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CHAPTER II
Pablo Neruda as a Love Poet, a Poet of Rapture
Of all fires
Love is the only inexhaustible one
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Majorie Agosin writes in her article on Neruda, “One of the reasons that
Twenty Love Poems draws the reader so powerfully is the sobriety of expression and
the economy of the images.” Rene de Costa in his article on Neruda notes that all the
poems in the collection contain “a highly charged confessional intimacy that
challenged and charmed the sensibility of its reader, creating in the process a
contemporary „still nuovo‟ which continues to resonate in the language of love.”
Neruda‟s capacity for joy and reverence toward life is evident in Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). The book was a sensation and the young poet
was suddenly famous. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair begins with an
evocation of the beloved‟s physical presence and ends with acceptance of her
absence. Though one can track the downward spiral love in these poems, it is equally
clear that the quality of yearning is most important for the poet. So long as his love is
absent, he can idealize passion. “Tonight I can write,” was considered highly
controversial because of its explicit sexual nature. Neruda writes about love‟s longing
and despair, as synthesized in his staple phrase: “Love is so short, forgetting is so
long” (32). These types of literary devices are made as a statement of intangibility:
love is much more than reality. Here, is the beginning of the twentieth poem,
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines.”: “The night is starry / and the stars are blue
and shiver in the distance” (1-2).
The night wind resolves in the sky and sings. The naturalness of these lines,
their exuberant and young melancholy, their untiring repetitions, their over-all
simplicity mark Neruda‟s early style and establish the continued popularity of the
book. He writes intricate poems about the lust and loss of love. Twenty Love Poems
and a Song of Despair, is a hybrid of French symbolist yearning for the ineffable and
earthy Latin American eroticism. There is a quiet longing in many of Neruda‟s early,
39
love poems that reflects the tormented nature of Neftali‟s early, fleeting love affairs in
Temuco. These formative years in Temuco, became the subject of his poetry, but it
was when Neruda studied in Santiago that his work really began to flourish. All of
Neruda‟s major translators have fine tuned Neruda‟s best work and its clear success is
W.S. Merwin‟s translation of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. The way
Neruda glorifies experience, the spontaneity and directness of his passion, sets him
apart from other poets. This collection of love poems was controversial for its
eroticism. The book catapulted Neruda to glory. Poetry lovers are swept away by the
urgency of language, as in this passage describing what he felt when he wrote his first
line of “Poetry”:
And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss
I wheeled with the stars
my heart broke loose with the wind. (38-46)
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, remains Neruda‟s most popular
work. Daringly metaphorical, these poems are based upon his own private
associations. Their sensuous use of nature symbolism to celebrate love and to express
grief is unsurpassed in literature. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was
considered unpublishable because of its frank celebration of sex. In “Song I,” Neruda
openly describes:
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Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world lying in surrender,
my savage peasant body digs through you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth. (1- 4)
These poems caused a sensation and made him famous at twenty. The frank
eroticism brought attention, but the book‟s technical merits and emotional intimacy
made it endure. His striking images capture the ecstasies and torments of young love.
One can realize the melancholy that followed him throughout his life and the familiar
themes, such as sex as a way to write with the earth and love as a salvation from
isolation. Twenty Love Poems remain Neruda‟s most beloved book, its sales reached
one million in 1961. The book is full of sensuality and an eroticism that was erstwhile
to Latin American poetry. Twenty Love Poems had launched into the international
spotlight, a young and unknown poet whose writings would ignite a generation and
continue to still inspire lovers and poets around the world.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was inspired by an unhappy love
affair. The verse in Twenty Love Poems is vigorous, poignant and direct, yet subtle
and very original in its imagery and metaphors. The poems express young,
passionate, unhappy love perhaps better than any book of poetry in the long romantic
tradition. His love poetry is tender, melancholic sensuous and passionate. Twenty
Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a perfect example to show how grateful Neruda
was for being alive and for having the opportunity to love.
