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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello everyone, it's Jack Wilson telling you that the History of Literature Podcast tour through Literary England is still accepting deposits and we'd love to have you join us. We will be visiting some of the greatest literary sites in history, including walks, tours, pub visits and leisure time activities, and with visits from scholars and other special guests as we experience the amazing cities of London, Oxford and Bath in a small group accompanied by yours truly. If you love literature and if you love life, you are not going to want to miss this. It's next year in May of 2026, but we need you to put down a deposit now so we can finalize the itinerary. 2026 is around the corner people. Give yourself something to look forward to next spring. You can find out more at John Shors Travel John S H O R S or you can find the links to the itinerary and sign up page@historyofliterature.com hope to see you soon.
- [01:15]
Alan Sisto
I'm Alan Sisto, the Man of the west here at the Prancing Pony Podcast.
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Sean Marchese
And I'm Sean Marchese, the real life Lord of the Mark.
- [01:21]
Alan Sisto
Every week here at the Prancing Pony Podcast, along with Sean or other co hosts, I explore the works of J.R.R. tolkien, author of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, bringing along lots of pop culture refere plenty of nerd humor and the occasional bad punk.
- [01:33]
Sean Marchese
It's just a couple of friends hanging out at the pub talking about our favorite books. We cover just a few pages every episode, reading important sections of the books and having a chat about what we've read.
- [01:42]
Alan Sisto
Now we do a ton of research for each episode so that we can bring as much background information to our conversation as possible. We do all the heavy reading so you don't have to.
- [01:49]
Sean Marchese
It's a great way for first time readers to learn the basics of Tolkien's world, while for Middle Earth veterans it's a deep dive into their favorite stories.
- [01:56]
Alan Sisto
Now the Tolkien fandom is like no other, so we spend time in the community giving talks at Tolkien events, recording live episodes and hanging out with our listeners on Discord to engage with our audience every chance we get.
- [02:07]
Sean Marchese
So if you're ready to dive into the most beloved world in fantasy literature.
- [02:10]
Alan Sisto
And become a part of a vibrant, active community of listeners, then look for.
- [02:14]
Sean Marchese
The Prancing Pony Podcast wherever you listen.
- [02:17]
Jack Wilson
Hello. She was born and raised in a Chilean valley farmland surrounded by the Andes. What she herself later called a heroic slash in the massive mountains. Her circumstances were rugged, modest and humble. From there she struggled to be educated and then to educate others, reaching towering heights in poetry but never forgetting her connection to the land and its impoverished, hard working people, even as she herself became a global figure. In 1945, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded her its literary prize for her lyric poetry, which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world. End quote Gabriela Mistral Today on the History of Literature Foreign welcome to the History of Literature podcast. I am Jack Wilson, your host. We have a great show today requested by a listener some months ago, which sent me down a Gabriella Mistral rabbit hole. Into the poetry which is exceptional, and into the life which is pretty extraordinary too. Dear Jack, the email began As a creative and poet, I absolutely love the format and delivery of your podcast. Thank you very much. Only yesterday I discovered it when searching for long form content on Pablo Neruda. Check out Gabrielle Gabriella Mistral as a potential subject. She also wrote poetry, first under a pseudonym as a school teacher tucked far away in the Andean mountains of Chile. She was the first Latin American male or female, to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1945. Born 1889 would make for a great episode. Thanks again. When I have a moment I will be sure to Patreon for your body of work is large and efforts are excellent. Best Jason from Austin, Texas well Jason, thank you for the message and for the suggestion. Gabriela Mistral had been on our are in my list for a while, but sometimes I could use a prompt to get me going. Usually it's a guest who comes out with a new project or a new angle on that particular author. I get the request comes in so and so has written about great writer X. Would you like to interview him or her about the new book? Yes please. And that's how Great Writer X gets crossed off our to do list. Anthony Trollope Somebody write a new biography already and come on the show. Invite yourself on so I could cross him off. But I also like diving into the research myself sometimes, especially when I'm curious or have some kind of affinity for the author. And in this case I have a few angles in. Gabriela Mistral came from humble roots, growing up in an out of the way place as I did, and raised by educators as I was. That's angle number one. She cared about people, which I prefer. I mean she really cared about people walking the walk as well as talking the talk. We will see all the evidence of that as we get further along in our story here. But it's very admirable. And she wrote beautiful poetry. So we're three for three, aren't we? She had personal hardships and sorrow and, you know, I love those melancholy notes, the minor chords of life. And she was a seeker growing up Catholic, turning to Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and then returning to Catholicism and bringing all her meditation techniques and other insights into life and the mind and the spirit back into her Catholicism. This is my kind of person. 20th century century. I know. Well, I come from. Actually, speaking of her religion, her Catholicism was heavily Franciscan, which. How should I put it? Let me take a sip of tea here. Let's say you're someone who says, well, Jesus was all right. I just have problems with organized religion. It's the church, capital C that's the problem. As if to say, well, when I read the Bible or hear Jesus's teachings, I can be on board with those. Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek. Blessed are the meek. The radical humanist side of Jesus. Give your money to the poor, help them. Don't judge all those things if that appeals to you. But you say, you know what I think those who came after corrupted his message. And we're all sinners, we humans and the sinners who came after who were in charge of the church introduced some greed and kind of diluted the message, became about power and control. Well, if that's you, if that's your take on Jesus and the church, well, then you should probably consider that St. Francis might be one of your guys, too. St. Francis was like the opposite of a megachurch televangelist begging for money to use on their private jets. God is a loving presence that infuses all creation, said Francis. Our job on Earth is to serve the poor and the marginalized, recognize their inherent dignity, treat all of God's creations as valuable, including his creation of planet Earth. We should treat the air and the water and the soil with the respect that we have for God. And we should live simple lives, full of peace, humility, poverty, community, friendship, respect, joy and humble prayer. That's the tradition Gabriela Mistral comes from. Her poetry expresses it, Though she also has some good, some good, all too human poems too. We'll see some jealous lover poems coming up. But her poetry a lot of times feels mystical, either at one with the universe or trying to get there. It's not the jittery urbanism of T.S. eliot, who was almost a direct contemporary. He was born about Six months before she was. But he, of course, lived in London, was a bank clerk. Remember his unreal city? Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, a crowd flowed over London Bridge. So many I had not thought death had undone so many. We hibernate among the bricks, Eliot wrote, and live across the window panes with marmalade and tea at six, indifferent to what the wind does, indifferent to sudden rains softening last year's garden plots and apathetic with cigars, careless, while down the street the spring goes, inspiring moldy flower pots and broken flutes at garret windows. End quote. Elliot, when he writes he's in the wasteland or the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. He writes about the Shakespearean rag. And you can hear the. The gramophone cranking up and electrifying the air. You hear people being distracted by urbanity, by pop culture, the way it's. Everything is buzzing and crackling and it feels right for London. It feels prophetic, it feels. It's the syncopated era. It's us. Our world today has even more fragmentation, even more hustle and bustle. It's even more too much with us late and soon. As Wordsworth put it, we absorb so much thinking, so much information, so much entertainment, so many ads, so much of everything that we lose that simplicity, that sense of self, the quiet moments, stillness. Mistral is on a different path. She's a woman of the world. She became one. She traveled widely, visiting dozens of countries, many of which she became a temporary resident of. So she's not. She's not Cincinnatus, retired to his farm or an anchorite, locked in her little room in some out of the way place. She's not a poet, hermit. But it's the room, the breathing room that we can appreciate. The room to breathe, the devotion to basics, the clearing away of the inconsequential and the return to what matters. Nature, people, one's principles, one's beliefs, core values, core everything. In Elliot Sometimes I think the lesson is that we've lost the core, right? We've filled ourselves with so much extraneous that the core can go missing or hollowed out. Gabriella Mistral. It's a full core. How did this happen? Who was she? Her name was one that she herself chose. Some say it was a combination of two poets, and there's truth in that. Gabriele d' Annunzio was a model for the first name. Gabriella d', Annunzio, of course, being one of Italy's great literary figures, the leading Italian writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He lived about 20. He was about 25 or so years older than Gabriela Mistral, so just old enough to be influential in that way. The last name Mistral was another poet's name came from Frederic Mistral, a Provencal writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1904. Now I say there's some truth to it, because it's a little too simple to say that she just mashed together names from two favorite poets. She also chose those names for substantive reasons connected with the words themselves. Gabriella connotes Gabriel the Archangel, and Mistral refers to a powerful wind. As an essayist writing for the Poetry foundation put, she acknowledged wanting for herself the fiery spiritual strength of the archangel and the strong earthly and spiritual power of the wind. Both Mistral's fiery spiritual strength and her connection to the natural world came from her love for her home. Not the small town of Acuna, where she was born and later was educated, but the even smaller and more remote village called Monte Grande, where she was surrounded by fruit orchards and rugged hills. It's nothing but a rush of water with two green banks, she said, and this little place can be loved as perfection. She sighted the almond trees blooming, and fig trees laden with stupendous dark blue figs. I had a family of trees, she said, and another of plants. And I talked and talked with the animals I found. She was there from soon after her birth until she was 11 years old. And that's a period that's incredibly formative for her. I know Monte Grande's hills one by one, she said. I was happy until I left Monte Grande, and then I was never happy again. What a statement to say that your happiness peaked when you were 11 years old. And one might think that that kind of a rupture, to say you're happy until you're 11 and then you're never happy again. You might associate that kind of a rupture when a child's parents get divorced, or maybe when there's a death in the family. But no, in fact, her father, who was kind of a vagabond, a free spirited school teacher, but had a poetic soul, creative person, played his guitar, sang songs for her. He abandoned the family when Gabriela was only three. She saw him rarely. And of course she wasn't Gabriella Mistralden, but I'll call her that for convenience sake. So her father. She didn't grow up seeing her father much, but she identified with him nevertheless. She knew his love for poetry, she knew his nomadic spirit, were Both elements that she felt within herself as well. He wrote poems for her and sang to her songs accompanied by his guitar. He gave her a sense of adventure, a feeling of wanting to be free. At the same time, her grandmother, her father's mother, gave her a grounding in religion, had her read the Bible, called out particular verses, and especially pointed her