Lorca and the Poetry of Death

Extract

The reader no sooner begins to pry into the poetic world fashioned by Lorca in his lyric poetry, ballads and plays, than he feels himself being immersed in a strange atmosphere. It is an apparently normal setting of popular scenes and people, all perfectly recognizable. But the air is, so to speak, inhabited by forebodings and threats. Metaphors cut across it like birds of ill omen. So, for example, summer “sows rumours of tiger and flame.” Day breaks in a most peculiar manner like a shadowy fish: “Great stars of white frost—come with the fish of shadow—that opens the road of dawn.” The wind is an enormous man pursuing the maiden “with red-hot sword.” These metaphors do not have a decorative function; they are an extension of meaning. They herald what is unusual and mysterious in this world. They proclaim that something is being prepared; they proclaim an imminence of fatality. For the poetic kingdom of Lorca, so brilliantly illuminated and at the same time so enigmatic, is under the rule of a unique, unchallenged power: Death.