Before Hatred

Kathleen Jamie discovers the poetry of Miguel Hernández

Apr 03, 2026

A photo of graffiti on a stone wall. There are two men in the middle of the image. The text reads: 'Rock & Poetry. Hernandez-Neruda.'

His image is everywhere in Orihuela; both the station and the university are named for him. His childhood home is now a museum. To reach it, you must find your way through the town, down narrow shopping streets and over the river. At length you reach the huge 16^thc Diocesan College, the Santa Domingo, built in the local honey-coloured stone, and behind that, a clean-swept square. Across the square stands a simple low cottage.

You enter the living room directly from the street. It’s plainly furnished, a table with flowers, a few photographs and manuscripts. There’s a dresser, with a dish of onions. The onions allude to the most famous of his poems, which was written when he was in prison, detained by Franco’s forces after the Spanish Civil War. He’d received a letter from his wife Josefina, telling him that she and his surviving son, an infant, had nothing to eat but bread and onions. In return, he wrote ‘Lullaby of the Onion’. Here is one of its seven stanzas:

Your laughter frees me,

gives me wings.

It sweeps away my loneliness

knocks down my cell.

Mouth that flies,

Heart that turns

to lightning on your lips.

(trans. Don Share)

These are his nouns: hearts, mouths, blood, wings, lightning.

‘Lullaby of the Onion’ was written in 1941. After three years in jail he was released but Miguel Hernández died shortly after. He was 32.

I’ll call him Miguel, as he is half my age, closer to my son’s. You pass through his childhood house, two rooms deep, into a little yard with a well and a privy. Beyond that, a few steps lead up to a byre for the family’s goats. A step higher lies a walled garden. The present-day gardener has conjured lettuces and brassicas out of the stony ground. There is an old fig tree. A lemon tree bears fruit. Immediately beyond the garden wall rises the arid hillside where the teenage Miguel tended the goats all day, taking his books with him.

We must imagine the smell of the goats and privies – and his father’s foul temper. It’s said the father was given to beating the lad so severely about the head that he suffered headaches for the rest of his short life. Little wonder he left, the goatherd poet. When he was 20, he lit out for Madrid, in his cords and espadrilles. He was gifted and sure of his vocation; he wanted to try and win his way with the literati. (Neruda befriended him, as did Lorca. But the escape was not a success, and he was soon back in Orihuela. There would be another more fruitful attempt a few years later.)

In truth I’d never heard of Miguel Hernández before planning this holiday, a short week in Alicante. Checking with my NSP colleagues I discovered I was not alone.

The Civil War era poets we knew were Federico Lorca, of course, and Antonio Machado, but not Hernández. Lorca was murdered in 1936 by Nationalist forces, his body has never been found. In 1939 Machado, then in his 60s, was forced to flee but he died having just crossed the border into France. It was Miguel, in his 20s and active in anti-fascist circles, who actually took up arms with the Republicans and became their pre-eminent soldier-poet.

A single voice recording survives: you can hear it in the reception room of the museum (the homeplace is so small the reception desk and information boards are housed in another building). Miguel is reciting his ‘Song of the Soldier Husband’. His voice is confident. (As a souvenir, visitors are offered a scroll with the printed poem.) Here are three of its eleven stanzas:

Write for the battle: feel for me in the trenches:

here with my gun I invoke and fix your name

and defend your poor womb that awaits me

and defend your child

Our child will be born with a clenched fist

clothed in the clamour of triumph and guitars

and I will heave my soldiering at the door

toothless and clawless.

One must murder to go on living.

One day I’ll enter the far-off shadows of your hair

and sleep in sheets starched and crackling

sewn by your hand.

(trans. AS Kline)

I Have Lots of Heart is the title of Bloodaxe’s 1996 bilingual Selected Poems, which has translations by Don Share and an introductory essay by Willis Barnstone. The title is well chosen; what reaches the reader through the English translations is exactly that – lots of heart. Miguel writes with such vigour, with a certainty that poetry, his poetry, matters. Despite his privations, his war and imprisonment, the poems are open to the world, kindly, sexual. (As a goatherd, I doubt the ‘facts of life’ came as a surprise to him.) We have his early poems, then the war poems, then the prison poems – that’s all he had life for. He talks of his wife and sons, of love, and inevitably of death. There are blood, kisses, lemons, onions, wings. There is the moon - and the earth, into which he and his wife buried their firstborn son, dead at only 10 months.

A visit to the homeplace museum is necessarily short, it’s so small and poignant.

But I’d also heard about some murals; where might I find them? The museum attendant took a tourist map and drew me a route back through the centre of town. Her blue biro line led between the medieval cathedral and the Ayuntamiento, along more narrow shopping streets (I stopped at a café called the Mary Magdalene). I passed the Islamic centre, mechanics’ workshops, and plazas where old men sat on benches beneath palm trees. It was coming up for Easter; images of Christ’s body, bowed and bloodied in his Passion, had been pasted up all over town. It was only later I thought how little, actually never, the Catholic church features in Miguel’s poems. For him, death means earth. Inevitably, despite the map, I got lost, but some cheerful local women helped. Les Murales! Les Murales! They pointed uphill.

San Isidro is a working-class barrio of steep lanes and single storey cottages.

You know you’ve arrived because you’re greeted by a copy of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, painted so to wrap around an entire building.Also the soundscape changes. The lanes are too narrow for vehicles, so here are brusque voices calling, dogs yapping, any number of cockerels. And here indeed are les murales!

Colourful pop art graffiti on a wall. Above is a black iron railing.

In 1976, when Franco died and Spain began its transition to democracy, the Spanish Communist party was still outlawed. Nevertheless, along with local committees they arranged an extraordinary event. ‘Despite the attempts of the forces of public order to prevent it’, more than 30 artists arrived here in San Isidre and set to work. Since then their original murals have been restored, and many more added. There are nearly 200 now, everywhere you turn. On the backs of houses, on yards and retaining walls, murals all around, all dedicated to Miguel Hernández, his short life and beloved work.

This one below, for example, alludes to his goat-herding days, and the delightful title of his first book, published in 1933: Perito en lunas. Expert in Moons.

A photo of a mural depicting black goats on a hillside. Full and crescent moons rise above them.

The lines below form the last stanza of his prison poem ‘Antes del Odio’, ‘Before hatred’ … This is Don Share’s translation:

There is no jail for man.

They can’t shackle me, no.

The world of chains

is small and foreign to me.

Who locks up a smile?

Who walls in a voice?

There you are in the distance, alone

as death. You, and I.

There you are in the distance.

In your arms, where freedom

for the two of us beats like a heart.

I am free. Feel me free!

Just for love!

A photo of another graffitied wall. The central image is an ornate bird cage, and there's a poem written to the right.

Here are the women in Miguel’s life; his wife and the mother of his two sons, Josefina Manresa, is depicted on the far right. The others are poets, artists, philosophers, scientists …

A mural of a row of women with their names written below them.

The time came for me to retrace my steps through town to the railway station, and in due course to the airport. The Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernandez Airport serves 20 million tourists a year, heading for the beaches and the sun. They all pass under his name! This poor, vital, brimming young man, every inch the poet, fallen into the cataclysm of war, honoured and revered.

Miguel Hernández.

It seems like a long time ago, but alas… Here is a short poem of his, written in 1936.