toward the Psalms. Later, Mistral would write, Bible, my noble Bible. Magnificent panorama where my eyes lingered for a long time. You have in the Psalms the most burning of lavas, and in its river of fire I lit my heart. You sustained my people with your strong wine, and you made them stand strong among men. And just saying your name gives me strength, because I come from you. I have broken destiny after you. Only the scream of the great Florentine went through my bones. The great Florentine, of course, was Dante, another poet of spirituality, passion, strength, beauty, awe and ambition, humility. By 12, Gabriela Mistral was already standing out as different from the other children at school. They called her little four year old, she said, or little four years, because her actions were not what they expected from a 12 year old. She didn't sew or darn or wash the dishes, as other girls were expected to do, and did. She instead had a vague gaze and a hunger for poems and stories, and she spoke in rhyme. There was some kind of incident at school where she was accused of stealing school materials, which she viewed as an injustice that she carried with her for the rest of her life. She had to fight to be educated, and at one point was denied admission to school because of her writing. She was. As a teenager, she was already publishing in newspapers and her views were seen as pantheistic. Pantheistic, pantheistic. A similar charge can be and has been levied against St. Francis. When your theology is is to worship God by celebrating his creation, that can be confused, apparently, for worshiping the creation itself or elements of the creation itself as gods. I don't know if that's exactly why Mistral was viewed as pantheistic. Mistral herself thought it was because a particular individual disapproved of her calls for educational reform, and she was agitating for increased access to schools for poor, poor people. And that was why she was blocked. And that actually sounds a bit more likely to me. Someone put their thumb on the scale and said, this is not the direction I want to go. I don't want her here. But in any case, she was undeterred by being rejected. She felt her calling was to educate, and so she put herself in a position to do that. She became a teacher's aide, as her older sister had done. You didn't need a teaching certificate for that. Her older sister had also been her earliest teacher. And I don't think we've mentioned Mistral's mother, but her mother was a seamstress and a solid supporter of hers. So there we are. Gabriela wants to be a teacher, but she's denied access to teaching school as a official, full teacher. So instead of studying for the degree which was denied her, she studied the curriculum on her own. And then she passed an examination, and she was able to get a teaching certificate that way, which opened the doors that she needed to open in order to teach and become an administrator, which she went on to do. And that became basically other. Aside from her poetry, the most important thing in her life, she wrote under a pseudonym at that point to try to keep her poetry separate from her professional life. That's when she became Gabriela Mistral. And she took one job after another in different parts of Chile. It was unusual to have this kind of experience with an entire nation, as someone I read pointed out, maybe it was the poetry foundation as well. Usually a poet either stayed in their own town or region where they grew up and they kind of identified with that, or they moved to the capital, in this case Santiago, to be at the cultural center. Right. We know both of those journeys pretty well. We know the writers who stay near their hometown and they kind of own their region. And we know the ones who start there and then travel to, whether it's London or whether it's New York or whether it's some other Paris, some other capital, going to the big city. Mistral is a little different from that. She spent 10 or so years as a teacher or educational administrator, moving up and down that long, narrow country, absorbing the local culture and customs in maybe half a dozen or so locations. And at this point in the biography, we are up to 1922, and she's in her early 30s. Let's talk about teaching for a minute. I love people who teach as a profession. For me, it's right up there. God bless teachers. Mr. All was the kind of teacher who would spend her day in the schools, poor schools, almost invariably teaching kids. These poor children, impoverished children, I mean, then organized classes in the evenings for workers in the area who had no other means of education. And somehow, even while doing all of this, she managed to write articles advocating for better education for girls and women, for rural areas. If people needed her, she was there for them, even if it meant she had to put aside her own needs. The poetry that comes out of this period and out of this life really is full of love and compassion. There's an awareness of suffering and sacrifice. It's poetry with a sense of purpose, a mission, and a sense of sorrow, too. Here's a poem called the Trees. The woodsman forgot them. The night will come. I will be with them in my heart. I will receive their gentle SAP. They will be like fire to me. And may the day find us quietly embraced in a heap of sorrow. It's easy to think of her as solitary and alone, especially in her later years, when she traveled so much and had such a firm sense of her poetry. And she was ousted from Chile, more or less. We'll get to that later. But she did have love affairs. It's not clear exactly where she was, what her sexual preferences were exactly. She was fairly private about her personal life, even though people viewed her poetry as emotionally autobiographical. She appears to have had passionate friendships. At least, let's say. Let's put it that. Let's go that far. Put that in quotes. Passionate friendships with men and women. In her later years, she had a long relationship with a woman that looks from the outside like a partnership, a loving partnership, a couple, although that's been disputed. And decades before that, she had two relationships with men that went into a collection called Desolation or Despair Desolacion. The first relationship was with a railway worker. This was a friendship and first love of hers with a man called Romelio, who, after the affair had ended, later took his own life still at a young age. And the second relationship was with a man who left Mistral and married another woman. We are going to hear a great poem about that which we can. We can assume part of that experience. When