“The Sea and the Mountain” was conceived between 1919 and 1920 and published in 1921. In it, the poet strips away rhetorical trappings in favor of a more refined expression, without intellectual burden mediating the apprehension of external reality, especially nature as a space for communion with divinity and the attainment of freedom.

The poetry here is painted with minimal strokes, dazzling through lexical simplicity synthesized into powerful semantic impressions. The text, in terms of topicality and artistic quality, aligns perfectly with the best of the national lyrical tradition, associated with the discovery of new aesthetic paths, whether considered from the perspective of modernism or postmodernism.

The text is divided into three sections, with a perhaps unconscious cabalistic meaning: “The Sea”, “Intermission (in the Village)” and “The Mountain”, where he breaks with the sonnet and surrenders to a metrical freedom that constitutes in a certain way the antithesis of the suffocating social situation that he suffered along with his peers under the new political order.

In the body of this collection of poems, one of the most accomplished poems is “Brotherhood,” perhaps the greatest expression of his pantheistic worldview, but above all hylozoistic, in that he attributes life to it and professes a love that is both painful and jovial towards everything that surrounds him, thus becoming a kind of spectator incorporated into the course of his world:

“There is a sensitive soul in everything.

The voices of silence in the mountains;
the rhapsodies of the sea; the pounding
of the wind on the beaches and cliffs;
the monastic rhythm of the late night;
the train of the valleys and ravines;
the equatorial bustle of the snail
and the symphonizing of the pine forests
They are complaints, cries, wails and cries
of simple and perennial things.

They are the chord of the world’s pain,
that the world has a soul, and there is a soul
sensitive in every way. A soul mate
of our poor human soul.”

The tone of the collection of poems conveys a serenity that contrasts with the exalted song of another era. Poetic expression has become more transparent to take communication with the reader to new spheres; more than this, a communion that reaches all the material and spiritual spheres of the universe, of life but which also incorporates death without a hint of tragedy, to merge into the “torrent of reality” as José Ortega y Gasset advocated.