Gacela of the Remembrance of Love
Gacela of the Remembrance of Love - form Summary
Gacela's Spare, Elegiac Lyric
This short lyric takes the traditional Spanish gacela and compresses it into an elegiac, imagistic meditation. Repetition of a closing line and spare stanzas create a refrain-like effect that emphasizes separation from the dead and the persistence of memory. Surreal, contrasting images—white cherry, poisoned quinces, sick tulip—produce emotional dislocation rather than narrative. The form’s brevity and refrains focus attention on tone and recurring motifs of loss and longing.
Read Complete AnalysesDo not carry your remembrance. Leave it, alone, in my breast, tremor of a white cherry tree in the torment of January. There divides me from the dead a wall of difficult dreams. I give the pain of a fresh lily for a heart of chalk. All night long, in the orchard my eyes, like two dogs. All night long, quinces of poison, flowing. Sometimes the wind is a tulip of fear, a sick tulip, daybreak of winter. A wall of difficult dreams divides me from the dead.
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