At the very beginning of her academic work, while a teacher in La Cantera in 1907, she experienced first love.His name was Romelio Ureta, an employee of the railroad company. Their relationship was marred by frequent and bitter disputes due to sharp differences of opinion.They finally severed their relationship and parted.In 1909, Ureta committed suicide for reasons of personal honor having nothing to do with his former betrothal.A search of his body revealed a postal card from Gabriela in the jacket pocket.The circumstances of Ureta’s death left an indelible impression on the young school teacher.Many of her poems written in those years speak of love, sorrow, and death. 
       On December 22, 1914, she competed in the poetic Floral Games in Santiago with her “Sonnets of Death” (Sonetos de la Muerte), dedicated to the memory of Ureta’s tragic death.With them she won the Gold Medal.Gabriela attended the presentation of awards incognito, hidden among the people who had filled the room.She was at that time a young girl of twenty-five, tall, slim, with a pale complexion, smooth golden hair, and green eyes, bright yet with a longing in them.Her proud bearing, her somewhat abstracted, distant air gave her an aura of loneliness and mystery.One of her colleagues, quoting a line from the Chilean national anthem, described her as a “majestic, the white mountain” (majestuosa la blanca montaña).All of this enhanced both her fame as a poet and the magnetic attraction that her personality exercised on all who know 
her.

          Shortly after this first literary triumph, she met under romantic and somewhat strange circumstances a young poet from Santiago; for him she felt a passion much deeper, more intense and more decisive than her first love.A short while later, however, he married a wealthy young lady of the capital’s high social circles.The cruel blow moved her to ask for her transfer to Punta Arenas in the extreme south of Chile, an inhospitable, desolate region.There she remained for two years, exiled and overwhelmed with sorrow.It was then, having decided to leave Chile, that she accepted the invitation from the Mexican government.The most moving and impassioned poems of Desolation (Desolación), the very title of that anguished book, express with ardent eloquence her heartbreaking disillusion.She turned her gaze to children and wrote for them, transforming her frustrated longing for motherhood into tenderness.In her affection for the American lands and peoples in the pleasures and friendship she sought the companionship denied to her by love.She adopted her nephew, Juan Miguel Godoy, and raised him as a son.But in friendship she was also to know cruel blows; while in Brazil, she was shattered by the suicide of her dear friends, Stefan Zweig and his young wife, as well as that of Juan Miguel, on August 13, 1943.From the date of that event her physical health began to fail.Plunged into sorrow, she waited for death.