What is the meaning of Rizals poem To the Filipino Youth?
In the poem, Rizal praised the rising generation, whose “prodigious genius” was the “fair hope of the fatherland” This fatherland was, importantly, not Spain but the Philippines. In that “ardent region” Spaniards, with “Pious and wise hand” offered a “resplendent crown” not to what ilustrado reformers would later call the islands’ “overseas Spaniards” but to what Rizal called “the son of this native soil”.
