In the poem, the poet envisions his son breastfeeding on his mother's onion blood ( sangre de cebolla), and uses the child's laughter as a counterpoint to the mother's desperation. Perhaps Hernández's best known poem is "Nanas de la cebolla" ("Onion Lullaby"), a reply in verse to a letter from his wife in which she informed him that she was surviving on bread and onions. The intensity and simplicity of the poems, combined with the extraordinary situation of the poet, give them remarkable power.
In these works, the poet writes not only of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and his own incarceration, but also of the death of an infant son and the struggle of his wife and another son to survive in poverty. These poems are now known as his Cancionero y romancero de ausencia ( Songs and Ballads of Absence). While in prison, Hernández produced an extraordinary amount of poetry, much of it in the form of simple songs, which the poet collected in his papers and sent to his wife and others. Some of his verses were kept by his jailers. Just before his death, Hernández scrawled his last verse on the wall of the hospital: Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends: let me take my leave of the sun and the fields. He suffered pneumonia in Palencia prison, bronchitis in Ocaña prison and eventually succumbed to typhus and tuberculosis in 1942 in Alicante gaol. His death sentence, however, was commuted to a prison term of 30 years, leading to incarceration in multiple jails under extraordinarily harsh conditions. He was tried in 1939, along with Eduardo de Guzmán and 27 others, accused of being a communist commissar and of writing poems harmful to the Francoist cause. Unlike others, he could not escape Spain after the Republican surrender and was arrested multiple times after the war for his anti-fascist sympathies. Josefina died on 18 February 1987 at age 71 in Elche, Alicante. Months later came their second son, Manuel Miguel (4 January 1939 – 1984). Their first son, Manuel Ramón, was born on 19 December 1937 but died in infancy on 19 October 1938. His wife inspired him to write most of his romantic work. ĭuring the Civil War, on the 9 March 1937, he married Josefina Manresa Marhuenda, whom he had met in 1933 in Orihuela. He campaigned for the Republic during the war, writing poetry and addressing troops deployed to the front. A member of the Communist Party of Spain, Hernández was a member of the Fifth Regiment at the start of the Spanish Civil War and served in the 11th Division during the Battle of Teruel. Though Hernández employed novel images and concepts in his verses, he never abandoned classical, popular rhythms and rhymes. Shaped by both Golden Age writers such as Francisco de Quevedo and, like many Spanish poets of his era, by European vanguard movements, notably by surrealism, he joined a generation of socially conscious Spanish authors concerned with workers rights. As a youth, Hernández greatly admired the Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Góngora, who was an influence in his early works. He was introduced to literature by friend Ramon Sijé. He spent his childhood as a goatherd and farmhand, and was, for the most part, self-taught, although he did receive basic education from state schools and the Jesuits. Hernández was born in Orihuela, Alicante, to a poor family and received little formal education he published his first book of poetry at 23, and gained considerable fame before his death. His last book, Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, was published after his death, and is a collection of the poems he wrote in prison, some written in rudimentary pieces of toilet paper, others preserved in letters to his wife, is considered one of the finest pieces of Spanish poetry of the 20th century. Hernández died of tuberculosis, imprisoned due to his active participation on the Republican side of the civil war. At school, he became a friend of Ramón Sijé, a well-educated boy who lent and recommended books to Hernández, and whose death would inspire his most famous poem, Elegy. Born and raised in a family of low resources, he was self-taught in what refers to literature, and struggled against an unfavourable environment to build up his intellectual education, such as a father who physically abused him for spending time with books instead of working, and who took him out of school as soon as he finished his primary education. Miguel Hernández Gilabert (30 October 1910 – 28 March 1942 ) was a 20th-century Spanish-language poet and playwright associated with the Generation of '27 and the Generation of '36 movements.
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