informed. That poem that's going to be. That might be the highlight of the episode. People stick around. There's a view of Mistral that is sort of outside these relationships. It's a view of her. It's partly a propagandized view, but it's the view of her as sort of the nation's mother or the people's mother, destined to be alone, deprived. Not a mother herself, not a lover herself. Someone who only was destined to know sorrow and despair. In that view of her. If her fellow Chilean, Pablo Neruda. We'll get to him later too. If he wrote 20 love poems and a song of despair. Maybe Mistral is closer to 20 songs of despair and one love poem, or almost love poem. A typical poem of Mistral's is To hear motherless children weeping. And the poet narrator takes them in. A teacher, in other words, a helper, a member of the village. The love for children, for other people's children, for the suffering, the efforts to heal. All of that is evident. She writes poems of tenderness for them, poems to help them learn, poems to bring them joy, literally. Poems to help them learn, poems to be used in. In curriculum. And they became used. A lot of Chileans grew up with Gabriela Mistral's poetry, specifically written to help them learn or to bring them joy. But it was Desolation that made her famous. Desolation is a collection of lyric poems in five sections. Although in subsequent editions two more got added. Those sections were Life, School, Children, Pain, Nature, Prose. And then the two that got added were School Prose and Stories. The section Pain included three poems called the Sonnets of Death, which had earlier won her a prize and which related to the suicide of her first love, Romilio. One can imagine a schoolteacher not at home, a transient of sorts, someone who has arrived to help build a community, who believes strongly in her faith, who loved nature and the struggling people of the earth. Remember our T.S. eliot poem about the fog? The fog of London, the people marching over London Bridge. Well, here's Gabriela Mistral on the other side of the planet, with a fog of her own. Fog thickens eternal, so that I may forget where the sea has thrown me in its wave of brine. The land I have come to knows no spring. It has its long night that like a mother hides me. The wind at my house makes its round of laments and howling breaks like a mirror my shout. And in the white prairies, the infinite horizon, I gaze at the dying of immense sorrowful sunsets. What to call her? She who has come so far that only the dead have gone further? The dead, so alone study an ocean hushed and grow stiff froze in the arms of the dead, in the arms of those they love. The ships whose sails fly white in the harbor Come from lands where my loved ones never have been. Their bright eyed men don't know my rivers and bring forth pale fruits without the light of my orchards. And the question that rises in my throat upon seeing them pass falls conquered. They speak strange tongues and are not moved by the words that my ancient mother sings. In lands of gold I watch the snow as if the dust of graves. I watch the mist form and grow like death throes. And so as not to go mad, I don't count the seconds because the long night, now so lonely, begins. I watch the enraptured prairie gather to me its pain. I that came to see the mortal lands. The snow is the semblance that appears in my mirror Its whiteness will ever be ever under the heavens ever. She grandly silent like the lofty gaze of God upon me ever her bridal wreath laid over my house ever Like a fate that never fades nor comes to pass she will descend to cover me, terrible and ecstatic okay, let's take a quick break. We'll come back with Pablo Neruda and Buddhism to wrap up the early career. Then we'll look at her years traveling around the world and the Nobel Prize. And we'll have her final years and her legacy. All that coming up after this. Hey everyone. My heartfelt thanks to AG1 for sponsoring this episode and for making a product that I use and enjoy. I've got a busy schedule and I work hard to fit everything in. One scoop of AG1 in the morning and I am good to go. Nutrients my body needs and energy to give me that physical and mental boost and that underrated but very important feature of a good life. Gut health. Yes indeed. Gotta have good gut health. AG1 has five probiotic strains and more than 75 vitamins and minerals. The flavors are delicious. 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- [33:06]
Jack Wilson
One of the great coincidences of literature is that Gamriela Mistral, when she was known as a poet, but not world famous, accepting these postings throughout Chile, in one small town after another, as she worked her way up the ladder of the Chilean educational system, taking on jobs as a. As a. For example, as the principal of a school for girls in a city called Temuco, the backwoods of southern Chile, the main city in the heart of the Indian community. She was there for a year. Well, at that time, at the school for Boys, there was a young teenager named Ricardo Naftali, who also wished to be a poet. Mistral met him and met and read his work. She thought he was talented and she encouraged him and gave him books to read that he didn't have. And the support generally gave him the support that he couldn't get at home. Well, Ricardo later became better known by his pseudonymous Pablo Neruda. To this day, the two of them are the only Chilean writers to win the Nobel prize. She was 15 years older than him and they won the prize 16 years apart. His father, by the way, was a railway worker. His mother was a teacher. Remember that? This is during the period when Gabriela Mistral was writing about her own early love. As a 17 year old teacher in love with a railway worker, one wonders if she saw a bit of her life not lived in this boy, Pablo Neruda. Also around this time, Mistral became a Buddhist. It's a natural outcome of her beliefs and values, as I've suggested. Those Franciscan values as the focus on an inner life and a celebration of the natural world, are all that's consistent with the version of Catholicism she had practiced as well. She believed a couple of things, some of which were more, let's say, aspirational than actual. For example, she viewed Eastern religion when she started learning more about it, and the religions of India in particular, she said, well, this is the mother of Christianity. This is the. The OG religion. Christianity comes out of this, doesn't it? Europe has amnesia, she wrote. She was referring to a Kind of forgetting of the spiritual values that were found in Buddhism. That's not necessarily the