woman’s palace beside the stream. This relocation transforms the river’s thanatic symbolism into a site of self-reflection. The Ophelian undertones of the myth are further accentuated by the Nordic light bathing the landscape (“envuelto en las neblinas de la corriente”) and the lyrical speaker’s invocation of the cyclical, timeless flow of the waters (“el agua sin fin y sin principio”).
The river embodies a range of concepts, including the death drive, suicide, remoteness, distance, the speaker’s reflective nature, delirium, madness, Nordic light, and the pilgrimage in search of mystery. Yet its significance transcends this ideological and semantic spectrum. In the poem “Agua oculta,” the image of the underground river or sinkhole symbolizes a libidinal or psychic fluid that secretly sustains the speaker’s demiurgic powers:
Tú eres el agua virgen sin destino
y sin nombre geográfico;
tú eres la frescura intocada,
el trémulo secreto de frescura,
el júbilo secreto de esta
frescura mía que tú eres. (212)
[“You are the virgin water without destination / and without a geographic name; / you are the untouched freshness, / the trembling secret of freshness, / the secret joy of this / freshness of mine that you are.”]
The images of the river and its current, initially depicted as external geographical elements, are internalized in the above fragment. Here, the riverbed shifts from a distant path beckoning young Ophelia to traverse it into an intuitively sensed presence. In “Agua oculta,” the evocation of water also functions as an allegory for the act of poetic creation, representing the channeling of a psychic fluid devoid of both origin and destination (“Tú eres el agua virgen sin destino / y sin nombre geográfico”). This fluid reveals itself phenomenologically, through the image of “freshness” that permeates the discourse of the speaking voice.
Building on the earlier association of water with the Ophelian body, the river also emerges as a place of shelter and refuge, even serving as a wardrobe or clothing in the literal sense:
Yo quisiera ceñirme el río a la cintura…
yo quisiera envolverme en el río
como en un manto frío y largo… (187)
[“I wish to gird the river around my waist… / I wish to wrap myself in the river / like a long, cold cloak.”]
The image of the body draped in veils of water stands as one of the most evocative and enduring erotic motifs within the Ophelia cycle. This motif, however, transcends the boundaries of Ophelia’s myth, finding parallels in a rich tradition of ancient Mediterranean figures. Ophelia’s body, with its tragic allure, can be seen as a Danish counterpart to the foam-born archetypes of Aphrodite, Galatea, the Nymphs, the Oceanids, and the Sirens (Darras 1991). These figures share a deep, symbolic relationship with water, emerging from or dissolving into it, their bodies inseparable from the fluid landscapes they inhabit.
In these myths, water is more than a setting—it is a transformative medium. It acts as a home and an extension of the feminine body, doubling as a wardrobe whose folds and veils are in constant motion. This fluid “clothing” blurs the boundaries between body and environment, creating a seamless interplay of concealment and revelation. The veils of water are not mere adornments but active participants in the erotic charge of these figures, enhancing their allure by rendering their forms at once visible and elusive.
In Ophelia’s case, the river becomes a similar dynamic wardrobe, wrapping her body in shifting textures that amplify the sense of vulnerability and desire. The folds of water seem to both claim and protect her, their cool embrace echoing themes of seduction, surrender, and death. This imagery ties Ophelia’s tragic descent into the water to a broader, timeless archetype of women whose beauty and fate are intertwined with the liquid element, making the river a symbol of destruction and a site of transformation and mythic resonance.
The river’s transformation into a garment serves as a prelude to its ultimate metamorphosis into a man. In the poem “El abrazo,” the water encircling the speaker’s body foreshadows this final transformation:
Hoy he sentido el río entero
en mis brazos… Lo he sentido
en mis brazos, trémulo y vivo
como el cuerpo de un hombre verde…
Esta mañana el río ha sido
Mío: Lo levanté del viejo
cauce… ¡Y me lo eché al pecho!
