Long before Juana de Ibarbourou was ceremonially crowned “Juana de América,” her poetry had already accomplished something more lasting: it had given ordinary physical life an extraordinary intensity. Rain, fruit, flowers, trees, skin, sunlight, wheat, water, youth, motherhood, desire, and the changing seasons entered her poems with a freshness that made the natural world feel almost inseparable from the human body. Her earliest poetry could be exuberantly alive, but beneath that celebration was an awareness that beauty passes, youth disappears, love changes, and mortality eventually enters even the brightest garden.
Born on March 8, 1892, in Melo, Uruguay, Juana Fernández Morales became one of the most celebrated Spanish-language poets of the first half of the twentieth century. Her 1919 debut, Las lenguas de diamante, brought almost immediate recognition, followed by El cántaro fresco and Raíz salvaje. In 1929, before an audience of writers and dignitaries in Uruguay’s Palacio Legislativo, she was formally acclaimed as “Juana de América,” a title that transformed her into something approaching a continental literary symbol. Yet the public image of the radiant poet of nature concealed a far more complicated private life, while her later work moved increasingly toward solitude, aging, religious reflection, memory, and death.
🌿 A Childhood in Melo
Juana was born in Melo, the capital of Uruguay’s Cerro Largo department, near the country’s northeastern border with Brazil. Modern Uruguayan institutional sources give her birth date as March 8, 1892, although older biographical publications sometimes listed 1895, a discrepancy that followed her for decades.
Her father, Vicente Fernández, had been born in Galicia, Spain, and her childhood exposure to poetry was connected partly with the verses he recited at home. Juana later remembered listening to poetry beneath the family’s grape arbor, an image that seems almost designed for the writer she would become. Literature was not initially an academic abstraction. It arrived through a human voice, family memory, nature, and the intimate setting of home.
Melo itself would remain deeply embedded in her imagination. The rural landscape of her youth supplied many of the plants, fields, birds, gardens, scents, and seasonal sensations that later filled her early poetry. Even after she became a nationally celebrated figure living in Montevideo, she repeatedly returned imaginatively to the countryside and to childhood as sources of emotional truth.
✍️ Writing Before Fame
Juana began writing when she was young and was already publishing in local newspapers as a teenager. Uruguayan cultural records note that she published in the Melo newspaper El Deber Cívico as early as 1908, along with other local periodicals.
Her earliest public writing appeared before she possessed a recognizable literary identity. She sometimes used names including Jeannette d’Ibar, experimenting with the kind of literary persona common among young writers seeking a place in newspaper culture.
Marriage eventually supplied the name under which she became famous. She married army officer Lucas Ibarbourou in the early 1910s and adopted his surname professionally. The couple had one son, Julio César, and Lucas’s military career meant that the family lived in several parts of Uruguay before settling more permanently in Montevideo.
The movement from provincial Melo toward the capital brought Juana closer to the publishing world that would transform her life.
🏙️ Arriving in Montevideo
By the late 1910s, Juana was living in Montevideo and trying to bring her poetry to a wider audience. She submitted work to the literary world surrounding the newspaper La Razón, where her poems attracted attention for their immediacy and unusual voice.
Uruguayan poetry already had important women writers, including Delmira Agustini and María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, while Latin American modernismo had transformed poetic language through figures such as Rubén Darío. Juana emerged after those innovations rather than before them, inheriting a poetry already rich in musicality, symbolism, exotic imagery, and formal experimentation.
Yet her voice sounded different.
The elaborate interiors and distant landscapes associated with some modernist poetry gave way to gardens, rainwater, wheat, fruit, trees, animals, sunlight, and an intense awareness of the physical body.
The exotic moved closer to home.
💎 Las lenguas de diamante
In 1919, Juana de Ibarbourou published Las lenguas de diamante—The Diamond Tongues—in Buenos Aires. The book appeared with a prologue by Argentine novelist Manuel Gálvez and rapidly established her reputation.
Its reception was remarkable for a first collection.
The poems retained some of the musical qualities associated with modernismo, but their language often felt more direct and immediate. Juana’s speaker did not merely contemplate nature from a distance. She seemed to want to enter it, touch it, breathe it, taste it, and become part of it.
Flowers were not decorative ornaments.
They possessed scent and texture.
Rain touched skin.
Fruit suggested ripeness.
Earth had physical presence.
The natural world became an extension of desire.
That fusion gave her earliest poetry much of its distinctive energy.
