Grieving as Depicted in Federico Garcia Lorca’s
"Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias"
Shelley Rockwell, Ph.D.
The
poetic form of elegy has ancient and deep roots. Theocritus's ( third
century
B.C.) "First Idyll," is commonly regarded as initiating the genre.
(see below p.23) In his book,
The
English Elegy, Peter Sacks refers to the elegy's origin in the phrase,
e e
legoi, which means "to speak well of" or possibly in the ancient word
for flute, elegn . Thirdly,
Sacks
notes an etymological link with e e logoi, connecting elegy to a "cry
of
grief over Hyacinth or that of Hercules over Linus."
(Sacks, 1985, p. 331, f.n. 2) This
last origin of elegy comes closest to
the subject of this paper, as well as to the poet's intention, his
"duende"
spirit, elegy as a cry of grief. This spirit is described by Lorca in
"Play and Theory of Duende," as follows, "so in all ages
In "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias," (1935) Lorca wrote about and for his beloved friend the well-known and excellent bull fighter, Mejias. The poem is a "deep song" of grief. Lorca wrote about deep song as follows: "Gypsy siguiriya is the prototype of the deep song… a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, (which) always evoked…an endless road…where the first bird died and the first arrow grew rusty (p.3-4)…it comes from the first sob and the first kiss (p.10)…(and is a) perfect poem of tears, the melody cries, and so does the poetry." (p.17) ("Deep Song," 1955/1998)
The grief, this deep song, is written at the highest level in this poem. By this I mean that in Lorca's articulation of his heart-wrenching loss, not only has he made duende, beautiful grief, but created a path of healing. This elegy stands out in its tradition because of its unique and close following of the long process of grief. We see in this poem, roughly aligned to its four sections, four developments in the experience of grief.
In the first section, "Cogida and Death" Lorca grapples with the actual and physical reality of Mejias' death, first and foremost with the repetition of "five in the afternoon." His preoccupation with the time of death, and as this section develops, the sensual experience and functional processes, are what enable the grieving poet/narrator to "break down his own denial of the actual death…(this) reality testing is by nature repetitive for it must …drive home the resisted fact of the death…" (Sacks, p. 239) Interestingly "five in the afternoon" initially and primarily serves as the drumbeat of reality, but as it continues through-out this first section its effect shifts, the reader numbs into the words which then take on a soothing and incantatory function. We sink into the reality. We begin to accept the reality. The reality begins to become part of us.
The second section, "The Spilled Blood," moves the reader beyond the physical reality and details of death to the narrative, the story and meaning of this bull fighter's life and death. Here we are given the story of Mejias' death-what actually happened. Through the story and the eulogy we come to know the brave man who has died. It isn't just death which must be accepted, but the terrible death of a single torero. With an anguished outpouring and a deep acceptance of a particular loss the poet/narrator moves, I will show, into a special place of beauty, emotional freedom and energy, in contrast to the barren repetitive world of the first section. Grieving and the consequent acceptance of Mejias' death has deepened in this second section and continues in the third.
In the third section, "The Laid Out Body," the poet has moved away from historical and mythical reality of Meijias to a spiritual position, the body and life of the beloved friend is "let go." Lorca gives Mejias permission to be dead, to have his own ending, perhaps peace. The fourth and last section of the poem enters the poem's fullest expression of itself, culminating in song, in lament, "Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you."
I will demonstrate how in these four sections Lorca moves the poem and its reader through four positions of grief, from the physical and mundane reality of concrete detail, to the narration of a life and death, to its spiritual culmination and to a final acceptance of death and its final resting place as a song in the mind. Although the griever must start his mourning with concrete reality, in order to progress he/she must move through narrative, to a letting go and the final use of symbol (song) or language as a "substitute" for, or as a holding of the beloved.
1. Cogida and Death: "At five in the afternoon"
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the
afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the
afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone
at five in the afternoon.
The wind carried away the cottonwool
at five in the afternoon.
And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel
at five in the
afternoon.
Now the dove and the leopard wrestle
at five in the afternoon.
And a thigh with a desolate horn
at five in the afternoon.
The brass-string struck up
at five in the afternoon.
Arsenic bells and smoke
at five in the afternoon.
