The spilled blood

As the subtitle here suggests, the main symbolism in this section is to do with the blood. The spilled blood of Ignacio spread over the countless grains of sand of the bullring. His blood is his life force. The spirit of his individuality, once consolidated within his body, now spilled everywhere.
Lorca's calling to the moon and the memory of white jasmines both evoke a sense of his want for Ignacio to be resurrected or made immortal, and of the bullfighter's sacredness and divinity.
To me, 'The cow of the ancient world [who] passed her sad tongue' means that no amount of nurturing energy can change what happened in the recent past - Ignacio's blood is now scattered eternally. The cow is also the bulls counterpart. Yin to the bull's Yang. Yet it was from the cow that the bull came.

The lines:

Ignacio climbs up the tiers	75
with all his death on his shoulders.
He was seeking the dawn,
and the dawn did not exist.
He seeks for his confident profile
and the dream confuses him.	80
He was seeking his beautiful body
and encountered his open blood.

describe the death with time and space symbols, through which the bullfighter sought to find a spiritual form. Imagery such as - tiers, shoulders, the dawn, his confident profile, dream and body stand out in regard to the time and space references. The two line sentences - 'stop/start' rhythm give the section a 'matter of fact' feel; a definite eulogistic quality.
The poem is filled with biblical references. One of these can be seen on line 89,

of a thirsty multitude

which appears to relate to 'the bloodthirsty masses who called for the crucifixion of Christ in the book of Luke, 23:13-25. Also,

There is no chalice to hold it,
there are no swallows to drink it.	139

make the comparison of Ignacio with Christ, the second line referring to the thought held that swallows raised the crown of thorns off the crucified Christ and drank of his blood.
The lines,

but the terrible mothers
lifted their heads.	95

may refer to the Fates, the Moirai or Parcae of myth fame.
Toward the end of this section the 'frost of light (the moon), white flowers and silver and their evocations of all things pure and divine are returned to. Through this whole section the poet works, partly with simile to build up Ignacio up to be infinitely more than mortal.
In actual fact, Lorca really didn't want to see it. Even though he could've travelled from where he was to see the dying Ignacio, he chose not to, and instead was given phone updates each hour by a mutual friend who stayed with Ignacio until he died.

The laid out body

From the quick, emotion filled shorter line of the second section, the pace of the third section slows down and the rhythm evens out. It takes the form of melodic quatrains of 10-14 syllables in length, reminiscent of the long line narrative poems of the early Teutonic scops. The poet's point of view also seems to pull back, comparing Ignacio (and all mortals) with timeless, unvanquishable stone. Only the stone can endure death. Lorca gives us the image not only of the cold hard stone morgue bench but also the old bullring operating tables were made of one thick stone slab.

death has covered him with pale sulphur	159
and placed on him the head of a dark minotaur.	160

In alchemy, the symbolic opposite of sulphur is mercury, or quick-silver. If mercury's primary attribute is fluidity then perhaps sulphur, here, represents stillness. I take line 160 to mean that to Death, all life is the same, man and bull alike. And yet the last two lines,

Go, Ignacio. Feel not the hot bellowing

Sleep, soar, rest: even the sea dies!

are exultant. They say that death is escape from the hot snorting of life, and that the soaring spirit is as eternal as the sea.

• On Sanchez Mejias' death, Lorca told a friend, 'It is like my own death, an apprenticeship for my own death. I feel an astonishing sense of calm. Perhaps because I had a premonition about what was to happen'.

• For Ignacio, the day of the fight was fraught with ill omens, the car in which he was being driven from Huesca to Manzanares broke down. When he got there he was told he couldn't have Ortega's preparation team as promised (Ortega was the bullfighter who was injured and asked Ignacio to stand in for him).

• The corrida began late, not as Lorca would have us believe at the traditional 'five o'clock sharp'.

• Antonio Garrigues, a friend who had come to watch him fight thought that, 'Ignacio looked absolutely exhausted'.

• When lots had been cast for the bulls earlier in the day, the first name on Ignacio's piece of paper was 'Granadino'. The bullfighter had not liked the look of the animal in the pen, and he liked it even less when it emerged now into the brilliant afternoon light. 'This one's out to get me', he observed laconically, turning to his friends.

• As he was carried to the infirmary, leaving a thick red trail behind him, Ignacio was heard to mutter to his friend, Alfredo Corrochano, 'I think I'm done for'.

• Due to the appalling facilities at Manzares, Ignacio had requested beforehand that, if he were to be wounded, to be taken to Madrid (the death of his brother, another bullfighter, at the hands of an ill-equipped medical staff still haunted him) but the ambulance broke down on the way and it wasn't until after midnight that it reached the dying Ignacio.

• That night in Madrid as he sank further into delirium he began raving about bulls and olive trees. As a boy, he had practised bullfighting illegally on an estate in Seville under the moonlight. When he executed a good pass he pretended that the olives, swaying in the trees, were his applauding spectators.

• In his agony Ignacio shook the bed with such violence that it moved around the room. Lorca heard of this, and perhaps, is the origin of the line-

  a coffin on wheels is his bed

• Lorca was convinced that Ignacio was fated to die that afternoon. He said, 'Poets are mediums and Ignacio, who was a poet, did everything he could to escape from his death, but everything he did only helped to tighten the strings of the net'.

• Hemingway, in his story, For Whom The Bell Tolls, borrowed the sentiment that many of Ignacio's friends agreed on about him after his death, that, 'a smell of death hung around him like a noose'.

• Lorca seems to have been careful in excluding the name of the animal that delivered the blow to his friend. Granadino, at a guess, means 'the grand two' (or 'poet'?) which, in hindsight seems terribly ironic. The bull's name might have suggested to the superstitious Lorca that in death, as in life, his and Ignacio's destinies were inseparably linked - as was proved two summers later.

Bibliography

Gibson, I. 1989, Federico Garcia Lorca - A Life, Faber and Faber, London

Honig, E. 1968, Garcia Lorca, Jonathan Cape, London

Maurer, C. (Ed.) 1991, The Poetical Works Of Federico Garcia Lorca, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York

Tresidder, J. 1999, Dictionary of Symbols, Duncan Baird Publishers, London

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This essay was written in 1999. It was webified due to the fact that I found nothing else like it on the net while researching it. Use it any way you see fit, but if you want to try and make money from it, then please ask first. - signed, the lads at Sunny Breaks