Fields of Castile by Antonio Machado
Published 1912 · 16,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Poetry, Classic Literature
How hard is Fields of Castile to read?
Fields of Castile scores 58 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 46 out of 100
- Deliberately plain Castilian with a precise vocabulary of trees, stones, weather and place-names, and no ornament.
- Sentence structure: 44 out of 100
- Short lines and simple sentences in traditional metres, with the ballad section moving in straightforward narrative verse.
- Abstraction: 64 out of 100
- Landscape is consistently made to carry arguments about time, memory and national character rather than described for itself.
- Information density: 54 out of 100
- Compressed lyrics with a dense weight of Spanish geography and history behind each detail, plus a narrative ballad sequence.
- Narrative indirection: 54 out of 100
- Grief is displaced almost entirely onto landscape, and the poems about Leonor never name her circumstances.
- Symbolic density: 78 out of 100
- The split elm with one green branch, the Duero, the ruined castles and the two Spains of the famous epigram form a fixed and heavily used iconography.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- The satirical portraits of Castilian small-town life and the epigram about the Spain that yawns sit against the elegies without reconciling.
- Resolution withholding: 64 out of 100
- The elegies refuse consolation, the questions to God and to his dead wife go unanswered, and the last poems are addressed into silence.
- Structural complexity: 46 out of 100
- A collection assembled and expanded over editions, mixing lyric, narrative ballad and aphoristic sequence without a governing structure.
How Fields of Castile is regarded
Fields of Castile holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.