Alfonsina Storni died on October 25, 1938, after entering the sea at Mar del Plata, an apparent suicide linked to illness and despair.
On the night of October 25, 1938, Alfonsina Storni walked into the sea at the beach of La Perla in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in an act widely understood as suicide. Her body was recovered the following day. She had been suffering from breast cancer, diagnosed a few years earlier, and her health and emotional state had deteriorated significantly, compounded by the recent death by suicide of her close friend and fellow writer Horacio Quiroga earlier that year.
Shortly before her death, Storni sent her final poem, "Voy a dormir" ("I Am Going to Sleep"), to the newspaper La Nación, where it was published posthumously. The haunting verses, addressed to a "earthly nurse," have been read by scholars as a serene, deliberate farewell, cementing the poem's status as one of the most famous death poems in Spanish-language literature.
Her death shocked the Argentine literary world and became a symbol of the era's fraught relationship between women artists and society. It has been mythologized in popular culture, notably inspiring the iconic song "Alfonsina y el mar" (1969) by Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna, which remains one of the most beloved compositions in Latin American music. Her death, following that of Quiroga and preceding the 1939 suicide of poet Leopoldo Lugones, marked a somber close to a generation of Argentine modernist writers.