❤️ Desire Without Apology
One reason Juana’s early poetry attracted so much attention was its treatment of female desire.
Women had long appeared as objects of desire in poetry written by men. Juana wrote from within a woman’s own physical experience, making desire active rather than merely received.
Her poems could be playful, urgent, sensual, confident, and intensely aware of the body. Youth becomes something to inhabit fully because its impermanence is already understood.
That awareness prevents the poetry from becoming a simple celebration of sensual pleasure.
Beauty matters because it will disappear.
The body is precious because it ages.
A flower becomes powerful partly because it blooms briefly.
Juana’s poems repeatedly place desire beside time.
Enjoyment and loss are already connected.
💧 El cántaro fresco
In 1920 came El cántaro fresco, a collection of prose poems whose title evokes one of Juana’s recurring sources of imagery: water.
Fresh water, rain, springs, pitchers, rivers, and moisture appear throughout her imaginative world because they suggest renewal, life, sensuality, and the immediate pleasures of the senses.
The prose-poem form also allowed her to loosen the boundaries of conventional verse. Instead of depending primarily upon rhyme or fixed meters, she could develop lyrical images through paragraphs while retaining the compression and musicality associated with poetry.
El cántaro fresco reinforced the qualities readers had already responded to in her debut: intimacy, vivid natural imagery, emotional clarity, and a voice that seemed accessible without being simplistic.
Her reputation was spreading rapidly.
🌱 Raíz salvaje
The title Raíz salvaje—Wild Root—could almost serve as a summary of Juana’s early poetic identity.
Published in 1922, the collection deepened her connection between the human self and the natural world. Roots, trees, vegetation, seasons, and earth become ways of thinking about identity, desire, belonging, and physical existence.
The word root is especially appropriate.
A root anchors.
It also grows invisibly.
The visible flower depends upon something hidden beneath the surface.
Juana’s poetry similarly presents beauty as something connected to forces deeper than appearance. Desire grows from instinct. Memory grows from childhood. Language grows from landscape.
The “wild” root resists complete cultivation.
Something in the self remains beyond social control.
🌺 Nature as More Than Decoration
It is tempting to describe Juana simply as a poet of nature, but that description can be misleading if nature is understood merely as scenery.
Nature in her poetry is physical experience.
A tree can reflect the body.
A season can reflect age.
Rain can become desire.
Fruit can suggest fertility.
Flowers can embody both sensual beauty and the certainty of decay.
This symbolic relationship between body and landscape gives her work a recognizably postmodernist character while separating it from the more decorative uses of nature found in some earlier poetic traditions.
Juana does not merely look at the garden.
She imagines herself as part of it.
That intimacy makes ecological and bodily imagery almost impossible to separate.
👩🍼 Motherhood and the Domestic World
Motherhood also entered Juana’s poetry and prose as an important dimension of female experience.
Her son Julio César was born early in her marriage, and maternal imagery appears alongside erotic love rather than replacing it. This matters because women writers were frequently expected to inhabit one culturally acceptable identity at a time: maiden, lover, wife, mother, or religious figure.
Juana’s poetry could contain several identities simultaneously.
The woman who experiences desire can also be a mother.
The celebrated poet can write about household intimacy.
The public literary figure can remain attached to childhood memories.
Her attention to domestic experience helped expand the subjects considered worthy of serious poetry without treating domestic life as inherently sentimental or trivial.
🌎 Becoming Famous Across Latin America
The success of Juana’s first books quickly extended beyond Uruguay.
Her poetry circulated in anthologies and literary magazines throughout Spanish America and Spain. Critics and other writers responded to the combination of accessibility, musicality, sensuality, and distinctly American landscapes.
The speed of her recognition was unusual.
She had entered literary culture from outside the major metropolitan centers, yet within a decade she was being treated as one of the continent’s major poetic voices.
The public image surrounding her increasingly emphasized youth, beauty, nature, femininity, and spontaneous inspiration.
That image helped create her fame.
Eventually it would also become a kind of cage.
👑 “Juana de América”
On August 10, 1929, Juana received one of the most extraordinary public honors ever given to a Latin American poet.
A ceremony was held in the Salón de los Pasos Perdidos of Uruguay’s Palacio Legislativo, where she was proclaimed “Juana de América.” The event brought together writers, public figures, students, and cultural representatives, with the distinguished Uruguayan poet Juan Zorrilla de San Martín playing a central role in the ceremony. Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes was also among the prominent literary figures connected with the occasion.
The title recognized how far Juana’s reputation had traveled beyond Uruguay.
