Analysis of City That Does Not Sleep
Federico García Lorca 1898 (Fuente Vaqueros) – 1936 (Alfacar)
In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.
Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.
One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.
Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention
of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.
Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one.
I have said it before.
No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.
Scheme | aBcxdedx aBxxaxx fxgcxxxeh ixxdx igxxfxjxxxkkke aklxlejx kdmmh |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 0011110111 1101 01010110101110 0100101101011111 00111011110101110 110 001001001001010110 1 11011111 1101 001111101 111111 0110110111 011110110111 111001110111110 11101101010 1110101011011 11110111011010101 1 11110111101 101101101 0010111 00101111111010 00101011111011110 11 010110001 00011 110110101111000 111 0101 111001101101 0110101011100101 111101101011101 10110110 0111111010010 01111011110110010 101 1111101011011001 1110110110010001 110 1011110 10101101110 001101011110100110 111000111 1110 111111 01101 111011101 0101110 111100111111 111101 11110 11111111110100 1 100111111001 0101001000110100 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 2,294 |
Words | 445 |
Sentences | 33 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 7, 9, 5, 14, 8, 5 |
Lines Amount | 56 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 263 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 63 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 30, 2023
- 2:13 min read
- 299 Views
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"City That Does Not Sleep" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 26 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/13435/city-that-does-not-sleep>.
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