Neruda considered him primarily a love poet. His capacity for joy and
reverence toward life is evident in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. The
power of poetry, the passion and the soul of the man, shines through these poems.
These love poems are an enduring favorite, full of erotic longing, sensuous and
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vibrant metaphor and spectacular romanticism. As he descended the steps of his plane
in Stockholm to receive the Nobel, a journalist asked Neruda, what he thought was the
“prettiest word.” He paused then said, “I‟m going to reply in a fairly vulgar way, like
in a radio song, with a word which is extremely hackneyed: the word „love.‟ The
more you use it, the stronger it gets. And there‟s no harm abusing the word either”
(Prasad).
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair made his reputation and that
continues to be one of the most popular poetry books on the planet. Till his death,
when Neruda read his work, audiences across the Spanish speaking world waited
earnestly for these poems. In the late 1960s, as Neruda read at the Ursuline Nun‟s
College in Lima, Peru the audience reached out to him to read his poem. “Tonight I
can write the saddest lines,” one of his most beautiful love Poem XX from the
collection. Neruda‟s friend Jorge Edwards (then counselor at the Chilean embassy in
Peru) recounts “A gigantic sigh ran through the hall a great collective breath, largely
feminine in tone but in which everyone took part: men and women young and old. It
was something which, until that moment, it had seemed, had been repressed. The poet
smiled broadly and went on reciting, this time in sacrosanct silence” (Prasad).
Neruda‟s capacity for joy and reverence toward life is evident in Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair. Neruda, the nonpareil of romantic yearning, is
celebrated the world over as a chronicler of love. In a way all of Neruda‟s poems are
love poems. He loved being alive and recorded his moments of joy and sorrow,
beauty and despair, love in its many manifestations. To him, love is an essential lifegiving spark. In a word intimacy. Pablo Neruda‟s poems speak of love, not just desire,
not just fleeting, passionate love, but lasting love - naked, exposed, vulnerable, and
receptive to what life offers.
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These early love poems remind that love is woven through all life and that
amorous love is only but the tip of such a powerful emotion. Twenty Love Poems
remains among Neruda‟s most popular work. Daringly Twenty Love Poems and a
Song of Despair present Neruda at the height of his powers with some of the most
vibrant verses of the twentieth century. In his book the most celebrated are Poems XV
and XX. Metaphorically, these poem, are based upon his own private associations.
Neruda is very appreciative of the human form and the beauty the female body
possesses. Neruda‟s style varied depending on his source of inspiration. In his second
book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, an unhappy love relationship
inspired him to write poems filled with imagery and metaphors. Here, Neruda talks
about young, passionate and unhappy relationships.
Neruda‟s love poetry, is the essence of Pablo‟s Twenty Love poems and a Song
of Despair it represents the voice of Neruda in his twenties. Twenty Love Poems and a
Song of Despair, is a collection of poems a breathless, exhortative quality of his early
love poetry describing a lost love and it is evocative, provocative and sensual.
Daringly metaphorical and popular, this collection juxtaposes youthful passion with
the desolation of grief. The poems combine eroticism and the natural world with the
influence of expressionism and the genius of a master poet. This collection of poems,
caused a scandal because of its frank and intense sexuality, as in Love Poem XIII,”I
Have Gone Marking”:
I have gone marking the atlas of your body
with crosses of fire
my mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide.
In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst. (1-4)
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With image after arresting image, Neruda charts the oceanic movements of
passion, repeatedly summoning imagery of the sea and weather, in A Song of Despair:
my kisses anchor and my moist desire nests
in you with your arms of transparent stone
as irresistible as the sea, love is engulfing
you swallowed everything, like distance.
...in you
everything sank! (31-36)
but also departs leaving the poet‟s heart a “pit of debris” (43), “fierce cave of the
shipwrecked” (6).