Yet it also transformed a living writer into a symbol.
The private Juana Fernández Morales increasingly disappeared behind the public “Juana de América,” an almost mythological figure associated with continental femininity, nature, poetic inspiration, and literary celebrity.
Being turned into a national monument while still alive can be a strange form of confinement.
Juana would spend decades living with the consequences.
🧭 La rosa de los vientos
In 1930, Juana published La rosa de los vientos—The Compass Rose.
The collection marks an important development because the exuberance associated with her earliest poetry begins to shift. Nature remains present, but time becomes more insistent. The poet who had celebrated youth with such confidence is increasingly aware that youth cannot be preserved.
This does not mean she simply abandoned the style that made her famous.
Instead, the emotional temperature changed.
Images that once represented fulfillment can now contain absence.
Beauty is shadowed by its ending.
Desire encounters memory.
The body that once seemed almost indistinguishable from the vitality of nature begins recognizing mortality within nature itself.
The compass rose suggests direction.
Juana’s poetry was turning.
✝️ Religious Poetry
Religion had always existed somewhere within Juana’s poetic vocabulary, but it became particularly visible in works of the 1930s, including Loores de Nuestra Señora and Estampas de la Biblia, published in 1934.
Biblical imagery and Marian devotion offered a very different register from the openly sensual poetry that had made her famous, although the two sides of her work are not necessarily as contradictory as they initially appear.
Her poetry had always been fascinated by incarnation—the meeting of spirit and body.
Nature could feel sacred.
Motherhood could possess spiritual dimensions.
Physical beauty could become a reminder of mystery rather than an enemy of religious experience.
Juana’s religious writing therefore belongs to the same larger search for meaning that animated her poems about love and landscape.
The imagery changed.
The intensity remained.
👭 Juana, Gabriela Mistral and Alfonsina Storni
One of the most remarkable gatherings in Latin American literary history took place in Montevideo on January 27, 1938, when Juana de Ibarbourou appeared publicly alongside Gabriela Mistral and Alfonsina Storni.
The three poets had been invited to discuss how they created their work during a South American summer course. Each responded in her own way to the unusual request to explain the mystery of writing.
Juana’s contribution became known as “Casi en pantuflas”—roughly, “Almost in Slippers.”
The setting was significant because these were not three writers occupying marginal positions in literary culture. They were among the most celebrated women poets writing in Spanish.
Their careers were different, but all three had confronted expectations about what a woman poet should sound like and how a female literary celebrity should behave.
The meeting now looks almost impossibly poignant.
Alfonsina Storni died later that same year.
Gabriela Mistral would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945.
Juana would live for another four decades.
🥿 “Casi en pantuflas”
Juana’s discussion of her creative process resisted the idea that poetry needed a grand theatrical origin.
The title “Casi en pantuflas” itself suggests informality and domestic intimacy.
Poetry might arrive while the poet was living an ordinary life.
The writer did not need to transform herself into a marble statue before beginning a poem.
That idea is particularly interesting given the increasingly monumental public image surrounding Juana herself.
The nation was turning her into an institution.
She continued describing poetry as something intimate.
The contradiction would grow stronger with age.
Public Juana became ever more ceremonial.
Private Juana increasingly withdrew.
🧒 Returning to Childhood in Chico Carlo
Juana returned to her childhood directly in Chico Carlo, published in the mid-1940s.
The prose collection recreates experiences from Melo through autobiographical stories and memories. Childhood becomes a landscape populated by family, animals, neighbors, streets, games, fears, discoveries, and the particular logic through which children understand adults.
The book demonstrates that Juana’s attachment to nature cannot be separated from childhood memory.
The plants and landscapes in her poetry were not simply literary symbols borrowed from tradition.
Many originated in remembered places.
Chico Carlo also shows her gifts as a prose writer. Her reputation rests primarily upon poetry, but she wrote children’s literature, autobiographical prose, radio material, essays, speeches, and other forms throughout her career.
The celebrated lyric poet contained a much broader writer.
🏠 Fame and Private Difficulty
The radiant public image of “Juana de América” concealed a private life that later biographical research has portrayed as considerably more painful.
Journalist and biographer Diego Fischer, drawing upon letters, documents, and testimony for his biography Al encuentro de las tres Marías, challenged the official image that had surrounded Juana for decades. His research described domestic violence, difficult family relationships, secret romantic attachments, financial pressures, and eventual dependence on morphine.
