Ditty Of First Desire - Analysis

A lyric of wanting-to-be

The poem’s central claim is simple but unsettling: desire is not just wanting something, but wanting to change what you are. In a green morning, the speaker doesn’t want love; he wants to be a heart. In a ripe evening, he doesn’t want to hear song; he wants to be a nightingale. Lorca makes desire feel like a kind of self-remaking that keeps sliding away from any stable identity.

The heart: purity, immediacy, and a wish to be only feeling

The first image, the heart, is bluntly repeated: A heart. That echo reads like insistence, as if the speaker has to convince himself the wish is possible. The green morning suggests beginnings and freshness, so the heart here isn’t a complicated organ of memory; it’s the fantasy of being pure response, nothing but direct feeling. But even in this early light, the wish carries a tension: to be a heart is to reduce the self to one function, to become a single instrument.

The nightingale: beauty that exists only as voice

By the ripe evening, desire turns outward into song: I wanted to be a nightingale. The nightingale is a body that is famous for one thing—its voice—so it intensifies the poem’s earlier narrowing. If being a heart is being only emotion, being a nightingale is being only expression. Evening also darkens the wish: ripe implies fullness, even sensuality, but it also hints that the day is nearing its end, as if desire reaches its richest form right as time runs out.

Soul, turn orange-colored: the impossible command

Twice the poem stops to address the soul directly: Soul, turn orange-colored; Soul, turn the color of love. Orange is a strange choice—neither the green of morning nor the dark of evening—so it feels like a third state the speaker demands, a transformation beyond the day’s natural cycle. The command reveals the contradiction at the poem’s core: desire wants to be sovereign, able to order the soul into a new color, yet the very need to command suggests the soul resists, or at least does not change on cue.

When myself still means A heart

The poem’s most telling turn comes when the speaker claims a more modest wish: In the vivid morning / I wanted to be myself. But the line that follows undercuts it: A heart. Even myself is immediately translated back into the earlier emblem, as if the self cannot be imagined except as a single, intense metaphor. Later, the final desire—I wanted to be my voice—does something similar: it sounds like self-possession, yet it again narrows the person into one aspect. The speaker keeps circling the same trap: wanting authenticity, but defining authenticity as becoming only one pure thing.

A sharper question the poem leaves open

If the speaker wants to be my voice, who is the I that wants? The poem quietly implies that there may be no stable speaker behind these wishes—only a chain of longings that replace each other from morning to evening’s end.