case, but it kind of makes a kind of sense. I guess you could argue for it, or you could argue that that's a way to kind of understand it, even if that's not what actually occurred. She was on firmer ground when she wrote of Buddhism's emphasis on the poor and how it rejected attachment to material things and how much she. How important she found that to be. It was how she practiced her views. I tend to think that her appearance now, famously, she's on the currency of Chile, which she's on money. It's not. So I think of that as not so much ironic or a betrayal of her values, as much as I like to think of it as a healthy reminder to all of the potential misers out there. When you see her face on the money, here's money. You may have earned it, you might enjoy it, but this is not to be worshipped. There's more to life than this piece of paper, as this poet and her poetry will remind you. Being on the money of Chile must have seemed like a world away in 1922, when Mistral, at the age of 33, left the country. She published Desolation that year, and she was invited to Cuba and then Mexico to speak and work. In Mexico, she helped rebuild the rural educational system, and she supplemented her work with articles for a Chilean newspaper. And this became the pattern for most of the rest of her life to live in a country, to earn an income through newspaper articles, to write poetry, and to teach. She lived in the United States, in New York City, in California, in France, in Italy, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Switzerland. She worked for international organizations. She worked as a consulate for Chile. She had several more tragedies that stayed with her. Her parents both died, and so did a nephew whom she considered to be like a son to her. Officially, he was said to have taken his own life at the age of 17, but I believe that my understanding is that this is an account. The official account is one she rejected. She believed instead that he had been killed by jealous classmates and that she also thought that his spirit could join her. At times, she was intensely saddened by his loss. She used to say that she longed for the time when she herself would die and she and her nephew could reunite. Let's hear some of her poems to get a sense of the range of her work, and then we'll get to the Nobel Prize and her legacy today. First up is a poem called Ecstasy, published in English in Poetry magazine in June of 1925. As you might expect from the title, it's a reflection on sex, depicting the aftermath of post orgasmic bliss. But as you might also guess from the title, there are overtures. And from the poet, there are overtures of religious ecstasy as well, including an appeal to Christ. There's also enough ambiguity, I suppose, that the poem could be referring to something not sexual. A relationship, a connection, a kind of spiritual harmony, a joy in two souls convening on some higher plane. She says in the poem, she's saturated, flooded, satiated, desperate for silence, even death. But is it from love, understanding, sex, religion? Poetically, it might not be clear, but as a description of ecstasy of some kind, it's highly evocative. Ecstasy by Gabriela Mistral. Now, O Christ, seal my eyelids, Let ice on my lips be spread. All the hours are superfluous, all the words are said. He looked on me. We looked each on each, in silence for a long space, Our look as rigid as death's. The stupor that whitens the face in the last agony blanched us after that instant Life holds nothing more. I heard him speak convulsively. I spoke my words, A confusion of plenitude, tribulations and fears hesitated, broke. I spoke of his destiny, of mine, a mortar of blood and tears. After this I know there can be nothing more, Nothing. No perfume but would roll diluted down my cheek. My ears are shut, my mouth is sealed. What meaning for me now by pallid earth could be revealed? What to me are bleeding roses or quiet snows congealed? Therefore, O Christ, I plead to you now. Though when anguished with hunger, I stilled my cries, but now stop my pulses shut the lids over my eyes Protect against the tempest this flesh that was thronged with his words. Let not the brutal daylight shatter this image to shards receive me. I go without stain, and I go fulfilled like a flooded plain. The next poem I want to talk about was published in English in 1941, again in poetry magazine. If you are one of the people, if you are, and I know there's a lot of you, if you're one of the people who enjoy watching the Stevie Nicks video of her singing the song Silver Springs to Lindsey Buckingham. The video has 56 million views. And it's not just because it's a great song, although it is. Okay, let's talk about the video for a moment. For Fleetwood Mac fans, this is familiar territory, but bear with me. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham go way back. They were a couple and a Music duo before they joined Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham Nicks, they were the duo and Lindsey Buckingham. The guy has problems. I love his music. I think he's kind of a genius, and I love his interviews and his general Persona. But he had some demons. I think at times, he was not such a nice person. But he and Stevie are like one of those couples. They're like Paolo and Francesca or Samson and Delilah, Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet were lovers, but they were toxic for each other, too, weren't they? Not exactly a happily ever after scenario there. So, anyway, Stevie writes this song, silver Springs, which got left off the Rumors album, their masterpiece album. But it's a great song, and it's great because of Stevie's poetry in the lyrics and her vocals and her feel for the song, but also because of Lindsay's guitar solo and arrangement and general musicianship. That was the blessing and curse of Stevie Nicks for Lindsay. He loved her. She was his soulmate. But he wasn't quite good enough for her personally. He fell short as a life partner. They couldn't be together. They would spin apart. But as a musician, as the musical genius that he was, he was the best in the world, the only person, the best person at taking her lyrics and song ideas and turning them into finished songs, masterpieces. He was almost remorseful about it. I saw an interview where he said, first, I just. I just know what Stevie's songs need. I just know how to do it. For some reason, I just know how to do it. And so, for the sake of the band, he would turn them into songs that get played hundreds of millions of times. They become the currency, the cultural currency of an era. But as he