Federico Garcia Lorca (1893-1936) is one of the most important Spanish poets, dramatists

and playwrights of the twentieth century. He was born in Fuente Vaqueros, a town few
miles from Granada. Lorca's two most successful poetry collections were Canciones (Songs)
and Romancero Gitano (The Gypsy Ballads). During the Spanish Civil war he was shot to
death by supporters of General Francisco Franco.

He was also a member of the Generation of 1927, which was a group of poets and other
writers who rose to prominence in the late 1920s. They used strategies like audacious use
of metaphors, coining new words and use of symbolic and suggestive images in their poetry
to convey aspects of inner personal experience.

He was intrigued by cante jondo flamenco which was a form of Spanish traditional poetry
and music. It used objects such as guitars, olive groves etc. and themes of love and death. In
this poem The Guitar, a similar approach has been used. Elements of nature mentioned in
the poem create a mystic element while the five swords represent the five fingers of the
hand that plays the guitar. This poem has been written during the times of war, the guitar
being personified as a victim of war.

The opening line of the guitar compares its sound to that of a wail, the wail of a wounded
person. The playing of the guitar represents a wounded person crying. The guitars lament
is monotonous and repetitious (like the wind and the rain), and Garca Lorca achieves this
effect through further repetition. The sound of the guitar is said to be strong enough to
break the wine cups of dawn. As the guitar begins to play as a person would cry, it cannot
stop playing, and there is no use to try and stop it. The weeping guitar is a symbol for the
despair the speaker feels. The guitar's song is impossible to silence just as it is impossible
for the speaker to combat the sorrow he/she feels.

In a series of brilliant metaphors, Garca Lorca supplies some answers, summarized in the
simple lines, It weeps for/ things far away. Sand of the warm south/ asking for white
camellias associates the guitar with Andalusia, situated on the Mediterranean Sea with its
beaches and flowers. It weeps arrow without target/ evening without morning. Arrows
without targets and evenings without mornings are metaphors of disorientation. Another
cause for its grief is The first dead bird/ upon the branch, a reference to the loss of
innocence, a theme that appears often in Garca Lorcas verse.

Finally, this instrument that evokes so many poignant feelings itself becomes a metaphor:
Oh, guitar!/ Heart grievously wounded/ by five swords. It is a splendid example of a
Garca Lorca metaphor. The body of a guitar roughly approximates the shape of a heart,
which is wounded by the five fingers of the person playing it. The image also evokes the
common household religious print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, wounded by the grief of the
world.