Rizal wrote poetry throughout his life — from the verses he produced as an eight-year-old in Calamba to the fourteen stanzas he completed the night before his execution. His output spans five languages, multiple decades, and an enormous range of subject matter: childhood, exile, nature, love, loss, faith, national identity, and death.
He was not primarily a poet in the sense that poetry was his main vocation — the novels, the essays, the medical practice, the political organizing all competed for his time — but the poems are among the most revealing documents in his entire body of work, because they are where he was most directly personal.
This page gathers his poems, organized by period and theme, with brief notes on each and links to the individual pages where the full texts and analysis can be found. For his complete published output across all genres, see The Complete Works of José Rizal.
Early Poems: Calamba, Biñan, and Manila (1869–1882)
Rizal began writing poetry as a child, which in the context of nineteenth-century Philippine education was not unusual — verse composition was part of the classical curriculum, and his Jesuit teachers at the Ateneo in particular encouraged it as a discipline. What was unusual was the quality of what he produced and how quickly the work matured.
Sa Aking Mga Kabata — To My Fellow Youth — is a Tagalog poem traditionally attributed to Rizal at age eight, making it one of the earliest literary works attributed to him. Its central argument, that a people who do not love their own language cannot love their country, would remain consistent throughout his life. The attribution has been questioned by some scholars, but the poem has been part of the Rizal canon for over a century and appears on the site with full context.
Mi Primera Inspiración — My First Inspiration — was written as a birthday tribute to his mother Teodora. It is among the earliest poems written in his own hand that can be dated with confidence, and it shows the same attentiveness to the people he loved that runs through his correspondence for the rest of his life.
Education Gives Luster to Motherland was written during his Ateneo years and won a poetry competition at the school. It reflects the Jesuit pedagogical emphasis on the moral and civic purposes of education, but already carries Rizal’s particular inflection: education as the precondition for national dignity, not merely individual advancement.
To the Child Jesus and To the Virgin Mary are devotional poems from the same period, demonstrating the Catholic formation that structured his early intellectual life. Rizal’s relationship with Catholic faith and Catholic institutions grew complicated over time, but these early devotional poems are sincere and technically accomplished.
Felicitation is a poem of congratulation, representative of a category of occasional verse — poems written for specific people on specific occasions — that Rizal produced throughout his life. The Spanish original is Felicitación.
Poems of Exile and Europe (1882–1892)
The decade Rizal spent in Europe transformed his poetry as it transformed everything else about him. The subject matter widened: homesickness, political observation, romantic love, philosophical reflection, and the encounter with European landscapes all enter the work. The Spanish becomes more precise and the emotional range broader. These are the poems of a man in full possession of his gifts, writing in conditions of displacement and longing.
A la Juventud Filipina — To the Philippine Youth — was written in 1879 and won a prize from the Liceo Artistico-Literario of Manila. It is addressed directly to the young people of the Philippines, calling on them to be the fair hope of the nation — a phrase that has become one of the most quoted in Philippine education. The poem’s address to an entire generation rather than an individual marks a shift in ambition from his earliest work.
They Ask Me for Verses was written in Spain and is among his most personal poems — melancholic, self-aware, and honest about the difficulty of writing in exile for a country he could not reach. It is less the poem of a national hero than of a tired young man who misses home and is not sure the words are coming.
To the Flowers of Heidelberg was written during his time in Germany, where he studied ophthalmology. The flowers of the Neckar River valley become the occasion for a meditation on beauty, distance, and what it means to be from somewhere else. It is one of his most purely lyrical poems, less burdened by political argument than most of his work.
My Retreat — with the Spanish original Mi Retiro — is a poem of solitude and contemplation written during his European years. It reflects the interiority that his political writing rarely had space for.
Kundiman is Rizal’s engagement with the traditional Filipino love song form — the kundiman — written in Tagalog. An English version is available at Kundiman (English Version). The poem is notable for the way it uses a deeply local musical form to carry a subject — longing, love, and the pain of separation — that in Rizal’s case was inseparable from political exile.
Goodbye to Leonor is addressed to Leonor Rivera, the woman Rizal loved for over a decade and eventually lost. It is one of the more directly personal of his surviving poems and should be read alongside the account of their relationship in The Women in Rizal’s Life.
