Vallejo entre “dos aguas encontradas” en Los heraldos negros

Abstract

Interpretation of “The weary rings” from César Vallejo’s The black heralds as an example of William Empson’s seventh type of ambiguity in which a text simultaneously suggests two opposing meanings, thereby expressing a fundamental division in the poet’s mind. The allusion in line 8 of the poem to the poet’s “deicidal finger” is seen as an echo of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The struggle between this new poetic style and Vallejo’s recherché and archaising modernista style is seen as operating at the heart of “The weary rings”, a poem which essentially refuses to achieve semantic resolution.