Groups of silence in the corners
at five in the afternoon.
And the bull alone with a high heart!
at
five in the afternoon.
When the sweat of snow was coming
at five in the afternoon.
when the bull ring was covered in iodine
at five in the afternoon.
death laid eggs in the wound
at five in the
afternoon.
At five in the
afternoon.
Exactly at five o'clock in the afternoon.
A coffin on wheels is his bed
at five in the
afternoon.
Bones and flutes resound in his ears
at five in the afternoon.
Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead
at five in the afternoon
.
The room was iridescent with agony
at five in the afternoon.
In the distance the gangrene now comes
at five in the afternoon.
Horn of the lily through green groins
at five in the afternoon.
The wounds were burning like suns
at five in the afternoon,
and the crowd was breaking the windows
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!
It was five by all the clocks!
It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
Almost one-half (23 out of 49 lines) of the poem's first section is comprised of its statement of time, "at five in the afternoon." Five additional lines contain a reference to the hour of five. Mejias' exact hour of death is the single point around which all other facts of reality must pivot. The time of death alternates with a line of fact throughout the three stanzas, all forty-nine lines; one reality exists in the world at this moment, "The rest was death and death alone."
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
At five in the
afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone
at five in the
afternoon.
The first and shortest stanza of seven lines has two bits of information, "A boy brought the white sheet…A frail of lime ready prepared…" The white sheet announces death, its necessary covering with a sheet and the frail (bucket) of lime used to aid the body's decomposition. Every fact is subsumed under the large fact of death's moment.
The tension mounts in the second stanza, much longer (twenty-four lines), which continues the first stanza's pattern of alternating descriptive fact with repetition, "at five in the afternoon." This lexical and phrasal repetition takes on a chant quality, or call and response, time is the call and the grim facts the recurrent evidential response.
The wind carried away the cottonwool
at five in the afternoon.
And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel
at five in the afternoon.
Now the dove and the leopard wrestle
at five in the afternoon.
And a thigh with a desolate horn
at five in the afternoon.
The brass-string struck up
at five in the afternoon.
Arsenic bells and smoke
at five in the afternoon.
Groups of silence in the corners
at five in the afternoon.
And the bull alone with a high heart!
At five in the afternoon.
When the sweat of snow was coming
at five in the afternoon,
when the bull ring was covered in iodine
at five in the afternoon.
death laid eggs in the wound
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Exactly at five o'clock in the afternoon.
The first eleven lines of the poem, stanza one and four lines in stanza two, are written in the past tense. The specific description continues, cottonwool (used either to cover the ears of the horse and/or the nostrils of the bull) oxide, crystal and nickel are afloat in the air. The emotional climate changes abruptly with "Now the dove and leopard wrestle…And a thigh with a desolate horn." The poet's intent and pounding description shifts to an emotionally close account of the bullfight; now life and death wrestle as in leopard with dove, and bull's horn with fighter's thigh. These lines, twelve through fifteen, are in the present tense, the poet has slipped from recounting to immediate experience.
Time (five o'clock) is being gripped so mercilessly in the entire first section that it becomes its own life and death struggle, i.e. neither the poet nor reader dare forget for more than one line the exact moment of trauma. The poet shifts again to the past tense, a more distant position, the "bass-string struck up" introducing the deep low music of death in the air. The first reference to an audience appears, "Groups of silence in the corners…And the bull alone with a high heart!" The spectators are silenced, horrified, but the bull triumphant. We move yet closer to death in the following lines, "When the sweat of snow was coming…when the bull ring was covered in iodine…death laid eggs in the wound..." At the time of great pain the body shivers in shock, heat and cold come together as in the "sweat of snow." The use of iodine for such a wound is too little, too late, the eggs of death have been "laid…in the wound." Death is now being born, as we turn to the last stanza of the first section.
A coffin on wheel is his bed
at five in the afternoon.
Bones and flutes resound in his ears
at five in the afternoon.
Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead
at five in the afternoon .
The room was iridescent with agony
at five in the afternoon.
In the distance the gangrene now comes
at five in the afternoon.
Horn of the lily through green groins
at five in the afternoon.
The wounds were burning like suns
at five in the afternoon,
and the crowd was breaking the windows
at five in the afternoon.