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair speaks about love, the way
everyone thinks about love. Neruda has always been cherished dearly for the earthly
sensuality and eroticism of his love poetry. Charged with sensuality and passion,
Pablo Neruda‟s love poems are the most celebrated of the Nobel Prize winner‟s
oeuvre, captivating readers with earth bound images and raveling in a fiery
re-imagining of the world. His gift for writing about love is best showcased in the
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: “Tonight I can write the saddest lines / I
loved her and sometimes she loved me too (4-5).
The naturalness of these lines, their exuberant and youthful melancholy, their
casual repetitions and their over-all simplicity mark Neruda‟s early style. The theme
of distance is introduced in the opening line. When the speaker informs the reader,
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines” (1) he suggests that he could not previously.
His overwhelming sorrow over a lost lover has prevented him from writing about
their relationship and its demise. The present isolated state of the speaker is
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highlighted by the constant juxtaposition of the past and present. The entire poem
suggests the sincerity of the speaker‟s emotions.
The speaker contemplates the natural world, focusing on those aspects of it
that remind him of his lost love and cosmic nature of their relationship. The night
skies‟ distance from him reinforces that he is alone. The staggered repetitions Neruda
employs throughout the poem provide thematic unity. In the eighth line, the speaker
remembers kissing his love “again and again under the endless sky” (8) a sky as
endless as, he had hoped, their relationship would be. How could one not have loved
her great still eyes? These contradictions create a tension that reflects the speaker‟s
desperate attempts to forget the past.
In line eleven Neruda repeats his opening line, which becomes a plaintive
refrain. The repetition of that line shows how the speaker is struggling to forget. It
becomes almost unbearable “to think that I do not have her, to feel that I have lost
her” (12). His loneliness is reinforced by “the immense night, still more immense
without her” (13). In line fifteen the speaker refuses to analyze their relationship.
What is important to him is that “the night is starry and she is not with me” (16) as
she used to be on similar starry nights. He declares that he no longer loves her, “that‟s
certain” (19) in an effort to relieve his pain and admits he loved her greatly in the past.
Now he must accept that “She will be another‟s” (21). Her “bright” (22) body will be
touched by another and her “infinite eyes” (22) that will look upon a new lover. With
a world-weary tone of resignation, he concludes, “love is so short, / forgetting is so
long” (39-40). In the last two lines, the speaker is determined to erase her memory
and ease his pain, insisting that his verses will be “the last verses that I write for her”
(24).
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Neruda‟s large selection of poems was about love. These poems were
sensuous, sumptuous and passionate. In the “Saddest Poems,” Neruda conveys his
misery for a woman he loves and is trying frantically to forget. This poem was written
in 1959. Neruda establishes that the theme in “Saddest Poem” is that there is no great
pain than to remember happy days in the days of sadness. This poem could have been
written as a symbol of his love for Delia de Carril.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair remains among Neruda‟s most
popular work, daringly metaphorical, these poems are based upon his own private
association. Their sensuous use of nature symbolism to celebrate love and to express
grief has not been surpassed in the literature of the century. Although the collection of
Twenty Love Poems is mono-thematic, Neruda finds so many different ways to
explore the love between a man and a woman. Neruda‟s own confused, desperate,
unfulfilled state of mind emerges throughout; the women he loves seem equally
complex and contradictory. A woman is an object of sexual pleasure, a place of
refuge, a dominator and dominated, a cosmic force and a very real physical presence.
The woman in the poet‟s arms is still unreachable. In Poem XIV Neruda describes his
loved one before she even exists - that is, when she is merely a series of images
sustained by his desire for her. In other words, woman, the loved one, forms a bridge
between the lonely isolated individual and the warmth of the universe‟s mystery.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is based around the appreciation of
the human form and the magnificence the female body possesses. These poems are
not simply erotica poetry, but beautifully crafted employments of figurative language
and skillfully placed diction. Neruda‟s unique usage of language places him in his
own class of poetry, although reminiscent of Whitman‟s poetry. Neruda creates a
46
feeling of natural understanding through his poetry. Neruda‟s love of nature and the
beauty that exists amongst it blazes through his language and metaphors.