These revelations matter partly because they alter the way readers encounter the famous early image of the endlessly joyful poet.
The exuberance was real.
It was not the whole life.
A person can write convincingly about joy while suffering.
A public symbol can be privately vulnerable.
The poems become more interesting when neither side is erased.
🕯️ After Lucas Ibarbourou
Juana’s husband, Lucas Ibarbourou, died in 1942.
His death marked another change in a life already moving away from the exuberant public years surrounding her early fame. She continued to publish, receive honors, participate in literary institutions, and maintain a formidable reputation, but solitude increasingly became part of both her life and writing.
By the middle of the century, the young woman associated with gardens and physical vitality had become an established literary elder.
That change brought a problem faced by many writers who become famous early.
Readers remembered the voice of youth.
The writer had continued aging.
Juana did not try simply to remain the poet of 1919.
Her later poetry allowed darker realities to enter.
🌑 Perdida
Published in 1950, Perdida—Lost—revealed a more somber and reflective poet.
The title alone suggests how far Juana had traveled from Las lenguas de diamante and Raíz salvaje. The early speaker seems to rush outward toward the world. The later speaker increasingly confronts interior spaces, absence, spiritual uncertainty, memory, aging, and death.
This development demonstrates why reducing Juana to her youthful nature poetry does her a disservice.
The career contains change.
The later poems may be less immediately charming, but they complicate the bright literary persona created around her.
Nature remains.
It simply no longer guarantees happiness.
The garden has acquired shadows.
📚 Azor, Mensaje del escriba and the Later Books
Juana continued publishing throughout the 1950s, including Azor and Mensaje del escriba in 1953, Romances del destino in 1955, and Oro y tormenta in 1956.
The titles themselves suggest a writer increasingly preoccupied with destiny, spiritual interpretation, transformation, and the tension between beauty and suffering.
The shift was not abrupt. Mortality had always existed beneath her earliest celebrations of youth. What changed was the balance.
Time was no longer merely the reason to enjoy beauty.
Time had become a subject in itself.
Juana’s later work increasingly asks what remains when the qualities that once seemed to define the self—youth, beauty, erotic vitality, public acclaim—begin passing away.
The question gives these books a depth sometimes overlooked by readers who know only a few anthologized early poems.
🏛️ The Academy and Literary Recognition
Juana’s position within Uruguayan literary culture became increasingly formal.
She was initially designated for a seat in the newly created Academia Nacional de Letras in 1943 but declined the appointment. In 1947 she was elected as a full member and delivered her formal entrance address later that year. In 1960 she became an honorary academician.
Her honors extended well beyond the Academy.
She received recognition in numerous Latin American and European countries, and in 1959 Uruguay awarded her its Grand National Prize for Literature.
These distinctions confirmed something that had already been obvious for decades.
Juana de Ibarbourou was not simply a popular poet.
She had become part of Uruguay’s official cultural history.
🪞 The Problem of Becoming an Icon
Literary fame often simplifies people.
A young Juana appeared to fit a compelling story perfectly: beautiful woman from the Uruguayan countryside writes spontaneous poetry filled with flowers, desire, youth, and sunlight, then becomes the beloved “Juana de América.”
The story was attractive.
It was also incomplete.
A literary icon is easier to admire than a complicated human being.
The older Juana did not fit the youthful image as easily. Her work became darker. Her health and personal circumstances became more difficult. She lived increasingly withdrawn from the public world that had once celebrated her so extravagantly.
Yet this later period should not be treated simply as decline.
It completed the themes that had always existed within the work.
The poet of youth eventually became the poet who knew exactly what youth’s disappearance meant.
🌹 Beauty and the Knowledge That It Ends
Juana’s enduring fascination with beauty becomes more powerful when understood alongside her fascination with time.
A flower matters because it wilts.
Youth matters because it vanishes.
Love matters because it can be lost.
A summer afternoon becomes precious because autumn exists.
Her early poems often choose celebration as a response to mortality.
The later poems increasingly choose contemplation.
Both responses originate from the same knowledge.
Nothing living remains unchanged.
This gives her poetry a deeper philosophical consistency than the familiar image of the exuberant nature poet initially suggests.
Juana’s gardens were never outside time.
They were blooming inside it.
🍃 The Sensory World
Few qualities distinguish Juana’s poetry as clearly as its sensory immediacy.
Readers encounter scent, texture, color, water, warmth, plants, fruit, soil, bodies, and weather.
The senses are not treated as distractions from intellectual life.
