Fame

Fame

The Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939) taught French at the local Instituto in Soria from 1907 to 1912.

Unclaimed by fame, obedient to poetry’s iron law,

Machado earned a living teaching in this classroom:

chunky wooden desks, a teacher’s table and

under glass—photographs, rolls, drafts of poems,

a copy of the French textbook of his time.

Today the Instituto’s name is his, as are the names

of streets and parks and lanes. Towns resurrect him

in bronze, cafes hallow corners where he sat,

front walls of his homes glow with burnished brass,

trains come and go at Metro Antonio Machado,

his poems sing in the tongues of Babel.

So alive in death, wrote Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Because they are marked in his hand

the rolls of his pupils’ attendance are preserved:

registers of long-gone schooldays,

lives on the cusp of memory’s reach,

earthly sojourns elsewhere carved in stone,

inscribed on fractured crosses on crumbling graves,

names fading on frangible paper in this classroom,

men and women who for much of a century

told wayfarers tramping the cobbles of Soria,

washing Castile’s dust down their throats in bars,

“I was taught French by Antonio Machado.”

B N Oakman