Song of the Wanderer captures the condition of exile — the experience of belonging nowhere fully, of carrying a country inside you while living outside it — in terms that are both politically specific and universally legible.
To My Childhood Companions returns to the friends and places of his Calamba childhood, written from the distance of Europe. Like much of his work from this period, it uses the personal as a way into something larger: the specific childhood becomes a meditation on what the Philippines was and what it could be.
Flower Among Flowers and To the Philippines are among his more directly patriotic poems from the European years, addressing the country directly and placing its condition within a broader argument about colonialism and dignity.
Miss C.O. y R. — addressed to Consuelo Ortiga y Rey, a woman he knew in Madrid — is a poem of restrained romantic feeling written at a moment when Rizal stepped back from a potential relationship out of loyalty to a friend. For more context, see The Women in Rizal’s Life.
Alianza Íntima Entre La Religión Y La Educación and Por La Educación (Recibe Lustre La Patria) are Spanish-language poems on the relationship between education, religion, and national progress — subjects that Rizal returned to throughout his career and addressed most fully in his essays.
Poems of Dapitan (1892–1896)
During his four years of exile in Dapitan, Rizal continued to write, though the poems from this period are fewer and quieter. The political urgency of the European years gives way to something more reflective — the writing of a man who has been removed from the world and is finding ways to live fully within a smaller one.
Hymn to Talisay was written for the school he founded in Dapitan, where his students gathered under the talisay trees. It is addressed directly to his pupils — young boys from the local community whom he taught without charge — and it is one of the most tender things he wrote.
To Josephine is addressed to Josephine Bracken, his companion during the Dapitan years. It is a love poem in the most straightforward sense, without the political freight that most of his work carries, and it is the most direct expression of personal happiness that survives from the last years of his life.
Memories of My Town returns, from exile, to Calamba — the town of his childhood. Written from Dapitan, it is a poem of sustained longing for a specific place, with specific sounds and smells and light, and it demonstrates the precision of his descriptive powers when he allowed himself to simply miss something.
Hymn To Labor reflects Rizal’s belief — expressed through everything he built and taught in Dapitan — that the dignity of physical work was as important to the formation of a people as political freedom.
The Final Poem: Mi Último Adiós (1896)
Mi Último Adiós — My Last Farewell — was written on the night of December 29, 1896, in his cell at Fort Santiago, and hidden inside a small alcohol stove for his family to find after his execution. It is fourteen stanzas in Spanish, untitled in his own hand, and it is the most significant poem he wrote.
The poem is a farewell to the Philippines — its mountains and seas and people — and an acceptance of sacrifice. It is calm, luminous, and entirely free of bitterness. It does not address his executioners or the colonial government that condemned him. It addresses the country he loved, and it asks the country to pray for him, to remember those who died in the dark, and to welcome the dawn when it comes.
Mi Último Adiós has been translated into more than forty languages. It is required reading in Philippine schools under the Rizal Law. For the full text with stanza-by-stanza commentary, see Mi Último Adiós and My Last Farewell: Side by Side. For the English translation by Nick Joaquín, see My Last Farewell.
Filipino and Tagalog versions are also available: Huling Paalam is the Tagalog translation of Mi Último Adiós. My Last Thought is an alternative English rendering.
Poems in Other Languages
Rizal wrote poetry not only in Spanish and Tagalog but also in German, French, and English. Most of these poems are occasional or experimental — written for specific people or contexts rather than as major statements — but they demonstrate the range of his linguistic facility and the way he used verse as a natural mode of expression in whatever language he was working in at the time. Several of these appear in the Complete Works.
Rizal and the Translator’s Problem
One challenge in reading Rizal’s poetry in English is that much of it was written in Spanish — a language with a very different phonological and metrical tradition — and translation inevitably involves choices that affect both meaning and feeling. The most important English translations are those by Charles Derbyshire, whose 1912 collection remains the standard reference, and Nick Joaquín, whose more recent versions aim for a closer fidelity to the emotional register of the originals.
For readers who want to engage seriously with Rizal’s poetry, comparing the Spanish originals with the available English translations is the most revealing approach. The site provides both wherever possible.
For Rizal’s novels, see Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. For his essays and other writing, see The Complete Works of José Rizal.
