Shadow of Paradise brings to its culmination the poetic world that Aleixandre began with Passion of the Earth: the elevation of nature to a kind of universal state of grace and the creature’s lament for not being able to be part of it. But the illusion of beauty created with words even surpasses Destruction or Love.
Although easily interpretable as pantheistic, this poetic world can be Christian, or at least understood from a Christian point of view. There is a poetic voice that could very well be Adam, that is, humankind longing for a glorious cosmos it lost, crying over its imperfection and yearning for a recovery that seems possible. God never appears, but the universe can be his metonymy (or his synecdoche, since the universe is only part of what was lost, also a part torn from man as a consequence of sin).
On the other hand, the work disproves in the best possible way the idea that in those years only the writer could produce critical literature.