Studying the structure of Platero y Yo makes explicit the organization and arrangement of expressive material as a unified whole. Why does Platero begin the way it does and why does it end the way it does? What are the inner principle or principles that tie together the various lyric chapters into a poetic unity? Several key patterns of imagery and events provide clues to the structure and meaning of Platero: the butterfly imagery which presides over the beginning and the ending of the work, occurrences of gratuitous bloodletting in the season of spring, the almost imperceptible disappearance of conditioned violence in the season of winter, the death of Platero in the month of February, the juxtaposition of life and death, violence and harmony throughout the entire work. All of these patterns and events are endowed with full symbolic significance by the seasonal cycle and by the theme of death and rebirth as a process of metamorphosis.