Thematic Patterns in Lorca's Blood Wedding

THEMATIC PATIERNS IN LORCA'S fJ3LOOD WEDDING LORCA HAS BEEN WIDELY PRAISED for the achievement in Blood Wedding of a tragic form the distinctive features of which·· are the fusion of lyric and dramatic impulses; the skillful integration of a musical pattern in the drama's structural design; the thematic relevance of songs, stage effects, and recurrent images-in short, for the assimilation of the Spanish folk and classical traditions in a poetic drama that is modern, sophisticated, and authentic. But some questions remain to puzzle the reader, especially the reader of an English version of the play:l How does Blood Wedding fit our current concept of poetic drama? In what sense is the organization of the play musical? What is the function of the lyrics in the development of action and theme? Is there a comprehensive structure of imagery defining the tonality and modulations of the play, and supporting themes perhaps resting upon and therefore nearer to the surface of the text than those more profound echoes of vegetation gods and human sacrifice which the archetypal symbols:! of the play suggest? The following essay is an attempt to explore some aspects of these questions. I. Our concept of modern poetic drama has been formed largely on the theory and practice of Yeats and Eliot, yet no one has been willing to call either Yeats or Eliot a dramatist of the first rank. The consensus seems to be, as Francis Fergusson implies, that Yeats is "cultish" and Eliot "middle-brow Ersatz." But either label would be inaccurate if applied to Lorca. It is true that his range is limited, even that he speaks primarily to a Spanish audience, but, as Fergusson says, "he writes the poetry of the theater as our poets would like to do."8 Yeats, Eliot, and Lorca are all fundamentally lyric 1 Three Tragedies of Garcia Lorca, translated by James Graham-Lujan and Richard L. O'Connell (New York, 1955). All quotations from the English text will be from this translation. The Spanish text used in the preparation of this paper is Garda Lorca, Obras Completas, I (Buenos Aires, 19!18). II Ronald J. Dickson, "Archetypal Sym·bolism in Lorca's Boclas de Sangre," Literature and Psychology X, 1961, 76-79. a"Don Perlimplin: Lorca's Theater-Poetry," in The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York, 1957), pp. g6-97. 16 1964 LORCA'S Blood Wedd4ng 17 poets working toward the drama. In their use of myth. ritual. and symbol they cut across the barriers of national cultures. but only Lorca has cut across intellectual class lines to appeal to both the naive and the sophisticated in his own culture (as Shakespeare did in his day). Perhaps in the modern world this could happen only in Spain, where class lines are not drawn on the basis of speech habits. What is the source of this appeal? Perhaps it is "poetic drama." Although Eliot is far from being satisfied with his own plays-and I suspect that he would not be satisfied with Lorca's-there are some features of Blood Wedding that should please him. Not, certainly , the medium. Eliot is opposed to- a mixture of verse and prose unless, as in Shakespeare, the author wishes to produce a jolt, to "transport the. audience violently from one plane of reality to another." But Lorca has come near achieving that "ideal toward which poetic drama should strive": the expression of a range of sensibility not possible to prose drama (the kind of feeling almost but not quite conveyed in the plays of Chekhov and Synge). In Eliot's terms the ideal poetic drama would be "a design of human action and of words, such as to present the two aspects of dramatic and of musical order ... without losing that contact with the ordinary everyday world with which drama must come to terms....'" The real problem, then, for the writer of poetic drama is not versification, but the resolution in a single work of two principles: that of decorum (a synthesis of incidents, character, and theme) and that of associative rhythm, which may be more verbal than metrical. In his essay on "The Music of Poetry...