Gabriela Mistral was an extraordinary woman. Her life was filled with tragedy but she turned her experiences into beautiful poetry. Her poetry reflected many things about who Gabriela Mistral was and what had happened to her throughout her life.
     
Gabriela Mistral was born on April 7, 1889 in Vicuña, Chile. When she was only three years old, her father abandoned her family. She attended a rural primary school and the Vicuña state secondary school. By the age of sixteen, she started to support herself and her mother by working as a teachers aide. Gabriela Mistral is only a pen name for Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. She took the name from her two favorite poets: Gabriele D’Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral. She was the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1945). After the suicide of her lover, Romelio Ureta, she lived a life of self-described desolation. Although she wanted it, she never experienced motherhood. She did adopt a child but it later died. She taught at Colombia University, and Vassar College. In 1930, she was a visiting professor at Barnard College in New York City. She also became the principal of Santiago High School. Her first text was la Voz de Elqui and Diario Radical de Coquimbo in 1905. Her second work was called Desolación. Soon after she accepted her post at Santiago, she was invited to work in Mexico on a plan to reform the libraries and the schools. She lived primarily in France and Italy during 1925 to 1934. She also worked for the League for Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations between 1922 and 1938. She was the honorary consult for Brazil, Spain, Portugal and the U.S. In 1933 she entered the Chilean Foreign Service and was appointed by the government of Chile as a sort of ambassador-at-large for the Latin American Culture. During World War two, she became friends with Stefan Zweig and his wife. Later they committed suicide in Rio de Janeiro. Also her nephew, Juan Miguel killed himself. Because of poor health, she was forced to retire to her home in New York. She died on January 10, 1957, at the age of sixty-seven. She died of cancer.
     
Like most people, Gabriela Mistral wrote poems about her life experiences or what she holds to be true. In her poem “Dolor”, which is from the Desolación collection, she expresses her feelings on the death of her lover. Most of her work offers intellectual and spiritual love, and nuturance to others. It offers a simple and direct language but full of tenderness and passion. The central themes in her poems are love, a mothers love, painful personal memories and sorrow and recovery. The death of Romelio left profound marks on her works. Her works reflected the yearning for physical maternity as seen in her “cradle” songs and poems about mothers. In the poems of Lagar and Tala, she suggests that life is just a mysterious pilgrimage leading to death, which she thinks is a final liberation from the world. She differs from other women poets who are often, painfully self-centered, she mentions herself only to tell us of her plainness. Desolación main themes are Christian faith and death. She promises that after death, “sunny land” will emerge from the decay around.
     
A poet, cultural minister, diplomat and teacher, she moved the whole world with her poetry and pain. She helped her nation by becoming an ambassador-at-large. Her life was full of pain and suffering but she rose up through the desolation and became one of the world’s most famous poets and people. Her longing for motherhood inspired many of her poems, as did the suicide of her lover, two friends and her nephew. Death is a main aspect of her poetry and in the end, even she had to succumb to it.