During the class’s discussion today, the wheels in my head screeched into motion as everyone thought about the line from Lorca’s poem (“as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.”)

I seem to be surrounded by shipwrecks lately! The poet I work on in my own research uses them poignantly in his poems (notably in “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish

Vernet

Chance,” and “Stilled beneath the Oppressive Cloud”). At our concert outing to Carnegie Hall, Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest (inspired, of course, by the Shakespeare play of the same name) involves a fantastic shipwreck whose turbulent booms and crashes vibrated our seats. And now, beloved Lorca closes his dawn with that image (which seems to fittingly correspond to the light of dawn as many of you brought up).

Though in all these things, and especially the Lorca poem, I come back to a Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun, who used the word in perhaps one of the most powerful contexts I’ve encountered. Writing about under-served and neglected youth in French suburbs (comparable to “inner-city” youth of American inner cities), he speaks of “the shipwreck of their destiny,” to hit home the catastrophic plight (in France) of their immigrant parents.

I find myself wondering if Lorca intended some sort of social commentary about the shipwrecked lives of these people in the mire of New York, as well.