They are ways of knowing.
Touch teaches something.
Smell carries memory.
Color creates emotion.
Taste connects the body to the world.
This emphasis gives her poetry a democratic quality. A reader does not require specialized knowledge of mythology or literary theory to understand the feeling of rain on skin or the scent of a garden after heat.
The sophistication lies in what Juana does with those familiar experiences.
She turns sensation into thought without making the sensation disappear.
🌾 A Distinctly American Landscape
The title “Juana de América” carried ceremonial grandeur, but there was also something genuinely continental about the way readers responded to her landscapes.
Her nature did not feel borrowed entirely from European poetic convention.
Fields, vegetation, rural life, intense weather, and the physical openness of South American landscapes gave the poetry a recognizable regional energy.
This did not make Juana narrowly national.
Quite the opposite.
The more specific the landscape became, the more effectively it traveled.
Readers in other countries recognized the emotional relationship between human life and the natural world even when their own landscapes differed from hers.
A poem does not become universal by removing everything local.
Sometimes locality is the route outward.
🖋️ Juana and the Women Who Came Before Her
Juana belonged to a remarkable tradition of women writers in Uruguay and Latin America.
Delmira Agustini had already written startlingly erotic poetry before her death in 1914. María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira brought philosophical intensity and formal sophistication to Uruguayan verse. Alfonsina Storni developed a sharply independent voice in Argentina, while Gabriela Mistral combined intimacy, motherhood, grief, education, spirituality, and public life in Chile.
Juana inherited possibilities opened by such writers while creating a poetic identity entirely her own.
The similarities among these women should not erase their differences.
Agustini’s erotic darkness is not Juana’s sensory exuberance.
Storni’s social irony is not Mistral’s austere spirituality.
Juana’s nature poetry belongs to another emotional climate.
Together, however, they transformed expectations about who could speak with authority in Spanish-language poetry.
🕊️ The Public Voice of a Woman Poet
Juana’s career is especially remarkable because she became famous during an era when women writers were still frequently framed through gender before artistic achievement.
Reviews described beauty.
Public ceremonies emphasized femininity.
The label “poetess” could function as though women belonged to a separate literary category.
Juana sometimes benefited from the public fascination surrounding her image, but she also exceeded it.
Her career lasted too long and her work changed too much to remain contained within the decorative role initially prepared for her.
She became an academician.
A national prize winner.
A writer studied in schools.
A cultural reference point.
The young woman celebrated partly as a phenomenon of beauty became an institution of literature.
🪟 The Later Years
Juana’s later life became increasingly secluded.
She lived for many years in Montevideo, eventually withdrawing more and more into her home. Accounts from those who knew her describe a woman separated from the public world despite continuing to receive honors and invitations.
The image of a writer looking outward through windows became especially poignant because Juana’s early poetry had been so thoroughly immersed in outdoor life.
The young poet seemed to run into the landscape.
The older poet increasingly watched the world from inside.
Yet writing continued to provide movement even when physical life narrowed.
Memory could return to Melo.
Language could recover childhood.
A poem could reopen a garden.
⏳ La pasajera and Elegía
Juana continued writing into old age, with works including La pasajera and the long poem Elegía appearing during the late 1960s.
The word pasajera—passenger, traveler, or something passing through—fits a poet increasingly conscious of life’s temporary nature.
The young writer had once insisted upon enjoying beauty before it vanished.
The old writer now understood herself as one of the things vanishing.
This movement gives her career an almost seasonal structure.
Spring dominates the public memory.
Autumn and winter belong to the later books.
Reading the whole career rather than only the famous early poems reveals a much richer writer.
🕯️ The Death of Juana de Ibarbourou
Juana de Ibarbourou died at her home in Montevideo on July 15, 1979. She was eighty-seven.
Her death was treated as a major national cultural event. She was buried in the family pantheon at the Cementerio del Buceo with honors equivalent to those of a Minister of State, an extraordinary recognition for a writer whose career had begun with poems sent from the Uruguayan interior.
By then, six decades had passed since Las lenguas de diamante first made her famous.
The literary world had changed repeatedly.
Modernism had faded.
The avant-garde had arrived.
Political poetry had transformed Latin American literature.
The Boom had brought a new international readership to writers from the region.
Juana had lived long enough to become both participant in literary history and survivor from an earlier age.
📚 Rediscovering the Whole Juana
Modern scholarship has increasingly attempted to move beyond the simplified public image created around “Juana de América.”
That recovery matters because the myth can obscure the writing.
