guitar

‘The Six Strings’ by Federico Garcia Lorca

The guitar 
makes dreams cry.
The crying of lost 
souls
escapes from its round
mouth.
And like the tarantula
it weaves a huge star
to catch sighs
that float on its black
wooden tank. 

(translated by Donald Hall)

The bareness of this poem is reflected in many ways: the sparse distribution of words across its lines through enjambment, the lack of rigid structure and the monosyllabic and disyllabic words, the only exception being ‘tarantula’. This enhances the bleak tone of the poem. The ’round mouth’ seems engulfing and the reference to ‘lost souls’ of the underworld, as well as the ‘black wooden tank’, gives a sense of the overpowering sensation of listening to the guitar music. Black and white are the main colours of this poem; there is black in the ‘tarantula’ and the ‘wooden tank’, there is white in the ghoulish ‘lost souls’ and ‘huge star’, giving an eerie image of something reminiscent of the Mexican day of the dead. At the same time, there is conflicting positive and negative imagery, of ‘dreams’ and a ‘huge star’, the ‘tarantula’, ‘crying’ and ‘souls’ which could convey the merging of life and death. The music is enticing and entrancing, but the presence of death and darkness is also chilling. However, it is conveyed that the music is seemingly harmless with the intangible nature of some of the images, such as ‘souls’, ‘sighs’ and the fact that they ‘float’ on its back. It seems a fleeting impression, captured in few words, possibly describing the ephemera of experience itself.