emains that Lorca's art and death coincided in a meaningful way.
One series of poems that offer a wealth of imagistic and symbolic material regarding Lorca's obsession with death is the group of poems gathered under the heading Gypsy Ballads. The poems are narratives designed to be brief scenes told out of Lorca's native Andalusian sensibility. The unifying gypsy theme is not to be read as the ultimate meaning of the poems, however. Lorca was not attempting to illustrate slices of gypsy life. He himself considered that the poems "have a single protagonist: Granada" (Cobb, Garcia Lorca 58). In other words, Lorca writes of his home, and, by doing so in an imagistic and elevated fashion, he is creating an interior landscape as well. He associates himself with his homeland so thoroughly that the poems can be read as an attempt to create a personal mythology. Lorca's interior life itself is the subject of the poems.
This is of paramount importance because the poems are laden with death imagery. Though the poems are peopled with saints and sexually ac
...