World Literature

“I killed one of me,

one I did not love.

 

She was the flame

of mountain cactus.

She was drought and fire,

thirstless.

 

With rock at her feet

And sky at her shoulder,

she never stooped

in search of cooling springs.”

 

In this excerpt from Gabriela Mistral’s poem “The Other”, she appears to refer to her alter ego. When she says, “I killed one of me, one I did not love”, it is not to say that she actually killed someone. Mistral is really trying to say that she has let go of her alter ego. In other words, she is no longer the person that she used to be. By insinuating the idea of one “I did not love”, she evokes the notion that she is not proud of the person that she used to be. In the next line, Mistral goes on to say, “she was the flame, of mountain cactus”. The flame can symbolize either pain and destruction or passion and rebirth. In this case, the flame represents pain and destruction as it highlights any devastation and agony that she may have inflicted on herself or others in the past. However, Mistral also makes use of the flame to display the passion that has to reinvent herself and become a better person. Next Mistral says, “she was drought and fire, thirstless”. A drought is defined as a continued absence of something specific usually in reference to water. In this instance, she appears to use the word drought to refer to an absence of happiness in her life. We also see another reference to flames and fire which is used in this case to demonstrate the pain that she feels from lacking happiness and she uses thirstless at the end of this line to show that at one point she loses hope in ever finding happiness. Finally, Mistral says, “With rock at her feet and sky at her shoulder, she never stooped in search of cold springs”. She uses the words “rock at her feet” and “sky at her shoulder” to show that she used to be stubborn and stuck in her bad habits. It is important to note that in this english translation, it appears that she uses the words “she never stooped in search of cold springs”, to say that at the time she never stopped to think about how she could turn her life around. However in Spanish it says “y no bajaba nunca, a buscar ojos de agua”, which would translate to “and she never came down, to look for eyes of water”, which may then appear to the reader that she is saying that she never stopped to look at the affects that her action had on herself and others. The point that Gabriela Mistral is trying to get across in her poem is that the purpose of life is to learn from the mistakes we made in the past so that we can have a better future.