"Infinite Atlantic, you who order my song!
Every time my steps take me to your side,
I feel new blood throbbing through my veins
and at the same time my body, my art gains health..."
Tomás Morales.
The dedication to Salvador Rueda of his first marine verses clearly speaks of the preferences of the Canarian poet. The Malaga poet, a master colorist, who had presented the new Atlantic poet in verse, appears here on his throne, the rock of a golden beach: "... where, crowned with secular foams / this son of the seas throws you as an offering / the wave of his stanzas that breaks at your feet."
His "Allegory to Rubén Darío in his last generation" demonstrates adherence to the master's renovating work and the emotion of the last farewell. Díez-Canedo in his fair prologue to Las Rosas de Hércules, alludes to other favorite poets or brothers of technique and inspiration: Jacinto Verdaguer, D'Anunzio, Catulo and Ovidio.
Tomás Morales was born in Moya de Gran Canaria, on October 10, 1885 and died in Las Palmas on January 15, 1921. He studied Medicine at the University of Madrid, finishing his studies in 1911 and returning to his native island the same year to practice as a tenured doctor in the town of Agaete.
In this town he married and composed a large part of the poems that would later form the second book of Las Rosas de Hércules.
During his studies in Madrid he cultivated the friendship of artists and writers, revealing himself as a poet with his first book of verses, Poemas de la Gloria, del Amor y del Mar, published in 1908. This book contained a poem by Salvador Rueda in which the Malaga poet greeted the young singer as the future great poet of the race. Valbuena Prat finds in Morales' work the characteristics of what he designates as "Canarian regional poetry": isolation, cosmopolitanism, intimacy and feeling for the sea."
Tomás Morales collaborated in various newspapers and magazines, among which we will mention Los Lunes del Imparcial, España, Nuevo Mundo, Por Esos Mundos and Mundial, a magazine published in Paris under the direction of Rubén Darío.
In 1910 his work La cena Bethaniana premiered at the Pérez Galdós theater in Las Palmas. In 1919 he returned to Madrid to publish his second book of Las Rosas de Hércules. The year following his death, his friends published his first book of Las Rosas de Hércules, as he had left it arranged, with a prologue by Enrique Díez-Canedo (where the work and personality of the poet are studied) and the poems he had left unfinished.
Villaespesa and Victorio Macho were the last peninsular artists who arrived in time to shake the hand of the one who had been all enthusiasm and cordiality for them.
Tomás Morales died surrounded by friends and affections, proof of his exceptional kindness and sympathies: and in his memory and as a tribute to his merits, his island has paid him the tribute of placing his bronze bust in a beautiful park in the city of Las Palmas, the work of the sculptor Victorio Macho.
A great passion for the noble rhetoric of major art, a magnificent exuberance, alongside other intimate and tender notes, and, above all, always present, great tutelary master of evocations, resonances and latitude, the sea, the vast sea. And as our poet said: "The trembling soul drowns in your current. / With fervent impetus, / lungs filled with your salty breezes / and fullness of mouth, / a fighter shouts FATHER! to you from a rock / of these wonderful Fortunate Islands!... "
Francisco Arias Solis
