Wealth & Money Quote by Federico Garcia Lorca

The line is a dagger wrapped in lyricism: Lorca turns a financial calamity into an image of refuse being swept away. “Lucky enough” lands first as provocation. No one is “lucky” to witness ruin unless the ruin belongs to a class you regard as overfed and overdue. Lorca’s speaker isn’t marveling at human suffering; he’s savoring the collapse of an abstract idol.

The phrasing “with my own eyes” matters because it’s the poet staking a claim against the unreality of capital. The stock market traffics in invisibilities - numbers, confidence, paper promises - and Lorca forces it back into the body: seeing, watching, witnessing. Then comes the coup: “a rabble of dead money.” He borrows the language of crowds and revolt (“rabble”) to describe wealth itself, flipping the usual fear (that the poor are the mob) onto the rich and their inert hoards. “Dead money” isn’t just cash that’s lost value; it’s money that never had life in it, never circulated as nourishment, never became shelter, wages, bread.

Finally, “sliding off into the sea” is Lorca at full surrealist strength: a cleansing, almost mythic disposal. The sea absorbs what society falsely treated as permanent. Written in the long shadow of the 1929 crash and the mounting crises of the 1930s, the sentence reads as both reportage and omen: a poet watching modernity’s faith in markets dissolve, and quietly insisting that what vanishes was always more ghost than substance.