The Little Mute Boy

The Little Mute Boy
The Little Mute Boy
by Federico García Lorca
Form	Copla
Meter	irregular
Rhyme scheme	-a-a
Lines	12

The Little Mute Boy

The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger

In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice, far away,
put on a cricket’s clothes.)

"The Little Mute Boy" ("El niño mudo") is a poem by Federico García Lorca published in his Canciones (1921-1924).^[1]^[2]^[3] In the poem, Lorca tells "a story in which separation and alienation predominate, as a child's voice is missing and imprisoned in the being of another".^[4] This theme is continued in the following poem, "El niño loco" ("The Crazy Boy").

Structurally, the poem is made of three coplas in octosyllabic verses with assonant rhymes between the even verses.

In 1947, the poem, translated to French as "L'enfant muet", was adapted musically by Francis Poulenc along two others poems from the Canciones.^[5]

References

^ Galt, Margot Fortunato (1994). "The Lost Sense: A Favorite Writing Assignment". Teachers & Writers. 27 (1): 4–7. ISSN 0739-0084.
^ Libby, Anthony (1975). "W. S. Merwin and the Nothing That Is". Contemporary Literature. 16 (1): 19–40. doi:10.2307/1207782. JSTOR 1207782.
^ "A Performance Guide to Keith Gates's Song Cycle, The Barren One" (PDF).
^ Perri, Dennis (1995). "Lorca's "Canciones": Speaker and Reader". Anales de la literatura española contemporánea. 20 (1/2): 173–198. ISSN 0272-1635. JSTOR 27741247.
^ Silva, Zenia Sacks Da (2004). The Hispanic Connection: Spanish and Spanish-American Literature in the Arts of the World. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 265. ISBN 978-0-275-98090-0.

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[1] Galt, Margot Fortunato (1994). "The Lost Sense: A Favorite Writing Assignment". Teachers & Writers. 27 (1): 4–7. ISSN 0739-0084.

[2] Libby, Anthony (1975). "W. S. Merwin and the Nothing That Is". Contemporary Literature. 16 (1): 19–40. doi:10.2307/1207782. JSTOR 1207782.

[3] "A Performance Guide to Keith Gates's Song Cycle, The Barren One" (PDF).

[4] Perri, Dennis (1995). "Lorca's "Canciones": Speaker and Reader". Anales de la literatura española contemporánea. 20 (1/2): 173–198. ISSN 0272-1635. JSTOR 27741247.

[5] Silva, Zenia Sacks Da (2004). The Hispanic Connection: Spanish and Spanish-American Literature in the Arts of the World. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 265. ISBN 978-0-275-98090-0.

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The Little Mute Boy

References

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