Pesaba el río… Palpitaba
el río adolorido del
desgarramiento… - Fiebre fría
del agua…: Me dejó en la boca
un sabor amargo de amor y de muerte… (196)
[“Today, I held the entire river / in my arms… I felt it, / in my arms, trembling and alive, / like the body of a green man… / This morning, the river was mine: / I lifted it from its old bed… / and pressed it against my chest! / The river was heavy… It pulsed, / aching with the pain of its tearing… / Cold fever / of the water… It left in my mouth / a bitter taste of love and death…”]
In Loynaz’s poems, the archetype of the spectral Ophelian body is brought to life through its immersion in water and subsequent cooling. When rereading her “Canto a la Mujer Estéril” (Song to the Sterile Woman), a text written before Juegos de Agua, from this perspective, the image of the female silhouette becomes impossible to ignore. She appears embalmed, submerged, and frozen in the first stanza, occupying a space devoid of light:
Madre imposible: pozo cegado, ánfora rota,
catedral sumergida…
Agua arriba de ti… Y sal. Y la remota
luz del sol que no llega a alcanzarte. La Vida
de tu pecho no pasa; en ti choca y rebota
la Vida y se va luego desviada, perdida,
hacia un lado… (140)
[“Impossible mother: sealed well, broken amphora, / sunken cathedral… / Water above you… And salt. And the distant / light of the sun that cannot reach you. The Life / in your chest does not flow; it crashes and rebounds / within you, then drifts away, lost, / to one side.”]
In this text, water symbolizes both sterility and damnation. Paradoxically, it also represents “life,” which continually crashes against the breast of the sterile woman. The female figure is portrayed as a structure of dead stone, trapped beneath the water. She is the submerged cathedral that resists being swept away by the vitality of the current, which “choca y rebota” off her walls, then “se va luego desviada, perdida / hacia un lado.” The central image in this representation may be the uterus of the sterile woman—an obstinate stone, closed off from within, hidden in a space where light cannot reach, resistant to fertilization by the invading semen. It could also evoke the river stone, which stubbornly resists the force of the rapids.
In both interpretations, the body becomes a stranded, frozen image, resisting the passage of time and the inertia of nature. Yet, Ophelia’s ultimate fate is to yield to these cosmic laws, to be swept away by the current, and to embark on a cyclical descent through the waters.
Esta es un agua sonámbula
que baila y que camina por el filo de un sueño,
transida de horizontes en fuga, de paisajes
que no existen… (151)
[“This is a somnambulant water / that dances and walks on the edge of a dream, / transfixed by fleeing horizons, by landscapes / that do not exist.”]
As it descends through the river and time, the Ophelian body not only recognizes itself in the landscape (“transida de horizontes en fuga”), but also refracts and reflects it upon its empty surface (6), reinventing and rewriting it (these are landscapes “que no existen”). In this way, the body becomes both language and the subject of its own enunciation—a sign in itself—a mobile tattoo etched onto the torso of the current:
Voy – río negro – en cruces, en ángulos, en yo no sé qué retorcimientos de agonía, hacia ti, mar mío, mar ensoñado en la punta quimérica y fatal de nuestra distancia. (164)
[“I go—black river—in crosses, in angles, in twists of agony I don’t know how to name, toward you, my sea, dreamed sea at the chimerical and fatal end of our distance.”]
The crosses, spirals, angles, circles, and compass roses formed by Ophelia’s body as it is carried by the current create the signs of a coded language, an act of enunciation without referents. Yet, within its structure, this movement captures the essence of the lyric body’s invention process. As noted earlier, Ophelia’s body is an adherent substance, drawing signs and particles of language to its surface as it moves through the water. It is also a metonymic body: never signifying anything in isolation, but instead revealing the constant shifts and displacements of meaning within the unbroken chain of signifiers. Viewed through this lens, Loynaz’s Ophelian body becomes one of the most intricate representations of the lyric body within the iconographic traditions of Western poetry and culture. In conclusion, I offer a final reflection on this concept.
