Abstract
The first chapter presents the three fundamental elements of love. In this chapter love is presented from the point of view of Plato in his book, the Symposium, which describes love as a search for an object of love. It also presents an analysis of the Book of St. John in order to show the relationship between the love of God and man. In the second chapter the form in which Cardenal uses love is studied in his search for God. This search reveals the following groups in Cardenals poetry: women, nature, God, oppression, the revolution and the cosmos. In this chapter the theme of unrequited love is emphasized as a symbol to show that Cardenal has not yet found his object of love. Another important symbol is renewal (or evolution) that represents the act of purification necessary to find love, especially when the object of love is God. In the third chapter the evolution of the theme of love in the poetry of Cardenal is presented. I have found four identifiable stages in the development of the theme of love as a search for God. In the first stage Cardenal begins to contemplate God through the beauty of women and nature. In the second stage Cardenal tries to find God by means of mystic love isolating himself from the world. In the third stage Cardinal continues his search without finding God and upon seeing the poverty of the common people he clamors for social justice. In the fourth stage Cardenal reconciles his ideas by accepting the idea of cosmic unity in which the lover, the beloved and love merge into a single entity.
Lorenzo, Mary Cooley (1995). El amor en la poesia de Ernesto Cardenal. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -1995 -THESIS -L674.