At five in the afternoon.
Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!
It was five by all the clocks!
It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
The reader can see
reality and
again this moment of seeing is in the present tense, "coffin on wheels
is
his bed." The wheels may refer to
the ambulance, which was delayed, that drove Mejias to the
The facts, the grounding in reality allow the senses full play. The internal world and mind have some security and therefore freedom to feel, "experience-near" on a sensory level when reality is well in hand. We read, ears are full of the sound of flutes and the clatter of bones, Mejias' bones, a death rattle. The bull's bellow has entered "through his forehead" taken over mind and head. In sound man and bull are one, not unlike a mother and her infant. The sound of the mother's voice enters the mind of the baby in the womb so at birth he/she "knows" her, they are joined in sound.
Visually the "room was iridescent with agony." The iridescence or luminosity of agony, initially visual, sinks into the reader's mind as a conglomerate sensory image. One can see, feel, smell agony in the air---a multi-sensory imagining. This merging of the senses results in a powerful emotional experience, we are touched in a place outside words. The sensory environment continues with "In the distance gangrene now comes," the smell of decomposition will come to the spectator/reader from a distance. The last images of this last stanza of the second section, related to skin: "Horn…through…groins…wounds were burning like suns…" From this richly sensual and primal place, Lorca indulges one more time, falling deeply into the demand and necessity for time.
Five times in the final five lines, "five" asserts itself within an incremental repetition. Lorca repeats the refrain, in italics, then the same refrain in bold print for the first time in the stanza, marking a break in the continuity. This sameness is further broken, with another variation, "Ah, (instead of "At") that fatal five in the afternoon!" as well as the addition of "fatal" before "five." The discontinuity continues to form a new continuity, marking a psychological shift between the poem's sections. The fourth refrain, "It was five by all the clocks!" asserts the deadly hour as a communal event, felt by all. As though by virtue of owning or reading a clock that read "five in the afternoon" one too suffers the "fatal" hour. The mourner longs to believe that his loss is universal. The last development in the continuous non-continuity is "It was five in the shade of the afternoon!" These last three lines are full sentences, not phrases, hence more formal and less chant-like. They develop a fuller picture of the mind of the mourner. The use of "ah" adds a moan, a note of dread; the "clocks" bring in the wish for a shared grief; and the "shade" recaptures for the mourner an atmospheric feel, i.e., the lack of light at that fatal hour. The grief travels into the voice, deep in the chest as a moan then pushes itself out into the world of "clock-readers" and finally right back in time, to the beginning, that moment of loss and the shade and the lack of light then, there in the bull ring.
The first task in mourning requires an acceptance of the specific loss as an actual fact and event in reality. This is more difficult to accomplish than we can imagine. Yet without this true contact with reality nothing else can develop, no deeper emotional resolution or coming to terms is possible.
Acceptance of death as a real event is the first position, coinciding with the first section of Lorca's "Lament." In this section the poet weaves two strands in his effort to accept the reality of Mejias' death and loss. The first strand is his incessant hold on its hour, five in the afternoon, as an anchor or center of organization. The second is an immersion in the physical and sensory detail of the event of loss; Mejias' goring by the bull. The mental weaving or integrating of these two strands is demonstrated in content as well as in the form of the poem, every line of description alternating with a repetition or chanting of the death hour.
The chanting of "five in the afternoon," in all its forms occurring twenty-eight times in forty-nine lines, moving from an incessant drum beat insisting on reality, initially shocking and disturbing, to an incantatory or soothing experience. Gregory Orr in his book, Poetry as Survival, writes regarding the usefulness of incantation: "the self discovers it can be sustained…through rhythmic repetition…like a woven raft of sound." (2002, p.106) Sacks tells us that repetition "creates a sense of continuity, of an unbroken pattern…oppose(d) to the extreme discontinuity of death." (1985, p.23) It is as if the poet were saying, "If I know when it happened I know it did happen," thus providing the mourner with some (perhaps magical) semblance of control. The telling of time is a crucial aspect of orientation, and a developmental leap for the child who masters the clock, or the adult who regains a sense of time when it has been lost.
The poet drums the truth of time, the reality of the hour of death into his as well as our heads. This repeated remembering and voicing is our first, our best and only method of mastery.