Neruda lyrically leads the readers down a path of his own inspiration in these
best, “hunting poems.” He was more of a realist in seeking out down to earth and
lovely mannered Chilean women who enraptured him. In all his poetry, he delves into
a world of erotic force and the revelations of nature, as well as the beauty that
surrounds all. Pablo Neruda keeps the readers in tune with cycles of life and the
imminent changes that must take place as the readers mature, evolve and crave for
hope in their lives. Through Pablo‟s life we can understand these seasons of change.
These love poems appeal to our great sense of love, lust and being human and
allowing us the divine opportunity of believing in ourselves.
Twenty love poems, is filled with touchingly intimate pieces. Neruda has the
power to make the ordinary extraordinary, in “I Remember You as You Were”:
I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.
Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul. (1-8)
At the close of the Poem XVII “Thinking, Tangling Shadows,” from Twenty
Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Neruda parallels the dissolving image of his lover
to the tangling shadows and deep solitude of the sea:
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Your presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing.
I think, I explore great tracts of my life before you.
My life before anyone, my harsh life.
The shout facing the sea, among the rocks,
running free, mad, in the sea-spray.
The sad rage, the shout, the solitude of the sea.
Headlong, violent, stretched towards the sky. (9-15)
Twenty Love Poems is powerful in the sobriety of expression and the economy
of the images. Rene de Costa in his article on Neruda notes that the poems in this
collection contain “a highly charged confessional intimacy that challenged and
charmed the sensibility of its reader... which continues to resonate in the language of
love.” The poems chart a love story from the initial infatuation to the release of
passion and finally to separation. Neruda's early works are overtly romantic in tone.
The sentiments are almost embarrassing at times, as in the poem "I like it when you're
quiet" selected from Twenty Love Poems:
It's as if, a butterfly in dreams, you were my
soul...
Such lines are saved only by the disarming naivete of a young poet.
Each of the Twenty Love Poems is a little gem, a tribute to the genius of a man
whose work speaks with gut-wrenching emotion of the joys and sorrows of love. He
merges sky and earth, the subtle nuances of feeling with the rich tapestry of nature
and earth‟s bounty. His descriptive powers and degree of comprehension are beyond
those of any other modern love poet. Neruda‟s raw, searching and high emotionality...
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speaks of love, longing, sensuousness and sexual highs and lows in these passionate
poems. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair established Neruda at the outset as
a frank, sensuous spokesman for love and incomparable love poems. Neruda‟s
capacity for joy and reverence toward life is evident in these love poems. Even his
love poems can be seen as a subtle and powerful cry against life‟s tragedies. The
personal voice in these poems is statements of Neruda‟s personal experience as a
lover.
In Twenty Love Poems, an alienated man is battling for fulfillment in a
woman. As he fingers the woman‟s body, it is the landscape of the south of Chile he
is groping for. The woman becomes mother earth, the possibility of a southern pine
forest germinating from the city‟s relentlessly paved streets. “Traditionally,” stated
Rene de Costa “Love poetry has equated woman with nature.” In The Poetry of Pablo
Neruda, Costa tells, Neruda took this established mode of comparison and raised it to
a cosmic level, “making woman into a veritable force of the universe.” Pablo‟s love
poetry is deeply emotional and beautiful and exploded with love for everything. Much
of his love poetry was influenced by the many loves of his life. His early work was
intimate and personal. His wonderful Twenty Love Poems, has convinced several
subsequent generations of young women of the urgency of love. And it is a rare
Chilean who cannot quote quite large sections of the little book.
Abundance of figurative language and literary devices can be found in Twenty
Love Poems and a Song of Despair. These devices bring Neruda‟s poetry to life; it
catches the reader‟s attention and keeps them focused on the essence of the poems.
This collection of poems is based around the appreciation of the human form and the
magnificence the female body possesses:
49
Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
You look like a world, lying in surrender (1-2).
