ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the different sections of Canciones to show how poems which Federico Garcia Lorca dispersed under different headings are interrelated through modern approach to desire. It is a well-known fact that Lorca's poetry is very rarely pure lyric in the sense of exhibiting a principle opposed to or contrasting with epic and drama. In Canciones Lorca repeatedly presents the trajectory of a desire that is forbidden or else, in the actual reading or performance of the text, thwarted by something that appears to be as ineluctable as fate. In practice the idea of a palimpsest also becomes for the poet a metaphor for poems built around the tension of a conflict between desire — including the desire to create — and the flow of time, which is destructive. Narcissus's error in one sense — to withhold love from the nymph Echo — is repeated in other poems in Canciones, which take as their subject hesitant lovers.