Freud wrote in his seminal work "Mourning and Melancholia," "mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object dead and offering the inducement of continuing to live." (p.257, S.E., XIV) The giving up of the object is the work of mourning, "this work of severance is so slow and gradual...Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrated the libido's attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of the reality that the object no longer exists…" (p. 255). "At five in the afternoon" is Lorca's verdict, his fact and the reality of Mejias' death. Reality is the first position, the first step in mourning and it is gained and lost numerous times. And at the end of this first section, the reader too can see, smell, hear, and touch the gangrene of the wound. The loss and its reality is now "universal.”
2. The Spilled Blood: "I will not see it!
I willl not see it!
Tell the moon to come
for I do not want to see the blood
of Ignacio in the sand.
I will not see it!
The moon wide open.
Horse of still clouds,
and the grey bull ring of dreams
With willows in the barreras.
I will not see it!
Let my memory kindle!
Warn the jasmines
of such minute whiteness!
I will not see it!
In this second section the refrain has moved from a preoccupation with the time of death, the realness of the loss, to a deeper apprehension. Each repetition, "I will not see it" is countered in the poem by what is seen, "the blood of Ignacio in the sand." The first three stanzas, each short and bracketed by "I will not see it," plead for the moon (and its darkness) "to come…wide open" revealing "still clouds…grey bull ring…" This muted picture and kindled memory is preferable to "the blood of Ignacio on the sand."
The cow of the ancient world
passed her sad tongue
over a snout of blood
spilled on the sand,
and the bulls of Guisando,
partly death and partly stone,
bellowed like two centuries
sated with treading the earth.
No.
I do not want to see it!
I will not see it!
Bull fighting is sport and ritual, with an ancient origin (like the bull which is "partly death and partly stone") including its animals, its death, its blood-letting. The reality of "the blood spilled" encroaches. The narrator looks at the blood and shouts his refusal to look in the next breath. But---he has looked, closely.
Ignacio goes up the tiers
with all his death on his shoulders.
He sought for the dawn
but the dawn was no more.
He seeks for his confident profile
and the dream bewilders him.
He sought for his beautiful body
and encountered his opened blood.
I will not see it!
I do not want to hear it spurt
each time with less strength:
that spurt that illuminates
the tiers of seats, and spills
over the corduroy and the leather
of a thirsty multitude.
Who shouts that I should not come near!
Do not ask me to see it!
In this stanza we have the first sign of a relatively straight-forward narrative , "Ignacio goes up the tiers/ with all his death on his shoulders." As he moves toward his death the poet imagines Ignacio's seeking for "dawn"---a new beginning, a "confident profile"---not a dying face, a "beautiful body"---not bleeding to death. The poet does not want to hear the spurt of blood "each time with less strength: that spurt that illuminates…" This last line reminds the reader of the first section's "iridescent" agony, this is the blood which "illuminates" the ring. Blood is the stuff of agony, its physicality and reality. The poet begs "Do not ask me to see it!" Again, he is seeing quite well.
His eyes did not close
when he saw the horns near,
but the terrible mothers
lifted their heads.
And across the ranches,
an air of secret voices rose,
shouting to celestial bulls,
herdsmen of pale mist.
There was no prince in
who could compare with him,
nor sword like his sword
nor heart so true.
Like a river of lions
was his marvelous strength,
and like a marble torso
his firm drawn moderation.
The air of Andalusian Rome
gilded his head
where his smile was a spikenard
of wit and intelligence.
What a great torero in the ring!
What a good peasant in the sierra!
How gentle with the sheaves!
How hard with the spurs!
How tender with the dew!
How dazzling in the fiesta!
How tremendous with the final
banderillas of darkness!
The poem's narrative continues. The reader is provided a relatively linear story. The death is made clear. Ignacio did not veer or hide from the horns of the bull. The matador's brilliance and courage occurs in this final confrontation with the horn of the bull as he must reach to stab the bull between his shoulders, into the aorta. This thrust of the sword exposes him to a goring, most often in the groin.
Courage and beauty are Ignacio's as "His eyes did not close/ when he saw the Horns near…" He now will pass over the "terrible mothers" to another level of being, a spiritual or "celestial" world. He will join the realm of bulls and fighters "of pale mist."
