Lorca's Blood Wedding & Machado's Campos de Castilla Analysis

Federico García Lorca's Tragic Trilogy

Analysis of Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre)

This fragment belongs to Blood Wedding (written in 1932), a major work by the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898–1936).

The Spanish Soil Trilogy

Blood Wedding is grouped with Lorca’s other tragedies, Yerma (1934) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), forming a dramatic trilogy subtitled Spanish Soil. These works share key characteristics:

• They are developed in a rural environment.
• Natural forces impose a tragic destiny.
• They embody Lorca's common themes: frustration, love as the unstoppable force of instincts, and death.

Structural Conflict in Lorca's Tragedies

All Lorca tragedies are structured on a basic situation resulting from two opposing forces:

1. The Principle of Authority: Represents order, tradition, reality, and the community.
2. The Principle of Freedom: Embodies instinct, desire, individuality, and imagination.

Blood Wedding specifically dramatizes the power of passion, sex, and the earth. The plot is based on a real event: the flight of a bride with her former boyfriend on her wedding day and the tragic fate that hangs over the characters for following their instincts and passion.

Antonio Machado and Campos de Castilla (1912)

This text was written by the Sevillian author Antonio Machado, a poet and prose writer whose creative activity spanned the first decades of the twentieth century until his death in exile in 1939.

Machado's Masterpiece: Campos de Castilla

This is a lyrical text consisting of verses pertaining to Campos de Castilla, which is considered his masterpiece. The book was first published in 1912. Based on the composition date appearing under the poem's title and its contents, we can deduce that this specific text was added after the initial core compositions of the first edition.

Stylistic Evolution and Innovation

Campos de Castilla established uniqueness and personality in Antonio Machado's poetry. It represents a significant stylistic cleansing, moving away from the intimate Modernism and romantic streaks characteristic of his first stage of poetry, including works like Solitudes (1903) and its extension, Solitudes, Galleries and Other Poems (1907).

The greatest innovation in Campos de Castilla, in relation to his previous books, is the incorporation of the Castilian landscape. The landscape serves both as a subject and as a subjective reflection of his emotions. Therefore, this poem is highly representative of the entire collection of texts that compose Campos de Castilla.