Just one of the many occurrences of figurative language is found within this
book of poems. These poems are beautifully crafted employments of figurative
language and skillfully placed diction. Neruda‟s unique usage of language places him
in his own class of poetry. Neruda‟s use of literary devices complements his themes
and motifs throughout his poetry. Metaphors, visual imagery, personification and
similes are the major devices used in Neruda‟s poetry. Neruda‟s poetry has been
widely known as the best lyrically written poetry in the world of poetry, due to his
intricate imageries and language.
Neruda celebrates in these poems love, nostalgia, experience and the interior
life. In times of inspiration he was capable of unparalleled romanticism. His
passionate love affairs provided him with a living muse. To him love is the poetry of
the senses. The book which declared Neruda to the world was Twenty Love Songs and
a Song of Despair, when he said, “Love Poems were breaking out all over my body.”
Throughout his life, he would meet people who could recite entire poems from this
collection, from Presidents to peasants; it is still undoubtedly staple fare for lovers in
Latin America today. Neruda‟s poetry moved through a variety of periods and styles
beginning with youthful romanticism to his later social commitment in Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair, his tone becomes more despairing expressing the
painful confrontation with human limits.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, decisively made Neruda‟s name
popular and it remains the one from which people, around the world still quote
copiously. Certain poems became engraved on the minds and lips of readers
throughout Chile and the entire Spanish speaking world. Neruda, on many occasions
50
declared that the Twenty Love Poems, belonged both to the atmosphere in the south of
Chile and also to the heady bohemian nights of conversation and sex in Santiago.
The collection of Twenty Love Poems is mono-thematic. Neruda narrates many
different ways to explore the love between a man and a woman. Neruda‟s own
confused, desperate, unfulfilled state of mind emerges throughout, these poems.
Similarly, the women he loves seem equally complex and plagued by contradictions.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair begins with an evocation of the
beloved‟s physical presence and ends with acceptance of her absence. Though one
can track downward spiral of love in these poems, the quality of yearning is what is
most important for the poet. So long as his love is absent, he can idealize passion.
Lovers everywhere wooed one another with verses from his Twenty Love poems. This
poetry encapsulates deep yearning, serving as a collective ode to love and loss and a
much needed ointment for aching or mending hearts. These poems express young,
passionate, unhappy love, with full of intensity and sensual passion, which is
tremendously powerful.
“The Morning is Full,” from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, is a
short poem. Both the overall length and the individual lines are brief and succinct.
Neruda uses very simple, easy to read language and primarily uses nature imagery.
Somehow, the simple and short lines describing: “The morning is full of storm in the
heart of summer. / The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of goodbye…” (1-2),
effects such subtle simplicity that the mind instantly processes the imagery without
question. The ease of the language, the emotion, the basic understanding and message
in the poem is remarkable. Similarly, the poem “So That You Will Hear Me,”
employs natural imagery in its address to a lover. The first stanza reads:
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So that you will hear me
my words
sometimes grow thin
as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches. (1-4)
Again, the simple language and simpler images that are elicited from his words are
beautiful in that they are uncomplicated and accessible. The third stanza completes
the first claiming: “And I watch my words from a long way off. / They are more yours
than mine. / They climb on my old suffering like ivy” (7-9). This descriptive quality is
largely featured in most of Neruda‟s poems.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, quickly marked Neruda as an
important Chilean poet. These poems not only brought the author notoriety due to its
explicit celebration of sexuality and as Robert Clemens remarked in the Saturday
Review: “established him at the outset as a frank, sensuous spokesman for love.”
Mixing memories of his love affairs with memories of the wilderness of Southern
Chile, Neruda creates a poetic sequence that not only describes a physical liaison but
also evokes the sense of displacement that he felt in leaving the wilderness of the city.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair was Neruda‟s “first substantial
success, commercial and critical” (Stavans 957). While this was his third published
book of poetry, it was the first to attract public attention and is his earliest work that is
widely available in English. A collection of twenty untitled but numbered poems and
a final Song of Despair, these love poems are direct, sexual and intimate,
exemplifying what Felstiner terms Neruda‟s “erotic love” period (14). Twenty Love
Poems introduced a meditative young poet of romantic intensity and confident
lyricism. The eroticism of this collection of poems played a key role in defining both
North and South American perception of Neruda. Neruda calls into question
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humanity‟s inaction with respect to the serious global issue of poverty, perpetuated by
societal acceptance of paying laborers less than a living wage.