Nowhere in this sixth stanza of the poem's second section does Lorca shout "I will not see it!" He has seen. And the poem in its entirety turns here. The poet/narrator recognizes Ignacio is lost to him and turns to elegy in a more traditional sense, the first etymological link from Sacks, e e legoi, "to speak well of." As the poet accepts, for the moment, Ignacio's spiritual presence and his absent physical being it frees him to recount the wonders of this once living man. This elegy becomes eulogy: a prince, his sword, his heart, strength, "his smile was as spikenard (ointment)/ of wit and intelligence." He is a "great torero…a good peasant…" In an almost Biblical poetic sequence, lines sixty-four through sixty-eight, gentle contrasts with hard, tender with dazzling, ending with "tremendous with the final/ banderillas of darkness!" In the final line of the stanza we end where it began with Ignacio's greatness as a bullfighter, his deft beauty in killing---the banderillas is the poisoned spike which kills the bull. Ignacio dies within his own passion and profession. His death has its own terrible symmetry, its own beauty.
The poet/narrator/reader has come a great distance in the process of mourning. Ignacio's death is truly known and seemingly accepted for what it is/was at this moment in the poem. The repetition, the chanting, and incantation has ceased. There is more air to breathe, more room to think about this very great man and his very big death. But as it must always be, we will see that later in the next stanza the movement turns and a regression sets in.
But now he sleeps without end.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And now his blood comes out singing;
singing along marshes and meadows,
sliding on frozen horns,
faltering soulless in the mist
stumbling over a thousand hoofs
like a long, dark, sad tongue,
to form a pool of agony
close to the starry Guadalquiver.
Oh, white wall of
Oh, black bull of sorrow!
Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!
Oh, nightingale of his veins!
No.
I will not see it!
No chalice can contain it,
no swallows can drink it,
no frost of light can cool it,
nor song nor deluge of white lilies,
no glass can cover it with silver.
No.
I will not see it!
It is a hard fall between the first lines of this sixth stanza and the prior stanza; rhapsodic eulogizing moves to "he sleeps without end,/ Now the moss and the grass/ open with sure fingers/ the flower of his skull." The body's decomposition is understood and anticipated. From decay and rot come redemption: the blood "comes out singing" over seven lines of beauty "sliding…faltering…stumbling…like a long, dark, sad tongue, to form a pool of agony…" The blood moves "along…on…in the mist…over hoofs and horns…marshes and meadows."
There
are two
significant psychological developments here.
The first is the further acceptance of the body's death and its
"soulless" state. Secondly, Ignacio's
blood which "I will not see, do not want to see!" has been
transformed into a thing of beauty, "like a long, dark, sad tongue/ to
form a pool of agony/ close to the starry
"If …the mourner is able to surrender fully to his feelings, and to cry out his sorrow about the actual loss," writes Melanie Klein in her classic paper, "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Defensive States" "there is a relaxing of the manic control over (his)internal world…and goodness and love (are) increasingly experienced within." (1940, p.359) This psychoanalytic description of mourning, its resultant effect on the mind and feelings of the mourner constitutes the second position of mourning in this poem.
It is with the "pool of agony" that this progress halts. A moan ensues, four lines begin with "oh," the first three are tightly held with alliteration and assonance. We have "white wall…black bull…hard blood." The fourth line of the moan, a lament really, breaks up the compression with a musical "nightingale," referring to Ignacio's singing blood.
The next line is simply "No." The next seven and final lines of this stanza each contain a no: "I will not see it" in line eighty-seven and ninety-four, four no's and one nor are in between the two refusals to see. In brief it is an outpouring of refusal, there is no tolerance, no softening, no containment of the agony by "chalice, swallow, light, song, lilies, silver."
This beautiful outpouring, a lament, eloquent and exquisite is less convincing in its refusal than the earlier moans. It is placed between two passages in which the poet has made deep and wide room for his loss, his articulation has grown enormously sophisticated. Ignacio has become named, it is no longer simply a thigh or a "he" that is lost. The narrative has developed. The lament at this point in the poem is a last ditch attempt to stave off what the poet knows all too well. It is a desperate wish to move away, and as we see in the third section he is too far along to succeed in his refusal to mourn.
