A perfect poem of tears: grieving as depicted in Federico García Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

Abstract

Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, a daring, well-known, and beloved bullfighter, was gored by the bull Grenadino in Manzanares, Spain, a small town south of Madrid, on 11 August 1934. Several months after Mejias' death, near the end of October 1934, Federico Garcia Lorca gave a first reading of his poem, 220 lines long in four sections. This chapter explores how Lorca incorporated his beloved friend's destiny, his very death. Lorca's relentless repetition drives his poem, and the mourner, towards integration–the repetition changes in quality as does the splitting and denial that move closer to reality, increasingly allowing the integration of inner and external reality. Mejias' hour of death is the centre around which all facts of reality arrange themselves. In the end, perhaps for both Lorca and Mejias, to die and be remembered for their daring in the bullring was preferable to living unknown; the lure of beautiful death more powerful than the love of ordinary life.