Jose Mercado's Heart is in Spain

RR Mercado

Detect the Conflict

Mercado’s poem “The Castilian Language” is an ode to the Old World, encapsulated in the language of that world. Mercado represents it in numerous ways in his poem: love of a mother for a child, and religion—the Virgin Mary as protector of the people of Spain; and literature, with Cervantes being the great “sad bard” of the Spanish people, whose most famous work Don Quixote de la Mancha is still beloved by people around the world. All of this is part of the past that is currently being rejected in whatever part of the New World Mercado is talking about when he refers to when he writes in the last two lines of the poem: “For a flag can be changed, / but never sentiments!” In other words, he is talking about a conflict in the spirit of a people, whose politics is pushing them one way towards a new flag of leadership, but whose hearts are still attached to the old ways and things of the past—the things that have made them special and that have given them an identity.

This poem, therefore, is about identity and the conflict that occurs when identity and politics clash. In the New World this was often the case as new governments sought to overturn the old ways of thinking and speaking and acting. It happened wherever Spain had brought civilization, as Mercado suggests in the poem. The liberal, democratic West took over the places where the Old World had once flourished in the New World.

In short, the central conflict is between the past and the present, or between the past and the future. The past offers something special to Mercado—faith, love, family, tenderness; the future (not really referenced or spoken of) nonetheless is felt to be bleak and full of foreboding. For there is the sense of pressure—of something beloved being taken away, starting with the language that the poet describes.