Reading about the Myth of Narcissus in Luis Cernuda’s Luis de Baviera escucha Lohengrin

Abstract

Luis Cernuda always stressed the expressive potential implicit in Greek myths, and made a constant use of them in his poetic work. Without a doubt the most important of these myths to his work is the myth of Narcissus, which becomes not only a mere example but also the structural base of his poetry. In this article I present an analysis about the presence of the myth of Narcissus in the poem “Luis de Baviera escucha Lohengrin” (Ludwig of Bavaria listens to Lohengrin), which belongs to the last section of Cernuda’s work La Realidad y el Deseo, called Desolación de la Quimera. After showing some examples from some of his previous work, I get to the conclusion that in this poem, Ludwig of Bavaria, Luis Cernuda and Narcissus are the same character. I also verify that the poem’s music flows as a sounding current where the images of both the king and the poet are reflected, a mirror where they both find the culmination of their own desire.