Potter is a university writing instructor and fiction writer living in San Francisco. In this essay, Potter shows how Lorca's adaptation of the Arabic ghazal in this gacela displays the poet's deeply idiosyncratic poetic diction.

"Gacela of the Dark Death," the eighth gacela of eleven of such poems in his collection The Divan at Tamarit, is one among those Federico García Lorca wrote in the 1930s in the tradition of the Arabic Granadian poets who had once resided in his native region of Andalusia, Spain. The gacela, which is Spanish for ghazal, is Lorca's adaptation of a short, rhymed, fixed verse form in Arabic poetry, according to his brother Francisco García Lorca in The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. In the gacela, the speaker-poet, "I," addresses a person, often a beloved. In the poem discussed in this essay, the person...