There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the striking contrast between human-made skyscrapers and the natural elements that surround them.
Federico Garcia Lorca presents a vivid and dynamic image of skyscrapers as they interact with the natural world. He describes how these towering structures not only dominate the landscape but also engage in a 'battle' with weather elements like snow and rain, which play both a decorative and obstructive role in this relationship. The quote evokes a sense of tension between human ambition represented by the skyscrapers and the elusive, mysterious qualities of nature that surround them.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the impact of urban architecture on natural landscapes.
The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the crowd broke the windows At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
Death laid its eggs in the wound
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
Woodcutter. Cut my shadow from me. Free me from the torment of being without fruit. Why was I born among mirrors? Day goes round and round me. The night copies me in all its stars. I want to live without my reflection. And then let me dream that ants and thistledown are my leaves and my parrots.
I consider music like a mirage in the desert. You're obsessed with the ideal piece of music, and the more you think you're getting closer, it's not there.
Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another.
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present. I want to gather them, like somebody's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
Judge: And what is your occupation in general? Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator. Judge: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet? Brodsky: No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity? Judge: Did you study it?...How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an insitute of higher learning...where they prepare...teach Brodsky: I did not think that it is given to one by education. Judge: By what then? Brodsky: I think that it is from God.
I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.
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