The pessimist à outrance might perhaps prefer this couplet:
Pues el delito mayor
del hombre es haber nacido.[1]
But of the true lyric there is not a trace. Not a single new and lovely image could I find in these thousands of lines. There is perhaps a breath of poetry in this paraphrase for the sunset:
Antes que la obscura sombra
sepulte los rayos de oro
entre verdinegras ondas.[2]
But even here there is a glimpse of a conceit which is by no means new.
Calderón had neither the desire nor the ability to write as a pure poet. In the theatre, indeed, pure poetry is but an intruder. Either the drama kills it, or else it kills the drama. Calderón sought to please his audience—and he succeeded, as the records amply prove. He sought to teach a moral lesson to the grandees of the earth, to picture a prince converted to Christian behavior by the discovery of the mystic commonplace that life is a shadow, an illusion, nothing.
It would be labor lost to seek hidden or lofty meanings in the play. It does not illustrate even that rigid application of a single principle which