3. The Laid Out Body: "All is finished."
Stone is a forehead where dreams grieve
without curving waters and frozen cypresses.
Stone is a shoulder on which to bear Time
with trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets.
I have seen grey showers move towards the waves
raising their tender riddled arms,
to avoid being caught by the lying stone
which loosens their limbs without soaking the blood.
For stone gathers seed and clouds,
skeleton larks and wolves of penumbra:
but yields not sounds nor crystals nor fire,
only bull rings and bull rings and more bull rings without walls.
Now, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone.
All is finished. What is happening? Contemplate his face:
death has covered him with pale sulphur
and has placed on him the head of a dark minotaur.
All is finished. The rain penetrates his mouth.
The air, as if mad, leaves his sunken
and love soaked through with tears of snow,
warms itself on the peak of the herd.
What are they saying? A stenching silence settles down.
We are here with a body laid out which fades away,
with a pure shape which had nightingales
and we see it being filled with depthless holes.
Who creases the shroud? What he says is not true!
Nobody sings here, nobody weeps in the corner,
nobody pricks the spurs, nor terrifies the serpent.
Here I want nothing else but the round eyes
to see this body without a chance of rest.
Here I want to see those men of hard voice.
Those that break horses and dominate rivers;
those men of sonorous skeleton who sing
with a mouth full of sun and flint.
Here I want to see them. Before the stone.
Before this body with broken reins.
I want to know from them the way out
for this captain strapped down by death.
I want them to show me a lament like a river
which will have sweet mists and deep shores,
to take the body of Ignacio where it loses itself
without hearing the double panting of the bulls.
Loses itself in the round bull ring of the moon
which feigns in its youth a sad quiet bull:
loses itself in the night without song of fishes
and in the white thicket of frozen smoke.
I don't want them to cover his face with handkerchiefs
that he may get used to the death he carries.
Go, Ignacio; feel not the hot bellowing.
Sleep, fly, rest: even the sea dies!
In this section, from the first stanza going forward, we have this wonderful thing called "stone" winding through the first four stanzas, appearing five times and once more in stanza nine as a refutation, "I want to see those men of hard voice…Before the stone."
Stone holds the grief, allowing it to be, deepen and heal. Specifically, "Stone is a forehead where dreams grieve…a shoulder on which to bear Time." The deep down, heavy, hardness of stone bears what must be borne, grief-filled dreams, time and its power of letting go. Stone does more, as it "gathers seed and clouds,/ skeleton larks and wolves…but yields not sounds nor crystals nor fire,/ only bull rings…" It is this gathering of seed which is generative, vegetative, the cloud which waters the seed; the remains of life in the skeleton of the lark whose bones nurture the seed and the wolf of darkness and shadow-violence, death and destruction. The stone "yields…bull rings and bull rings…without walls"---that is endless rings of death and violence. The stone holding all of life and death (and the implied prehistoric worship and sacrifice of bulls) also holds the single body of one bull fighter, Ignacio, "Now, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone./ All is finished." The next stanza repeats the phrase, "All is finished." And then tells us "rain penetrates his mouth…air…leaves his sunken chest,/ and Love, soaked through with tears of snow…" The beauty and glory of Ignacio "laid out which fades away…pure shape which had nightingales…being filled with depthless holes." Eternity of course is endless, depthless. "A stenching silence settles down."
The first three of the last six stanzas of this third section are each dominated by one more lunge toward denial and undoing: "Here I want nothing else but the round eyes/ to see his body without a chance of rest"---alive in fact. This yearning continues over the next two stanzas, the poet "want(s) to see those men of hard voice…that break horses and dominate rivers…who sing/ with a mouth full of sun and flint." "Before the stone/ Before this body with broken reins" is a wish to see Ignacio as he was before there was a need for stone.
