Romance Sonambulo Violence Quotes

We've never seen a forest compared to a cat before, but to compare it to a cat that "bristles" suggests that the animal's fur is standing up in a sign of fright or aggression (like what our neighbor's cat does when it sees our dog). This establishes an emotional mood in the poem, where violence and its effects are close at hand.

To Shmoop, what's interesting about this trade is what the speaker is trying to get rid of: a horse, saddle, and knife. Those things would be pretty handy to a soldier, but it seems that our speaker is rejecting them for a more peaceful way of life.

In these lines, the speaker invokes the violent past of his country, in which wars were fought between Christians and Muslims for control of the Spanish kingdoms. This included fighting at the village of Cabra, in southern Spain. Here, as the speaker bears this old wound, the poem reminds us that violence, even if committed in the distant past, remains painfully with us.

Uh, yeah. We're guessing that wound like this would probably not need much attention called to it, but the speaker seems compelled to bring it up to his friend anyway. In doing so, he also brings it up to us, reminding us that he's been a victim of violence himself.

In a word, ew. The speaker's wound seems pretty bad, no matter how pretty the description is. That the speaker is wearing a sash would indicate that (a) he's a prom king, or (b) he's done military service at some point. We're going to guess (b) here (though we'd love to read a poem like this about a prom king). The speaker's suffered horrible violence in some conflict, like the kind that used to rage in Spain and, a few short years after this poem was published, raged once again.

These lines aren't particularly violent in and of themselves, but they are heavy with the weight of violent possibility. What else might you expect if a bunch of drunken cops started banging on your door in the middle of the night? Perhaps the biggest violence of these lines is the sudden break that pulls the speaker back from his near-connection with the elusive, green gypsy girl on the balcony.