Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Federico García Lorca's "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías: Cogida and Death," the recurring phrase "at five in the afternoon" serves as both a temporal marker and a mournful incantation that sears the moment of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías' death into memory. Mejías was a matador and close friend of Lorca's, and his untimely death during a bullfight in 1934 became the stimulus for this elegy. This poem captures the immediate aftermath, a landscape saturated with impending death and sorrow, illustrating how a specific moment in time becomes a universe of eternal mourning.

From the beginning, the phrase "at five in the afternoon" is repeated, building a rhythmic cadence that emulates a death knell or funeral bell. It also serves to insistently anchor the reader to the moment of death, creating a relentless awareness of its inevitability and finality. The repetition makes the phrase a leitmotif that captures the essence of loss - it's as if time itself is now defined by this moment, with every event before or after becoming irrelevant.

"A boy brought the white sheet / at five in the afternoon. / A frail of lime ready prepared / at five in the afternoon." Here, traditional symbols of death-a white sheet and lime-are introduced. The white sheet is both a literal object used to cover the dead and a metaphorical veil of mourning. The lime, often used to accelerate the decomposition of a body, symbolizes the transformation from life to death. It is as though the world is waiting for this moment, prepared with the ceremonial elements of passing.

The poem moves on to encapsulate the dissonance between life and death in a single moment: "Now the dove and the leopard wrestle / at five in the afternoon." The dove, a universal symbol of peace, clashes with the leopard, a symbol of ferocity and violence. This line encapsulates the dichotomy of the bullfight, a spectacle that combines elegance and brutality.

The agony of the moment is underscored by the visceral imagery: "Death laid eggs in the wound / at five in the afternoon." This line is particularly harrowing, suggesting that death is not a singular event but a process, a genesis of its own. It propagates, hatching its finality in the wound, and turning it into a site where life transitions irrevocably into death.

"A coffin on wheels is his bed / at five in the afternoon. / Bones and flutes resound in his ears / at five in the afternoon." Here, the transient nature of life is epitomized. The coffin, the final resting place, is now his "bed," emphasizing the intimacy and finality of death. The "bones and flutes" create a haunting auditory landscape, as if a surreal, otherworldly procession is accompanying Mejías to the afterlife.

Lorca's lament not only captures a specific tragedy but also speaks to universal themes of life, death, and the passage of time. Through the obsessive repetition of "at five in the afternoon," Lorca turns a moment of personal grief into a resonant, timeless expression of human mortality. The poem becomes a memorial, a monument built from words, to a moment when time stood still in the face of irrecoverable loss.

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