But from these adventures he came back to the sobering facts of his mission as the business and only reality of life. To contribute something to the helping and enlightening of these people was his métier and the only thing really important. A many-sided man, as you shall see. With all the laborious exactions of his time schedule, he could still continue his worship of art and beauty; he kept on with his modeling, kept on with his painting and poetry. His holidays he sometimes spent with his mother at Calamba; and his habit was to go home to her with a pocketful of verses of his recent making. That excellent woman and judicious critic set herself to clarify and direct the fire thus burning. [48] She must have succeeded after good models, for Rizal freshened the laurels of his Ateneo triumphs by winning prizes beyond its intellectual tiltyards. The Manila Lyceum of Art and Literature founded a competition among Filipino poets, “naturales y mestizos.” [49] Rizal won it with a poem entitled “To the Philippine Youth.” [50] From a point of view that was never urged he had no right to win it: the Lyceum was supposed to be for adults, and he was only eighteen years old. But the subject had called forth the best that was in him; it offered a chance to preach his favorite theme, to appeal to his young countrymen, and to stir in them something of the passion that moved him, while he suggested the Filipinas that might be. [51] His achievement went beyond prize-winning. By a route that even he had never imagined, it became a thing of history. In this poem he called the Philippine Islands his “fatherland.” The Philippine youth were the Bella esperanza de la Patria Mia! [52] Simple and natural as the reference was, it started the easy typhoon to blowing. No such phrase from such a source with such an application was tolerable. In his poem on “Education,” Rizal had spoken of that sweet wisdom as illuminating the “fatherland,” but this was naïvely taken to have a wholly different meaning. To these people, in the litany of lip-service, at least, the only fatherland they knew was the Spain they had never seen but of which the image in their hearts was all somber and cruel. With passionate adoration Rizal now spoke of another fatherland, of the Filipinas of his birthplace; he dared to address it even as a Spaniard might address Spain, “Vuela, Genio Grandioso!” “Come, thou great genius!” Yet he knew it as a country that breathed the effluvium of an unnatural existence—chained to a corpse. In irony he was dealing; a terrible, sobering irony. Already he felt in his heart that the existing state could not last; no proud, capable, normally minded people with a historic background of their own would long endure it. Echoes of the great wave that rolled around the rest of the world grew every day in the ears of these Islanders. Discontent surged in their hearts, and Rizal in his poem was the first voice and wise articulation of their protest. [53]