There is a subtle and surprising shift at the beginning of the tenth stanza, three-quarters through the section (tenth of twelve stanzas.) Lorca writes, "I want them to show me a lament like a river…to take the body of Ignacio where it loses itself…Loses
itself in the round bull ring of the moon…loses itself in the night without song of fishes…" The purpose of these "men of hard voice" has changed to "show me a lament." The poet indicates an increased softening into the sense of loss and grief. The last stanza, one of the most beautiful in the entire poem, reveals both sides of the mourning dilemma: "I don't want them to cover his face with handkerchiefs/ that he may get used to the death he carries." And then, "Go, Ignacio; feel not the hot bellowing./ Sleep, fly rest: even the sea dies! Side by side lie the demand for illusion, denial( if they don't cover his face he won't be dead) and the poet's realization of the loved one's departure. "Sleep, fly rest" is a giving of permission, allowing the bull fighter his own ending.
This line acknowledges that death brings peace to the one passing and must not be resisted by the living. "I want to see," said three times, yields to "I want them to show me a lament." The demand to see yields to a wish to be shown how to grieve, and even more importantly, allows for the "losing" of the "body of Ignacio." This marks another turn in the lament with its "sweet mists and deep shores" which opens the mourner to a letting go, a loosening of the grip on the body of the loved one. Ignacio, like the sea, is enabled, permitted by the mourner to die, to go and be lost forever to us. This then is the third position of the mourning.
4. Absent Soul: "and I remember a sad breeze through the olives trees."
The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,
nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house.
The child and the afternoon do not know you
because you have died for ever.
The back of the stone does not know you,
nor the black satin in which you crumble.
Your silent memory does not know you
because you have died for ever.
The autumn will come with small white snails.
misty grapes and with clustered hills,
but no one will look into your eyes
because you have died for ever.
Because you have died for ever,
like all the dead of the Earth,
like all the dead who are forgotten
in a heap of lifeless dogs.
Nobody knows you. But I sing of you.
For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.
Of the signal maturity of your understanding.
Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.
Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety.
It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born
an Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure.
I sing of his elegance with words that groan,
and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees.
This fourth and last section is somber, full of resignation, bitterness and acceptance. The need for repetition remains, "because you have died forever" is repeated four times in four stanzas in a section with a total of six stanzas. This is, Sacks explains, because the "griever must be convinced of the actual (and final) fact of loss." (p.23) It is in dramatic contrast to the poem's first section in which more than half of the lines were repeated, a drumbeat, a chant, "at five in the afternoon." In this fourth stanza the effort is one of final and absolute acceptance, Ignacio cannot be known, will never be known again. Not the bull who killed him, or any other bull, will ever know him. The list continues, "the fig tree…horses…ants in your own house./The child and the afternoon…back of the stone…the black satin in which you crumble." But most painful is the realization that Ignacio will never know himself again, "Your silent memory does not know you…" Animate and inanimate entities will not know Ignacio, and time will pass, "autumn will come" (and go) with no heed of his death. Nothing on this earth stops for death. This discouraging fact leads to an eruption of bitterness, "like all the dead of the Earth…who are forgotten/ in a heap of lifeless dogs." Ignacio is not a dead lifeless dog, but the momentary feeling is that death levels us to the lowest common denominator, which is true and not true. Its not trueness comes in the next two stanzas.
The poet sings of his singing, the fullness of this moment, the recognition that poetry and song provide genuine solace, language and thinking are the best and perhaps only possible resolution, marking the fourth position of grief. The poet and reader are filled with sad resignation and hope. We note that this is the single stanza holding five lines. The other five stanzas of this section and the previous third section's stanzas each contain four lines. This fuller stanza, in length and feeling, marks the final turn of the poem, toward a way of living and being with loss, "I sing of his elegance with words that groan,/ and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees." We as human beings can't do better than this.
Discussion and Summary
The emotional progression in Lorca's "Lament…" is exquisite for its poetic beauty and psychological truth. The barrenness of the first section "Cogida and Death" depicts the shock and emptiness that comes to the bereaved in the first moments (days, weeks, months) of realization. The need to repeat the specifics of death in vivid detail, and the relentless and beating repetition of time, is the most salient characteristic of the first grappling (what I am calling the first position) with death. We notice the poet/griever is unable to name the lost one in this first section of the poem, it is "death, and death alone" which preoccupies. This chanting has the paradoxical effect of coming to terms with reality and numbing poet and reader. The chanting which begins as a way to face tragedy shifts into an attempt to be soothed by reality. By the end of the first section the repetition has taken on this incantatory quality. We are lost in the feel of the words, momentarily forgetting their actual meaning, that a real body-person was killed by a bull, at "five in the afternoon."
