Nearly half of the lyrics in the Poema del cante jondo contain variations on the theme of death.” As Stanton points out in speaking of Lorca’s poetry: “It oscillates between the two extremes of love and death, plenitude and tragedy. While Lorca’s collection, like the cante jondo tradition which inspires it, is firmly set against the unique Andalusian landscape, the poems are “distinctive for their recreation of landscape as a state of the soul, an outer version of an inner world.” The physical landscape and the forces of nature acting upon it are present in many of the poems but are invested with existential meaning beyond the ostensible.
The cosmic resonance of this grito is heard and seen in the synaesthetic image of shattered wine glasses on the horizon of dawn, a projection of the heart with universal implications.” Stirring the turbid waters of the unconscious, it brings to light hidden dreams, memories, illusions.” Refering to the siguiriya poem ‘La Guitarra’, and the personification of the instrument as an expression of this ‘wail’, Loughran says “the guitar speaks for the monotony of the ever-present complaint of nature, as though it shared in the dilemna of man. “The music of this instrument ,” says Maurer, “seems to have opened secret chambers of the spirit for Lorca. Lorca echoes, faithfully, this sense of anguish that can resound from the singer – as seen in the ‘¡Ay yayayayay’ of La Soleá – or from the ubiquitous flamenco guitar. While catholicism found its expression in prayer, however, duende was expressed in the grito of the songs. The ‘Dios te salve’ with its ‘gimiendo y llorando, en este valle de lágrimas’ is very akin to the sense of anguish in the depts of cante jondo. Cante jondo offered “a powerful distillation of those elemental issues (birth, love, time, death) by which our experience is defined.” This echoed the “two main and obsessive themes” in the work of Lorca: “on the one side love, hope and joy on the other side grief, frustration and death.” In Poema del cante jondo we see a recurrent theme which Lorca was later to single out as the sole character of his subsequent, much-lauded Gypsy Ballads: “… pena without recourse the black pain from which there is no escape but death.” What Lorca saw in cante jondo, suggests Grande, was an expressive tradition “en donde todo es terriblemente verdardero, desconsoladamente verdadero, y en donde sin embargo esa verdad se transfigura en unas músicas que nos ofrecen un consuelo verdadero también, terriblemente verdadero.” “For Lorca,” writes Morris, “ the rich Andalusian heritage of music and song constituted a starting point rather than an end in itself.” Ī theocracy in the early 20 th century, Spain was immersed in a Catholic past that was simply unavoidable. The key difference lies in that: “it is a communication of a dark soul rather than an exuberant entertainment.” Lorca, a member of the avant garde Generación del 27 with their recognition of poetic forefathers such as Góngara, had grown up emersed in the rich and mystical character of his native Andalusia so these “verses that condensed momentous events of human experience into a few, resonant words” held an obvious appeal for the young poet. Ĭante jondo is the forerunner of the flamenco, explains Hobbs. Instead, he suggests that: “ Book of Poems was Lorca’s initial lyrical statement of existential conflict, and Poema del cante jondo is its subsequent symbolic expression.” Indeed Maurer makes the point that Lorca, and Manuel de Falla, whilst arguing against opposition to their 1922 folk festival, insisted that cante jondo was not simply folklore but “living proof of Granada’s ‘universality’”. As Loughran bemoans: “Too often general commentaries on Lorca’s poetry point to Poema del cante jondo as an example of the ‘folkloric’…”.