said, sometimes I didn't want to be working on those songs. I didn't want to be making them into hits because maybe because he and Stevie were arguing and he thought, I don't want to do this for you. But as in the case of Silver Springs, which was also a common thing because the song was about him. And here he is working on it, playing this beautiful guitar on it, turning it into a finished song. And the song is Stevie singing about him. And in this video Fleetwood Mac performance of Silver Springs live in Burbank, California, in May of 1997. Seek it out. If you haven't seen it, watch it again. If you haven't watched it for a while, Stevie sings this song at him. Not to him, not next to him, not beside him, not with him and at him. The song builds, and she's singing these lines, and she just gets this look on her face. That's like, get ready. Get ready for the blast, buddy. I. Here I come. And she's singing. He's playing the guitar, which is. He's, of course, plays this beautiful solo. And she just starts warming up. She fixes him with her eyes. The camera is all set up to do it. Maybe they knew this was coming because the camera angles are perfect. And she's singing the lines. Don't say that she's pretty. And did you say that she loves you? Baby, I don't want to know. And then the chorus. Time casts a spell on you. Remember that. The witchiness of Stevie Nicks. She's not literally a witch, but she embraces that side of herself. She. She leaned into that Persona once people started calling her a witch or referring to her as a witch. She said. She said, yeah, yeah. Call me that. I'll be that. I've seen her in concert. She comes out with these flowing robes, and they blow in the wind. And she lifts up her arms, and behind it, it was super hot. And behind us, it started raining, and the crowd went crazy. It was as if she was calling forth the rain. And this is like she's calling forth something else. The hounds of hell maybe turn to attack. Lindsey Buckingham. She's singing these lyrics. Time casts a spell on you, but you won't forget me. I know I could have loved you, but you would not let me. Those two lines are repeated over and over. And then the lines go to. I'll follow you down till the sound of my voice will haunt you. You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you. And over that, she's vamping, singing right at Lindsey Buckingham, who's just sort of absorbing it dutifully. He knows this is his job. He knows what she's doing. He gets it, but he's accepting it. He's not really fighting back. He's not running away either. He's just continuing with the song, letting his. Letting his music speak for him to say, I'm here, too. I'll. I'll keep going. Give me what you got. Give me everything you got. It's like Rocky in the movie, right? Getting beat up. Is that so bad? Is that so? It ain't so bad, even. It's. And Lindsay, Stevie's voice is raising up like the headless horseman in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, getting bigger and bigger and bigger, rising like this demonic force. And you feel every word that she's singing. I'll follow you down till the sound of my Voice will haunt you. And she's singing, was I just a fool? Give me just a chance. You'll never get away from the sound of the woman who loves you. And she sings, never get away, Never get away. All their ups and downs as a couple, all of his love and devotion and abuse and betrayal, it's all coming out like a. A potion that Stevie Nicks has brewed up in her kettle. And now she's unleashing it upon him like a mad woman in the forest, delivering the curse, pronouncing the curse. It's kind of terrifying and also kind of awesome. Go, Stevie, my bewitching queen. And Stevie, getting back to our story, meet your poetic predecessor, Gabriella Mistral, who published the following poem in English in December 1941. It's called God Wills it, which is hilarious. Imagine if Stevie, at the end of her song Silver Springs, if she just said facts and dropped the mic. That's kind of like this, right? Oh, you think this is just me? You think this is just me? A scorned woman, a vengeful woman who's gonna hector you with this curse in my poetry. No, no, no, no, my friend and former lover. This is God. This is God's plan for you. I'm just the messenger. God wills it. By Gabriela Mistral the very earth will disown you if your soul barter my soul in angry tribulation the waters will tremble and rise. My world became more beautiful since the day me to you, when under the flowering thorn tree together we stood without words and love, like the heavy fragrance of the flowering thorn tree, pierced us. The earth will vomit forth snakes. If ever you barter my soul, barren of your child and empty, I rock my desolate knees. Christ in my breast will be crushed, and the charitable door of my house will break the wrist of the beggar and repulse the woman in sorrow. The kiss your mouth gives another will echo within my ear as the deep surrounding caverns bring back your words to me. Even the dust of the highway keeps the scent of your footprints. I track them and like a deer, follow you into the mountains. Clouds will paint over my dwelling the image of your new love. Go to her like a thief crawling in the boweled earth to kiss her. When you lift her face, you will find my face disfigured with weeping. God will. This is so good. Sorry. God will not give you the light unless you walk by my side. God will not let you drink if I do not tremble in the water. He will not let you sleep except in the hollow of my hair. If you go, you destroy my soul. As you trample the weeds by the roadside, Hunger and thirst will gnaw you, crossing the heights or the plains. And wherever you are, you will watch the evenings bleed with my wounds. When you call another woman, I will issue forth on your tongue, even as a taste of salt deep in the roots of your throat. In hating or singing, in yearning, it is me alone you summon. If you go and die far from me, 10 years your hand will be waiting, hollowed under the earth, to gather the drip of my tears. And you will feel the trembling of your corrupted flesh until my bones are powdered into the dust on your face. Hmm. As much as I. And that's Gabriella Mistral, who was quite angered when her second lover left her for another woman. And that poem, God Wills It, I think comes out of that pain. But as much as I love that poem, I don't think it's why she won the Nobel Prize. Let's take our last break. We'll hear a couple more poems and then talk about why she came to be the first Latin American woman. The first Latin American poet awarded the most prestigious honor in literature.
