LAST week, we talked about José Rizal’s lesser-known Dapitan poem “Mi Retiro” as the swan song before “Mi Ultimo Adios.” They are complementary and can be appreciated if taken together and constitute Rizal’s long goodbye to the nation. A copy in Rizal’s own handwriting was sold last Saturday at León Gallery.

What makes this poem important aside from its authorship is the discourse, albeit varied, that goes around it.

José M. Hernandez was the one who was able to capture best the common sentiment of biographers about the poem’s melancholy feel: “It is a poem like a cry from a heart wrung dry with pain. It is a sad song from the very ends of the world where one lives only in the memories of happier days. Everything contributes to the mood of sadness: the long stretch of sand, the quiet sea, the silence of the forest, the gentle breeze, the pale moon and the memories... It sings dolefully of the sadness of Rizal’s days, the silence of the nights, the quiet, slow passing of time.”

Leon Ma. Guerrero, an excellent writer himself, wrote in one of the best biographies of Rizal, “The First Filipino”: “The verses for his mother entitled ‘Mi Retiro’ are some of his best. They reflect in a polished glass not only the enchantments of his rustic life but also its bitterness.”

National Artist Nick Joaquin was not as enthusiastic as the others. He describes this period as Rizal’s “dry season.” He wrote in his foreword to “The Complete Poems and Plays of José Rizal”: “The poems of the Dapitan exile are without merit. … he seems to have lost all interest in poetry and to have abandoned even his European manner. As though he had never learned dryness, precision and economy, he returned to writing vaporous, interminable verses which, save that the craftsmanship is more expert, might have been written by the rhymer at the Ateneo. The longest, ‘Mi Retiro,’ in verbose alexandrines, is as boring as the didactic exercises of his youth. In fleeing despair, he almost touched the other extreme. Dapitan was too comfortable; the poet grew fat.” Yet Joaquin perhaps made the most beautiful English translation of the poem.

But literary critic Antonio C. Manuud insisted in 1967 that our love of country blinded us to think that Rizal’s poetic masterpiece would be his last farewell. He predicted that the time would come that as our admiration for “Mi Ultimo Adios” subsides, it is then that we will notice Rizal’s best, “Me Retiro.” Manuud wrote: “A quick review of the arrangement should show the reader how apt it is to speak of a sea-change, not only in regard to the subject matter of the poem but in regard to its structuring as well: There is an undulatory motion in time from the present to the past, to the future, back to the present and again to the past and once more toward the present. …the description of the weather change… Quiet is disturbed by the storm and the night, only to be restored in the morning calm. Before the poem ends, a storm image is again recalled before peace is regained in the last stanza. All this, in relentless, wave-like motions, prefigure the sea — an important agency in the poet’s life, for it not only has brought him to other lands and therefore to other visions, but it also, even now in exile, brings other lands to him and therefore, again other visions.”

National Artist Virgilio Almario noted that, after breaking away from the academic tradition of his time with some of his European poems like “A Las Flores de Heidelberg” and “Canto del Viajero,” Rizal “retreats” to his Romantic roots. This can also explain why Noel Villaroman commented, “considered as his best literary work, even rivaling ‘Mi Ultimo Adiós.’ As a piece of poetry, it displays an almost mathematical symmetry. The movement of its verses is slow and cadenced, in perfect harmony with its melancholic theme. One can only savor such exquisite poetry in its original Spanish.”

Almario suggested that the poem is not only about acceptance and finding joy in a limiting space. We should look at how Rizal used the term “retiro” as a clever word-play to include all of these meanings: retirement from a long duty, retreat from battle, and, in a religious sense, can also mean temporary respite from the frenzied hurly-burly of city life (is that you José Mari?) to reflect about your own life. It can also mean a look back to a life well-lived, a look back at the past and a physical return to one’s native or beloved land.

Rizal was settled but not contented. Because he knew the fight was not yet over. That somehow, the wheels of history would roll. And it did. The revolution happened, the “idea” he wrote about in the poem — the nation — will be birthed, and his image became one of its enduring symbols.