On the Love and Work of Jack Gilbert

For my classes with study-abroad students in Seville, Spain, I’ve got a spiel for each nook and cranny of the city we visit. At the Glorieta de Bécquer—a circular garden in María Luisa Park dedicated to the Sevillian late romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer—I am, as the locals say, “en mi salsa.” I gesture sweepingly to the set of statues wrapped around the trunk of a towering 150-year-old cypress with weeping foliage. A bust of the handsome, bearded poet, who died at thirty-four, lords over the scene with a thousand-yard stare. To his right, naked Eros lies wounded by an arrow, his quiver empty, bow dropped beside him, reaching out in agony to the poet for help. To Bécquer’s left, Cupid, on tip-toe, has just dropped from above, quiver full, one hand on the bust’s pedestal for support. Beneath Cupid, carved from a single piece of white marble, sit three female figures, fancily dressed, all swooning—the first from love lost, the second from love consummated, the third from love idealized.