In the Library
Rima LIII (Volverán las oscuras golondrinas)
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, 1871
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Jules Renard (1908)
- Original
- Original es
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
The dark swallows will return to hang their nests upon your balcony
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
The swallows come back every spring to build their nests on your balcony, and the honeysuckle climbs the garden wall once more, and someday other burning words will sound in your ear. Everything returns, and that is both the cruelty at the centre of this poem and its unbearable tenderness. Bécquer builds three times toward the same hush, the same insistence: the swallows that once learned your name, the dewdrops you watched tremble and fall like tears of the day, the man who loved you kneeling as though before an altar. Those, and only those, will never come back. Read aloud, the Spanish moves like a slow tide, each stanza rising on the promise of return and breaking on the one thing that cannot. Few love poems have known so exactly that grief is never the loss itself but its particular, unrepeatable face. You will read it in ninety seconds and carry it for years.