There is the young sensual poet, certainly.
There is also the prose writer remembering childhood.
The religious writer.
The poet of aging.
The woman negotiating enormous public fame.
The writer whose private circumstances were far more painful than her official image suggested.
The older poet confronting mortality.
Seeing these figures together does not diminish the youthful Juana.
It explains how extraordinary the entire career actually was.
A writer should not be frozen at the age at which the public first fell in love with her.
🌟 Why Juana de Ibarbourou Still Matters
Juana de Ibarbourou matters because she made physical existence feel worthy of poetry.
The body mattered.
Nature mattered.
Desire mattered.
Motherhood mattered.
Childhood mattered.
A garden mattered.
The movement of time through all those things mattered too.
Her language helped carry Spanish American poetry away from some of the more elaborate conventions of late modernismo toward something intimate, immediate, and grounded in recognizable physical experience.
She also helped demonstrate the authority with which women could write openly from within their own bodies and desires.
That achievement can be easy to underestimate a century later.
What now appears beautifully direct once represented a significant change in who was permitted to speak and what a woman’s poetic voice could say.
🎂 Remembering Juana de Ibarbourou
Born on March 8, 1892, Juana de Ibarbourou began as Juana Fernández Morales, a girl in Melo who listened to poetry at home, wrote verses while still young, and gradually carried the landscape of northeastern Uruguay into a literary world far larger than anyone around her could have predicted. Las lenguas de diamante made her famous in 1919, while El cántaro fresco and Raíz salvaje established the combination of nature, sensuality, music, and emotional immediacy that readers came to associate with her name.
The celebration reached its extraordinary public peak in 1929, when she was proclaimed “Juana de América” in Uruguay’s Palacio Legislativo. Yet her career did not end with that coronation. La rosa de los vientos revealed a changing poetic consciousness, her religious works explored another dimension of experience, Chico Carlo recovered the landscape of childhood, and later books including Perdida, Azor, Mensaje del escriba, Romances del destino, Oro y tormenta, and La pasajera confronted time, solitude, faith, and mortality with increasing intensity.
Her life was more complicated than the public mythology suggested. Later biographical research has revealed private suffering behind the image of the radiant national poet, while her increasing seclusion gave the final decades of her life a very different character from the exuberant years of early fame.
Yet perhaps the two Juanas were never entirely separate.
The young poet understood from the beginning that beauty disappears.
The older poet simply knew the fact more intimately.
That knowledge is part of what gives her poetry its continuing life. Flowers open because they will close. Youth matters because it passes. Rain touches the body and disappears. Love becomes memory. Childhood becomes a book. A poet becomes a monument, while the human being behind the monument continues changing.
Juana de Ibarbourou spent a lifetime writing inside that tension between possession and loss.
She wanted the world intensely because she knew no one keeps it forever.
Bond
I grew
Only for you.
Cut the acacia boughs that demand
Only destruction at your hand!
My blossom blew
Only for you.
Uproot me—in its natal hour
My lily doubted were it candle or flower.
My waters blue
Flow for you.
Drink me—never crystal knows
So pure a tide as in this channel flows.
Wings I knew
Only for you.
Pursue me! (Quivering firefly,
Veil your flame from every eye!)
I shall suffer for you.
Blessed be the evil that your love will do!
Blessed be the blade, the net I shall feel!
Blessed be thirst and steel!
My heart’s blood will flow
That my love you may know.
What fairer gem, what rarer jewel could be found
Than this offering of a scarlet wound?
Instead of diadems in my hair,
Seven long thorns I shall wear.
Instead of ear-rings I shall don
Two burning coals of vermilion.
When you see me suffering
You will hear my laughter ring.
And you will weep and pity me:
Then more than ever mine you will be.
-Juana de Ibarbourou
🔗 Related Articles
- Pablo Neruda: Love, Landscape & the Poetry of a Continent
- Nicanor Parra: Remembering the Father of Antipoetry on His Birthday
📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Uruguay Ministry of Education and Culture — Juana de Ibarbourou
- Autores.uy — Juana de Ibarbourou
- Uruguay Educa — Nace Juana de Ibarbourou
- Montevideo Government — Juana de Ibarbourou Memorial Plaque
- Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes — Juana de Ibarbourou
- Biblioteca del Poder Legislativo — Tres mujeres, una pasión
- Biblioteca del Poder Legislativo — Perdida, La pasajera y otras páginas
- GaliciaAberta — Juana de Ibarbourou
