My short answer: the poem is about human love.
In more detail, “Dos Angeles” (”Two Angels”) is found in Mistral’s third book, Tala (“Fellling” or “Cutting down”, sometimes also rendered as “Clear cut”). The poem is part of the section entitled “Alucinación” (”Hallucination)” and within this “Dos Angeles” falls into a set of seven poems subtitled “Gestos” (“Gestures”), which have the overall theme of longing for what has passed. Accordingly I do not believe that the poem has a religious theme, despite the use of religious imagery, such as angels, within it. In an essay1, Juan Manuel Mancilla Troncoso concurs with this view, writing:
Se trata de un poema amoroso, místico, de carácter epifánico
(It is a love poem, mystical, of an epiphanic character.)
The poem deals with a union of opposites: an angel who gives joy and an angel who gives agony, and how the poet feels tugged between the two. The descriptions used throughout the poem occur in opposed pairs: joy-agony, trembling-fixed, flame-ash, united-enemy, death-life, emphasising the dichotomies of feeling that the poet experiences. The poet’s response to these feelings seems entirely passive. She compares herself to the sea, surrendering herself to the emotions: “I give myself to them like seaweed to the wave”. This actually seems reminiscent of depression - many sufferers feel themselves to be helpless participants in a battle of emotions in their hearts and minds - although I do not know if this is actually relevant to Mistral’s own case.
In the last verse the poet reveals that the two angels coincided at only one point in the past. On that day joy and agony united to tie “the knot of death and life”. The juxtaposition of agony and ecstasy is common in depictions of intense love, and this is undefined further by the event occurring on “the day of love, the day of the Epiphany”. It is also interesting to note that Mistral also used the metaphor of a knot in the Colophon of her second collection Ternura, writing:
el poeta es un desata-nudos y el amor sin palabras nudo es, y ahoga
(the poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot,
and it drowns)
Here again, love (mute love in this case) is symbolised by a knot.
We can ask ourselves why she emphasises that this only happened once, and a clue may lie in Mistral’s early life. When she was twenty years old, her lover, Romelio Ureta Carvajal, committed suicide. His death clearly affected her greatly, and it became the inspiration for her “Sonnets of Death”, her first works to attract widespread attention. Possibly the “knot of life and death” refers to the fact that her life and his death remained entwined ever afterwards.
- Los dos ángeles: Encuentro y desencuentro de dos poemas. Gabriela Mistral y Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Acta Literaria N°38, I Sem. (153-163), 2009.
