The Guitar

While Lorca refers to the poem as simply “The Guitar,” his intention is to celebrate the flamenco guitar specifically, which is distinct from other guitars because of its design and the way it is played. The flamenco guitar has a higher pitch and sharper sound than other guitars, which Lorca suggests with his lines “The goblets of dawn / are smashed” (Lines 3-4). Traditional flamenco music is usually improvised and, therefore, passes down through oral tradition. Lorca’s poem has a narrative quality; there is the sense that it too could be passed down through oral tradition because of its repeated phrases and the emotional arc of the guitar from its life of wailing, or playing, and its ultimate demise, or silencing. The guitar, through its status as main character, could also symbolize Lorca’s own journey of personal pain and writing and how the two interweave and clash at different periods of his life.

The sword has a long history associated with military use, civilian dueling, and sport (fencing), and fashion accessory. In Shakespeare’s tragic plays of the 16th and 17th centuries, the sword is the main weapon of choice. There is an intimacy to the deaths that take place because of the sword, as they involve the blade directly meeting the flesh. At the end of “The Guitar,” the flamenco guitar’s long-expressed wails come to an end with “heart mortally wounded / by five swords” (Lines 26-27). Lorca writes this poem in the early 20th century, celebrating flamenco music as it was at its height in the 18th and 19th centuries, suggesting a correlation between the choice of the sword and the Romanticism and nostalgia of the past. In fact, the small sword was actually a fashion accessory at the time of flamenco’s golden age for many European men. While the sword is capable of ending life, the end can also offer—as is depicted in many plays, songs, and poems—a noble, honorable death.