Green, how much I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship upon the sea
and the horse in the mountain.

These lines open Federico García Lorca’s poem “Romance sonámbulo” (“Sleepwalking Ballad”), written in the late 1920s and published in his landmark collection Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads) (1928). The poem belongs to Lorca’s Andalusian “romance” tradition—narrative ballads infused with modernist imagery—and is associated with his recurring symbolic palette (especially the color green) and his fascination with desire, fate, and death. “Romance sonámbulo” became one of Lorca’s most famous poems, often quoted for its incantatory refrain and dreamlike atmosphere, and it is frequently encountered in English translation in slightly differing word choices.

The repeated “Green, how much I want you green” functions like a spell: an obsessive longing that saturates the landscape (“green wind,” “green branches”) until desire and environment become indistinguishable. In Lorca’s symbolic system, green can suggest vitality and erotic yearning, but also unease, jealousy, and a premonition of death; the poem’s surreal images hover between beauty and menace. The ship at sea and the horse on the mountain evoke motion and freedom, yet they are held in a suspended, dreamlike tableau, as if the speaker’s craving cannot reach its object. The lines set the poem’s central tension between desire and doom, waking life and somnambulant fate.

“Green, how I want you green.”
“Green wind. Green boughs/branches.”
“The ship on the sea / and the horse on the mountain.”