We see from the beginning of the poem the power of language, in the same moment, to both reveal and soften the harshness of truth.
In this first section Ignacio is referred to not by name, but by "wound…his bed…ears…forehead…gangrene." The mourner grapples with the context of the disaster (time and place) and the things used to care for the fight, the goring and ensuing death: white sheet, lime, cottonwool, crystal and nickel, thigh "with a desolate horn," brass string, smoke, iodine, coffin---but not yet a closely-told story of loss. In the third stanza we see it is the sensory world which brings us into contact with this death. The alternating drum beat of "five in the afternoon" with the contextual and sensual details of death combine to provide what Freud described as the "work of severance" between self and lost object. The "verdict of the reality that the object no longer exists" (1917, 1925) is intoned by "five in the afternoon!" Reality then is our first position in the emotional processing of grief.
Early
in the second section (fourth stanza), "The Spilled Blood," the bull
fighter Ignacio is placed in the context of myth. "The cow of the
ancient
world," is a reference to the deep and ancient importance of the
worship
and sacrifice of the bull. Lorca wrote in his essay "Poem of the
Bull" (1955, 1998) that "
Later in this essay Lorca writes, "the torero goes to the ring…to be alone with the bull, an animal he both fears and adores, and to whom he has much to say…and thus bears the yearning of thousands of people…the bull plays the leading role in a collective drama." (p. 84) It is here in the poem that Lorca begins a narrative of this one bull fighter's loss of life to the ancient animal: "Ignacio goes up the tiers / with all his death on his shoulders." At the same time the narrative develops a protest rises, "I will not see it!" It is human nature that just as reality becomes emotionally and mentally integrated the resistance to it mounts. Reality becomes felt and real enough to deserve an attack!
Ignacio's courage as a bull fighter is eulogized, "His eyes did not close / when he saw the horns near." The poet grapples with the loss of his most wonderful friend in all his particulars: Ignacio's sword, heart, strength, smile, wit, intelligence and furthermore his gentleness, hardness, tenderness and dazzling way with the sword of death, "the final / banderillas of darkness!" Idealization and reality mix as they must do when we lose a beloved. The lost one, because he/she is lost, becomes "larger than life." The mourning continues in the remembering and recounting, the eulogizing.
From the rapture of memory the poet faces the earthy decay of death, "moss and grass / open with sure fingers / the flower of his skull." This recognition of the body's vulnerability and decomposition is contiguous to the blood which "comes out singing"---an outpouring of beauty, blood in an agony of beauty.
The experience of
beauty, energy
and vitality come when the "mourner is able…to cry out his
sorrow," (
Klein, 1940, p.359.) The beauty is
followed by more wonderful lament and protestation, "Oh, white wall of
It is interesting to note that there is a major shift in the poem's form between section two and three. The stanzas become uniform in length, with one exception. There is an overall increase in order, less chanting and repetition. The poem seems to have settled down at the very point in which the poet/narrator has moved into a more solid acceptance of Ignacio's death. The frantic protest has calmed and a coming to terms sets in.
In section three the narrator gives Ignacio permission to "feel not the hot bellowing. / Sleep, fly, rest: even the sea dies!" The poet lets go of his claim on the physicality, the bodily life of his friend, "All is finished." There is comfort to be found in the "Stone…(as) a forehead…a shoulder on which to bear Time."
The grappling with reality, the opening to the beauty of agony and the world in which we live, moves the poet to an inevitable healing, the letting go of his grip on Ignacio and the third position in this work of mourning.
Section four gives us the final position. The poet writes, "Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you." The song, a lament full of duende, haunts us. Lorca wrote in his essay "Play and Theory of the Duende," "these black sounds are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire…(which) climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet." (1955/1998, p.49) The poem's final lines , "I sing of his elegance with words that groan,/ and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees." Poetry, song, love, death and grief come together to form a "duende" feeling, a breeze that we remember and hold. Ignacio does not die "forgotten / in a heap of lifeless dogs." Rather, Ignacio is felt on the inside and outside of our mind-bodies for as long as we can read, think, and remember.