IV
The Ophelian Body in Loynaz’s Work and the Evolution of the Lyric Body
If we accept, as we have throughout this inquiry, Hénaff’s assertion that the lyric body exists to allegorize the universe of feelings and sensations, abstract notions, and the most obscure perceptions and drives of being—those that fatally elude the speaker’s consciousness—then we can conceive the Ophelian body as a kind of apotheosis of the very process of inventing the lyric body. Within an iconographic tradition that stretches from the golden Helen (celebrated by Spanish medieval and Golden Age artists) to the dismembered body glorified by the avant-garde (such as the fractured body of Frida Kahlo, the morbid deconstructions by Picasso and Dalí, or the body Catalan poet Ana María Martínez Sagi attempts to reassemble in her arms), Ophelia’s body occupies an intermediate position. It neither enjoys the complacent plenitude of Helen—an icon capable of launching “a thousand ships” into war—nor does it reveal the crisis of the body’s representational canons that Frida Kahlo and avant-garde artists symptomatized. In Dulce María Loynaz’s work, the Ophelian body is neither a body of plenitude nor one of crisis, but a body of the apotheosis. It is the icon that most effectively captures the contradictory universe underlying the concept of the lyric body: a body created to both signify and conceal meaning, to amplify the most diverse tropes and associations (body of water, vegetal body, body transfixed by love, death, madness), and to demonstrate that, in the end, it is a representation made of emptiness, a null body, only capable of refracting its surroundings and the metonymic displacements within the chains of signifiers. Thus, the complexity of capturing this body—one that begins as an image of a lost, maddened girl in the heart of the forest and culminates in becoming a language, a chain of signs, a coded writing on a riverbed.
Cited Works
- Cleger, Osvaldo. “Safo en el trópico: imagen post-victoriana del cuerpo en la poesía de Mercedes Matamoros.” Revista de estudios hispánicos, vol. 45, no. 3, 2011, pp. 551-570.
- Darras, Jacques. La mer hors d’elle-même. L’émotion de l’eau dans la littérature. Paris: Hatier, 1991.
- Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siècle Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
- Flores, Angel, editor. Spanish Poetry: A Dual-Language Anthology, 16th to 20th Centuries. Dover Publications, 1998.
- Hénaff, Marcel. Sade, The Invention of the Libertine Body. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
- Horno-Delgado, Asunción. Margen acuático: poesía de Dulce María Loynaz. Madrid: Ediciones Jucar, 1998.
- López Lemus, Virgilio. Dulce María Loynaz: estudios de la obra de una cubana universal. Tenerife: Centro de la Cultura popular Canaria, 2000.
- Loynaz, Dulce María. Obra lírica. Madrid: Aguilar, 1955.
- Morales Blouin, Egla. El cuervo y la fuente. Mito y folklore del agua en la lírica tradicional. Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1981.
- Puppo, María Lucía. La música del agua: poesía y referencia en la obra de Dulce María Loynaz. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2006.
- Rimbaud, Arthur. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
- Ugalde, Sharon Keefe. Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain. University of Wales Press, 2020.
Notes:
(1) All translations are my own unless otherwise specified.
(2) For a definition of the lyric body, see Hénaff (1999). For an essay exploring the invention of the lyric body through the lens of Sappho’s body, see Cleger (2011).
(3) For an analysis of the myth of Ophelia in Bécquer’s poetry, see Ugalde (2020).
(4) It is revealing to encounter this distant, far-from-the-river-delta image in the work of an author of Caribbean descent, who spent most of her life in a city by the sea.
(5) It is interesting to note that the ballet Giselle follows a structure similar to the myth of Ophelia. In the first act, Giselle is a cheerful peasant girl who dances and sings with her village friends, exchanging promises of love with Albrecht. The second act begins when Giselle discovers that Albrecht is not a humble villager, but a nobleman engaged to Bathilde, the daughter of the Duke of Courland. This act is dominated by scenes of Giselle’s madness and her attempt to commit suicide with Albrecht’s sword, culminating in her death from intense emotional pain. In the third act, Giselle, like Ophelia, is stripped of her humanity and transformed into a ghost, a wilis; this final act centers on Albrecht’s spectral and cyclical dances with Giselle and the other wilis in the forest.
(6) If we were to ask what Ophelia’s body would be if stripped of the objects that surround it—the river, the forest, the willows, the lilies, the birds, the water lilies, the stagnant waters, the riverbank—the answer would be nothing. The Ophelian body, in itself, is a hollow mold, a void, an empty surface. This condition of nullity allows it to be invaded and populated by the images of its surroundings, transforming it into both the subject of enunciation and the enunciated.