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This thesis studies the elegy that Federico Garcíia Lorca wrote to commemorate the death of his friend Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, fatally gored in mid-August 1934. Because the poem celebrates an historical event attention is first directed to the life of Ignacio and to the details of his fatal injury and its repercussions. Because some of these details have heen incorporated into the poem there follows a commentary on the poem which seeks to explain these references, as well as some of the images and metaphors. Some lines lack a convincing explanation but their obscurity does not hinder to any great extent an overall comprehension of the poem. The second part of the study looks at the history of the Spanish Elegy, tracing its formation and development from the eleventh-century 'Planctus' to the form used by Lorca. It is in the final chapter that Lorca's debt to history and tradition is assessed, at the same time pointing out that the poem, although based on an historical event and drawing from a long tradition of the Elegy, is very much an example of the work of a sophisticated and talented twentieth-century poet.