Echoes of Nezahualcoyotl

A Brief Commentary on “Tezcotzinco” by Alan Seeger

Though thou art now a ruin bare and cold,
Thou wert sometime the garden of a king.
The birds have sought a lovelier place to sing.
The flowers are few. It was not so of old.

It was not thus when hand in hand there strolled
Through arbors perfumed with undying Spring
Bare bodies beautiful, brown, glistening,
Decked with green plumes and rings of yellow gold.

Do you suppose the herdsman sometimes hears
Vague echoes borne beneath the moon’s pale ray
From those old, old, far-off, forgotten years?

Who knows? Here where his ancient kings held sway
He stands. Their names are strangers to his ears.
Even their memory has passed away.

Alan Seeger (1888, United States-1916, France), a poet and soldier who died in battle in WWI, is perhaps best known for his poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Seeger spent part of his youth in Mexico and decided to write about Tezcotzinco, the park and spa designed by 15th-century tlatoani Nezahualcoyotl for his own use, not far from his palace in Texcoco (present-day Mexico state). Maybe Seeger felt an affinity with Nezahualcoyotl, a fellow poet. Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, also originally designed by Nezahualcoyotl, is infinitely more utilized as an actual park, but I have a feeling that the Tezcotzinco park area is not as abandoned or forgotten today as Seeger’s poetic voice suggests. Nonetheless, the sonnet is a finely wrought treatment of the ubi sunt theme in a Mesoamerican setting.

The first quatrain, in spite of the elevated register, and in spite of referring to the garden that the ruin once was, consists of short phrases that describe the ruin’s absence of life and movement. In contrast, the second quatrain, evoking the garden of old, is one long, lush phrase. It is linked to the end of the previous quatrain through the anaphora “It was not,” but it is much more extensive, and suggestive of a Garden of Eden. Colors abound (brown, green, and the pleonasm “yellow gold”), with ornamentation, perfume, and movement (the “bare bodies” stroll and glisten). For extra measure, Seeger bestows on “Spring” the modifier “undying,” an ironic choice given the poem’s theme and conclusion.

True to form, the tercets restate the theme, in this case through a question and a two-part answer: (1) the quick rhetorical question “Who knows?” and (2) the rest of the final verses, characterized by a return to short, sparse statements like those in the opening quatrain. The poetic voice contrasts the second quatrain’s communality of “bodies,” “arbors,” “plumes” and “rings” with the tercet’s solitary figure of the herdsman. The herdsman’s lonely occupation echoes the first quatrain’s ambiance of loneliness, even though the hypothetical “echoes” in the question refer to the glory years of activity in the garden. The correspondence is highlighted by alliteration: the “h”s and “b”s of “herdsman sometimes hears / Vague echoes borne beneath” effectively echo the “h”s and “b”s of “hand in hand” and “Bare bodies, beautiful, brown” in the second quatrain. Another solitary figure in the tercet is the moon, whose “pale” (and singular) "ray" contrasts with the rich colors of the second quatrain.

And in the final verses, the herdsman “stands,” fixed like a column among the ruins, in opposition to the movement of the strolling bodies earlier. The verb “stands” also plays off the word “sway” at the end of the previous verse; the kings “held sway” or controlled motion, but the herdsman merely stands. The questioned echoes from the first tercet dissipate here into unrecognizable “names” and then “Even their memory has passed away,” an allusion to an ultimate death as the unremembered and unknown. This reinforces the “old, old, far-off, forgotten years” at the end of the first tercet, and also recalls a trope frequently employed in this kind of sonnet: nouns of diminishing substance that, together with the short phrases and the loss of words’ substance (visual as well as aural) at the end of the poem, conjure the death itself.

A gem of a sonnet, but fortunately the ubi sunt theme is overstated here. Seeger composed the poem before the victors of the Mexican Revolution began an official revindication of indigenous cultures as part of a renewed national identity, supporting Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica; the murals of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros; the color and symbolism of Kahlo and Tamayo; and many other manifestations, culminating perhaps in the monolithic construction of the Museo Nacional de Antropología. Here are some terrific photos, by the highly creative visual artist Bernard Perroud on his outstanding blog, of the park at Tezcotzinco and of the structure known as Nezahualcoyotl’s bath. Long live the memory of Tezcotzinco!