Reading Mistral—reading her over and over—is to feel the experience of a land and to touch the halo and the breath of poetry. Hers gathers the strongest components of the spirit: utopia, tragedy, and prophecy. Utopia from what was not, that ghostly round in the void; tragedies of herself and her time; the historical prophecy of the dispossession of her own community. Pruning, desolation, and the sordid press is the suffering substance of her poem of Chile.