- [52:40]
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- [53:04]
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- [53:44]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so this pair of poems was published together when they came out in English. That one was called. One is called Drinking and the other is Slow Rain. These were from May of 1943. They had been written before then, but the translations in English are from that period. And by the way, before we begin, there's a reference in here to the Aconcagua, which is a mountain in Argentina. Drinking. I remember people's gestures. They were gestures of giving me water in the valley of Rio Blanco, where the Aconcagua rises. I went to drink. I leapt to drink in the whip of a waterfall that fell in a stiff mane and broke white and rigid. I glued my mouth to the foaming, and the blessed water burnt me, and for three days my mouth was bleeding from that drink of the Aconcagua. In the country of Mitla, a day of cicadas, of sun and of walking. I bent to a pool and an Indian came to hold me over the water, and my head, like a fruit, was between the palms of his hands. I drank, and what I was drinking was my face and his face together. And in a flash I knew that my race was the flesh of Mitla. On the island of Puerto Rico at the time of the blue filled siesta, my body at rest, the waves in a frenzy, and the palms like a hundred mothers. A little girl gracefully opened a cocoanut close to my mouth, and I drank as a daughter, her mother's milk, milk of the palm trees. And I have drunk no sweeter with the soul nor with the body. In the house of my childhood, my mother brought me water. Between one drink and another I looked at her over the jar. My head I raised higher and higher. The jar sank lower and lower. And still I keep the valley, I keep my thirst and her look. This shall be eternity, for we are still as we were. I remember people's gestures. They were gestures of giving me water. That's the first poem. The second poem is called Slow Rain. Slow rain. This timorous, sorrowful water, like a child that suffers before it touches the earth, falls fainting. The tree and the wind are quiet. And in the stupendous silence these clear and bitter tears keep falling. The sky is like an immense heart which opens bitterly. It does not rain, it is bleeding slowly, abundantly. Men indoors at the hearthstone feel none of this bitterness, this gift of sorrowful water from above us, this wide and weary descent of conquered waters toward the earth. Reclining and exhausted, the lifeless water is falling as quietly as in a dream. Like the slight creations dreams are full of, it rains. And like a tragic jackal, night lies in wait in the mountains. Out of the earth in darkness, what will rise up? And shall you sleep while outside this sickly, lifeless water of death is falling. Okay, let's turn now to what happened to her in 1945, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the ceremony, she herself spoke modestly and was full of praise for Sweden and its tradition of democracy. And it was left to a member of the Swedish Academy, Hjalmar Gulberg, to Sing her praises. And to explain what Gabriela Mistral had meant to the world of poetry. What she meant to the world of poetry at that time. I'll just quote from his speech. He says, her story is so well known to the people of South America that passed on from country to country, it has become almost a legend. And now that she has at last come to us over the crests of the Andes and across the immensities of the Atlantic, we may retell it once again. In a small village in the Elquis Valley several decades ago, was born a future schoolteacher named Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga. Godoy was her father's name, Alcaiaga, her mother's. Both were of Basque origin. Her father, who had been a schoolteacher, improvised verses with ease. His talent seems to have been mixed with the anxiety and the instability common to poets. He left his family when his daughter, for whom he had made a small garden, was still a child. Her beautiful mother, who was to live a long time, has said that sometimes she discovered her lonely little daughter engaged in intimate conversations with the birds and the flowers of the garden. According to one version of the legend, she was expelled from school. Apparently she was considered too stupid for teaching hours to be wasted on her. Yet she taught herself by her own methods, educating herself to the extent that she became a teacher in the small village school of Cantera. There her destiny was fulfilled at the age of 20, when a passionate love arose between her and her railroad employee. We know little of their story. We know only that he betrayed her. One day in November 1909, he fatally shot himself in the head. The young girl was seized with boundless despair. Like Job, she lifted her cry to the heaven that had allowed this. From the lost Valley, in the barren, scorched mountains of Chile, a voice arose, and far around men heard it. A banal tragedy of everyday life lost its private character and entered into universal literature. Lucila Godoy y Alcaiaga became Gabriela Mistral. The little provincial schoolteacher was to become the spiritual queen of Latin America. When the poems written in memory of the dead man had made known the name of the new poet, the somber and passionate poems of Gabriella Mistral began to spread over all South America. It was not until 1922, however, that she had her large collection of poems, Desolation, Despair, printed in New York. A mother's tears burst forth in the middle of the book. In the 15th poem, tears shed for the son of the dead man, a son who would never be born. Gabriela Mistral transferred her natural love to the children she taught. For them, she wrote the collections of simple songs and rounds collected in Madrid in 1924 under the title Tenderness. In her honor, 4,000 Mexican children at one time sang these rounds. Gabriela Mistral became the poet of motherhood by adoption. In 1938. Her third large collection, Tala, a title which can be translated as ravage but which is also the name of a children's