Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Federico García Lorca's poem "Guitar," the guitar becomes more than a musical instrument; it is a medium of expression for existential sorrow and the inevitability of suffering. The poem establishes an atmosphere steeped in melancholy from the very first line, "The weeping of the guitar begins," that haunts the reader throughout. The use of the word "weeping" anthropomorphizes the guitar, elevating it to a living entity capable of experiencing and expressing human emotion.

The poem speaks to the impossibility of silencing this pain: "Useless to silence it. Impossible to silence it." Lorca articulates the unyielding and relentless nature of sorrow. The guitar weeps "monotonously as water weeps, as the wind weeps over snowfields." Here, sorrow is as elemental as nature itself-inescapable, intransigent, and universal. Lorca's analogy to water and wind weeping captures a sense of grief that is unconfined by form, a lament that permeates everything and cannot be compartmentalized or rationalized away.

The poem extends the weeping of the guitar to collective sorrow: "It weeps for distant things. Hot southern sands yearning for white camellias." The guitar's mourning is not merely personal; it resonates with the universal experience of longing and loss, symbolized by the "hot southern sands yearning for white camellias." The imagery juxtaposes heat with coolness, southern with presumably northern, and sand with floral life, perhaps suggesting how sorrow emerges from contrasts and unattainable desires.

The lines "Weeps arrow without target, evening without morning, and the first dead bird on the branch" are charged with a sense of purposelessness and finality. The arrow without a target embodies a sense of aimlessness; the evening without morning echoes despair, a darkness that doesn't end. Even the mention of "the first dead bird on the branch" carries significant weight, almost as if the guitar's weeping is elegiac, lamenting lost potential and shattered beginnings.

Finally, the last lines, "Oh, guitar! Heart mortally wounded by five swords," encapsulate the essence of the poem. The guitar is revealed to be more than an object; it is the heart of the poem, the center of the sorrow. The "five swords" possibly refer to the five strings of the traditional Andalusian guitar, and these strings or "swords" have "mortally wounded" the heart, again emphasizing the depth of the sorrow conveyed.

Throughout the poem, the guitar functions as both the subject and the object, the mourner and the mourned. In its lament, it becomes a universal symbol for the human condition: our essential loneliness, our unfulfilled yearnings, and the inescapable sorrow that marks our existence. The poem leaves the reader with an overwhelming sense of the tragic yet beautiful struggle to express the ineffable, something that music, poetry, and indeed, life itself, constantly strive to articulate.

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...