Sunstone Painting

Sunstone is one of the high points of Octavio Paz's poetry. This suggestive work with its many layers of meaning seems to incorporate and interpret major existential questions, death, time, love, and reality. The poem Sunstone is a circular poem based on the circular Aztec calendar. The first six lines of the poem repeat themselves at the end of the poem in a movement that "doubles back and comes full circle,/ forever arriving". The poem was welcomed in Mexico as an abandonment of Paz's European surrealistic style and as he later explained in an interview: What I mean to say is that, over the circular time of myth, is inserted the unrepeatable history of one man that belongs to one country, to one generation, and one era... Time may be cyclical, and thus immortal... but man is finite and unrepeatable. What is repeated is the experience of finitude: all men know that they will die... These experiences are historical, they happen and they happen to us... At the same time, they are not historical, they are repeated. "willow of crystal, a poplar of water, a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever:"