game, appeared in Buenos Aires for the benefit of the infant victims of the Spanish Civil War. Contrasting with the pathos of desolation, Tala expresses the cosmic calm which envelops the South American land whose fragrance comes all the way to us. We are again in the garden of her childhood. I listen again to the intimate dialogues with nature and common things. There is a curious mixture of sacred hymn and naive song for children. The poems on bread and wine, salt, corn and water, water that can be offered to thirsty men, celebrate the primordial foods of human life. From her maternal hand this poet gives us a drink which tastes of the earth and which appeases the thirst of the heart. It is drawn from the spring which ran for Sappho on a Greek island and for Gabriela Mistral in the valley Elchis, the spring of poetry that will never dry up. Madame Gabriela Mistral, you have indeed made a long voyage to be received by so short a speech. In the space of a few minutes, I have described to the compatriots of Selma Lagerloff your remarkable pilgrimage from the chair of a schoolmistress to the throne of poetry. In rendering homage to the rich Latin American literature, we address ourselves today quite specially to its queen, the poet of desolation who has become the great singer of sorrow and of motherhood, the poet of motherhood who was not herself a mother. But maybe that gave her a particular appreciation for motherhood and maybe gave her the room to mother everyone and everything she had mothering in her. We'll skip lightly over her last 12 years. She lived 12 years longer after winning the Nobel Prize. She was still writing excellent poetry. And she had a partner named Doris Dana, who loved her and whom she loved. Letters have made that clear, how close they were. Although Dana, for her part, denied that their relationship had ever been erotic. She said that it was more of a stepmother and stepdaughter relationship. We'll just leave that there. Gabriela Mistral died of pancreatic cancer in 1957, at the age of 67. The Chilean government declared three days of national mourning. As I mentioned, her portrait is now on Chilean money. For a stretch in the 1970s and 80s, the Chilean government, military dictatorship tried to paint her as the portrait of submission to authority, a representative of social order, as saint like celibate, long suffering, a charity worker. Those views have all been challenged, thankfully refuted by the biographical record and by the poetry itself and by her letters. She had lovers. She burned like anyone else. The woman who wrote God wills it is not someone to long be portrayed as the portrait of submission. Nor is the young woman who refused to accept the denial of her education. She lived a life like a poet should, with all the requisite physical and spiritual heartbreaks and triumphs and joys, enduring more sacrifice and sorrow than most of us are asked to endure. And she had enough restlessness and seeking to make us appreciate the questions she asked and the truths she found. And poetry was there for her through it all. The little girl who spoke to animals and who spoke to her fellow humans in rhyme was the woman whose verse spoke for a nation and a people and the world. Okay, there we go. We are coming to the end, people. The end of the month is approaching the end of the year and the end of our sign up for our trip to Literary England. With all of its excitement of the new, of the familiar, of being together in our small group, finding our way through the stomping grounds of Shakespeare and Dickens and Austin and so many others. Signup period is coming to an end. We will lock it up and we want you to be on the inside, not on the outside looking in. So what can you do? If you are interested in coming with us, you can head on over to John Shores Travel, their website that's sh o r s or to the history of literature.com where you can find links to the itinerary. That trip's going to be in May of 2026, which is really just around the corner and I hope that you can make it. We still have a few slots open. We need a few of you more. A few more of you to sign up so we can make this the best possible trip. The first drink at Ye Olde Cheshire cheese, the treasured spot of Dr. Johnson and Dickens and Agatha Christie and many others will be on me. Just mention Gabriella Mistral and I'll. I'll put down my. My currency. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [66:45]
Jonathan F.P. Rose
What does it mean to live for the common good? Introducing the Garrison Institute presents the Common Good, the brand new podcast from the Garrison Institute, a leading not for profit organization exploring the intersection of contemplation and engaged action in the world. Hosted by me, Jonathan F.P. rose, a co founder of the Garrison Institute, the series dives into the threads that bind us all. First, you'll discover the interdependent nature of life with environmental entrepreneur Paul Hawken and trailblazing plant intelligence researcher Monica Gagliano. Next, we unlock the mysteries of the mind with renowned psychiatrist Dan Siegel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Finally, we experience compassion and action with social justice activist Conda Mason and environmental leader Bill McKibben. We invite you to listen, reflect and join us in acting for the common good. Follow the Garrison Institute presents the Common Good on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are Listening now the town of.
- [67:44]
Sean Marchese
Milton may seem normal at first glance, but the shadows are cursed and the expansive woods surrounding town are forbidden. They call it the void, and nobody comes back alive.
- [67:53]
Jack Wilson
You're headed straight for the void.
- [67:55]
Sean Marchese
Milton lives suspended in time, trapped by a darkness that seems to be creeping closer and closer.
- [68:00]
Jack Wilson
It's safe. The void is kept at bay. Is it though?
- [68:03]
Sean Marchese
Join three friends as they embark on an epic journey into the heart of darkness. The Void Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [68:11]
Jack Wilson
This is just the beginning.