Play: Remorse en traje de noche

Clarification

No stage play by Luis Cernuda titled "Remorse en traje de noche" is documented for 1952. The title refers to the poem "Remordimiento en traje de noche", first published in 1931 within the book Los placeres prohibidos and later incorporated into successive editions of his collected volume La realidad y el deseo. The following summary addresses that poem, which has often been cited as emblematic of Cernuda’s exploration of desire, guilt, and social hypocrisy.

Overview

"Remordimiento en traje de noche" presents remorse as a figure dressed for an elegant night out, a guest who visits at the most intimate hour to undo the truth that desire has briefly revealed. The poem’s speaker confronts this glamorous, chilling presence, recognizing in it the pressure of social norms and moral judgment that intrude upon private feeling. Night awakens desire and authenticity; remorse, costumed in evening attire, arrives to reassert the world’s codes with exquisite cruelty.

Scenario and Movement

The poem establishes a nocturnal room charged with intimacy. After an encounter marked by warmth and abandon, a knock seems to come from the edges of memory and conscience. Remorse enters not as a grotesque specter but as a refined figure, perfumed, poised, almost ceremonious, whose elegance sharpens the wound it brings. It sits near the bed, stands before the mirror, touches objects with a connoisseur’s detachment, and speaks in a voice that sounds like society itself: composed, reasonable, irresistible.

The speaker, still bathed in the afterglow of desire, senses how the room’s tenderness begins to chill. Words that moments before named joy now ring false, as if muffled by velvet. The visitor rearranges the scene, turning the night’s living warmth into a tableau for judgment. Memory is curated; gestures are reinterpreted; what was natural becomes transgression. By the time remorse departs, it leaves behind order and emptiness, the sheets smooth, the heart made correct and desolate.

Themes and Imagery

Desire versus repression structures the poem. Cernuda binds eros to truth, casting desire as the moment when the self recognizes itself, while remorse belongs to performance, costume, and polite society. The "evening dress" condenses that idea: a garment for display, elegant and constrictive, designed to be seen and to please the gaze of others. The room, the bed, and the mirror form a triad of intimacy, body, and self-scrutiny; the mirror, in particular, becomes the stage where remorse rehearses its authority.

Social hypocrisy surfaces through the visitor’s impeccable manners. Remorse never shouts; it corrects. Its refinement masks an act of violence: the erasure of the night’s truth. Time and memory act as accomplices, since morning, with its routines, aids remorse in rewriting experience. The poem hints at clandestine love and the cost of living one’s desire under hostile norms, a hallmark of Cernuda’s poetics.

Tone and Style

The tone is both bitter and lucid, with a cool irony that refuses theatrical lament. Cernuda’s free verse favors a supple, colloquial line that opens to image and metaphor without ornament for its own sake. The anthropomorphizing of remorse, the sensual detail of the room, and the contrast between warmth and elegance create a cinematic flow: the camera moves from skin to fabric, from breath to perfume, from confession to etiquette.

Place in Cernuda’s Work

As part of Los placeres prohibidos, the poem stands at a turning point where Cernuda asserts an ethics of desire against the moralizing gaze of society. "Remordimiento en traje de noche" distills his central conflict into a single, unforgettable figure, making visible how guilt is not a private impulse but a social costume. Its enduring force lies in that image: remorse, impeccably dressed, arriving late to put out the lamp of truth.