Dedicated "to the spirits of Gutiérrez Nájera and Othón", this was the title of the first book published by Ramón López Velarde.
Due to the themes of many of the compositions that appeared in the volume, the book made a pleasant impression: it was in keeping with the new appreciation of life and provincial tastes that the Revolution had brought with it.
Poems such as Sundays in the province, My cousin Agueda, To the primitive grace of the villagers, From the native town, To the patron saint of my town, and also the environment, sometimes religious, other familiar, often still innocent eroticism, to the province, within the framework of national poetry, to the category of literary theme.
With this book, modernist poetry, which had begun in Mexico within a provincial city with cosmopolitan aspirations, became an expression of the citizen and national province. It is then when the moment is reached when the "universal" creation of Mexican poets is no longer an uprooting of their circumstance, but an acceptance of all the values that comprise it, such as the place of their birth, their customs, the smells and textures of childhood, the village environment and everything that ends up forming a national expression, a poetry of its own.
In The Devout Blood the Jerez poet also inaugurates his own romantic myth, that of his unfortunate love for his first muse. López Velarde writes the following in the Foreword to its second edition:
“Enemy of explaining my procedures even on occasions when apt criticism or the baseness of stupidity have touched on general issues, today I break that line of silence.
I wish to affirm that out of loyalty and legality to myself this edition is identical to that of 1916, without changing a word or a period or a comma. A single novelty: in the first poem, the name of the woman who dictated almost all the pages. "
And this is what the first poem says:
IN THE REIGN OF SPRING
TO JOSEFA DE LOS RÍOS MARCH 17, 1880 - MAY 7, 1917
Beloved, it is Spring, Fuensanta, it is that the ecclesiastical anointing of Lent blossoms
There is a sweet relief in sick souls, because April with her auras gives them the feeling of convalescence.
The sky is dressed in the best blue and the earth in roses and I dress with your love… Oh glory of being in love, in love, drunk with love for you, perpetual bride, madly in love, like fifteen years old, what a first passion!
And with the happiness of doves that flee from the convent in which they were prisoners and go far away, under the blue promise of the sky and on the flowery of the earth, thus they fly to see you in other climates oh holy, oh beloved, oh sick! These childhood verses that sprouted under the empire of Spring.
After Devout Blood, like Dante with Beatriz, within López Velarde's poetry there was perpetual passion, exaltation and mourning.
