universally mourned his loss. In fact, several poets
of the day wrote elegies dedicated to the bull-
fighter’s death, including Miguel Herna ́ndez and
Rafael Alberti. Yet neither poet’s work is as cele-
brated as Lorca’s is today. According to Peter
Boyle inSoutherly, ‘‘‘Lament for Ignacio Sa ́nchez
Mejı ́as’ is one of the great poems of the century: a
formal elegy that takes up a thread going back to
the Romans but incorporates the surreal into
that.’’ Boyle adds: ‘‘And with this big theme Lor-
ca’s touch never falters.’’ InLorca: An Apprecia-
tion of His Poetry, Roy Campbell makes a similar
assessment, finding that ‘‘Lorca reached the height
of his achievement in his ‘Llanto por Ignacio Sa ́n-
chez Mejı ́as’; here he remained true to his native
Andalusia, to the earth and the landscape from
which his verse derived its strength, flavour and
perfume.’’ Miguel Gonza ́lez-Gerth, writing in the
Texas Quarterly, remarks that, ‘‘likePoet in New
York, Lorca’s ‘Lament for the Death of a Bull-
fighter’ has a place in the development of his tragic
symbolism.’’ He calls the poem the ‘‘peak of Lor-
ca’s lyrical accomplishment,’’ in which ‘‘one can
find the tragic symbol of his whole vision of life
and man.’’
Criticism.
Leah Tieger
Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. In the
following essay, she attempts to track the nonlinear
progressions of time and emotion in ‘‘Lament for
Ignacio Sa ́nchez Mejı ́as.’’
The Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-
Ross developed a framework for the five stages
of grief in her groundbreaking 1969 text On
Death and Dying. These five stages are denial,
anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Even Kubler-Ross admitted that these stages
are not necessarily linear or progressive, they
can occur in any order or permutation. Indeed,
while anger is not a particularly strong emotion
in Federico Garcı ́a Lorca’s ‘‘Lament for Ignacio
Sa ́nchez Mejı ́as,’’ Kubler-Ross’s framework for
grief and mourning can be applied to the poem
with interesting results. For instance, the first
section of the poem captures the shock of
death, of the silence and preparation that imme-
diately follow it. Yet the first half of the poem is
literally fraught with denial. This can be seen in
the constant repetition of the matador’s time of
death. It is a piece of information that the
speaker denies so strongly he is unable to process
or understand it, thus necessitating the repeti-
tion. Furthermore, to the speaker, it is as if time
stopped when the matador was killed.
The second section further exhibits the
speaker’s denial. It is entirely about not wanting
to look at the horror of death, of refusing to look
at that which the speaker fears most. Yet, the
section also reflects the conflict of not looking,
the contrasts of morbid curiosity. The speaker
says he does not want to look and then describes
exactly what he does not want to see as if he were
looking at it anyway. At the same time, theWHAT
DO I READ
NEXT?For a look at Lorca’s work as a dramatist,
read his three most famous plays, all written
or performed between 1933 and 1936. The
works are collected in English translation in
Three Plays: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The
House of Bernarda Alba(1993).
To learn more about surrealist art, read
Fiona Bradley’s Surrealism (1997). This
brief but liberally illustrated volume offers
a comprehensive look at the roots of the
movement as well as several prominent sur-
realist artists.
For a more biographically centered and
more literary exploration of the surrealist
movement, seeSurrealist Paradeby Wayne
Andrews. Published in 1990, the volume
looks at the lives of the artists and writers
whocametoembodythesurrealistmovement,
and how each influenced others in their sphere.
The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa
(1888–1935) lived and wrote during the
same period as Lorca, and both poets are
held in equally high esteem today. Pessoa’s
work, like Lorca’s, exhibits a great deal of
lyricism and surreal imagery. His work in
English translation can be found in the
2001 Poems of Fernando Pessoa.Lament for Ignacio Sa ́nchez Mejı ́as