Pablo Neruda confessed to the University of Chile that “It is worthwhile to
have struggled and sung; it is worthwhile to have lived because I had loved”
(Memoirs). In all his works, Neruda attests to the simplicity, valor and importance of
love, whether for country, “common things,” or another human being. In Twenty Love
poems, his striking images capture the ecstasies and torments of young love. His
familiar themes are sex as a way to unite with the earth and love as a salvation from
isolation. With Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, all over South America,
adolescents recited his poems in city squares and black capes became the new regalia
for would-be romantics and aspiring poets. It made Neruda‟s enduring reputation as a
love poet, a poet of rapture who made myths out of facts and desires. These poems are
among the greatest love poems ever written. Neruda once suggested that, “his words
be poured, like wine, into the glasses of other languages.” Neruda loved the idea of
continuance – of both love and literature.
“Tonight I can write the saddest Lines,” has a beauty of longing and
understanding of the complex and contradictory emotions of romantic love. The
passion, in these poems is incredible and their wild metaphors capture the dimensions
of love. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair established Neruda as a frank,
sensuous spokesman for love. These stunning poems move seamlessly between
exquisite expressions of intimacy and almost unbearable suffering.
Twenty Love Poems of the title describe remembered affairs with two women:
a girl from the poet‟s native town of Temuco and a classmate at the University of
Santiago. Neruda protected his lover‟s identity, first by calling the two women of his
poems as Marisol and Marisombra and then posthumously biographers linked them to
53
Teresa Vazquez and Albertina Rosa Azocar, the great love of his early life. The
collection begins with intensity describing sensual passion that slackens into
melancholy and detachment in the later verses. The closing poem A Song of Despair
is bitter and hopeless. This youthful collection of poems, with emphasis on strong
emotion, individual imagination and experience of sublimity with nature, formed by
romanticism. Rene de Costa applies the term “necromantic” to Neruda and these early
poems foreshadowing the frank appreciation of the body and the unashamed
eroticism (36).
In A Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda begins the poem with a wistful tone and
with lots of complementary images. The pain at parting of a loved one is expressed in
passionate intensity and beauty. The poem begins with a rhyming couplet and it has
two verses right up to its end, the rapidity of the sad images is relentless through the
poem. Neruda gives two meanings to a jar half way through the poem, as he reflects
on how it can hold something and something that can be easily smashed. Similarly,
love may seem safe, but it can be easily broken. He combines erotic imagery with
extremely bleak visualizations of this doomed romance, such as a “cemetery of
kisses” (33).
Pablo Neruda relies heavily on the flowing nature of water to inspire his
imagery. The word “sank” repeatedly emphasizes the end of the affair and his own
feeling of despondency. The two line verses are broken up by two-single lines at the
end of the poem. The penultimate line sees the poet repeat, by thinking that nothing
appeases far away as his departed lover. The last line brings out the sadness - both for
him and for her. In roughly twenty nine couplets, Neruda, in figurative language,
discovers the depth of love and loss concerning a woman. The poem is imagistic and
the poet uses a formalistic approach to deliver the couplets and the occasional slant
54
rhyme. The poet addresses the woman and the sea, formally: „oh, deserted one‟, „oh,
flesh‟, „Ah, woman‟ etc.
The tone of A song of Despair, is serious and foreboding. The central conflict
expressed in the poem, is loss. The poem is fresh and candid and never relies on stock
images or cliche. The poet never lets the material take over but brings his reader back
to the address of a second person. The poem is replete with sexual overtones. A Song
of Despair is more of a modern imagistic poem, wherein the poet takes desperate
subjects and links them together, through the use of simile or metaphor. A Song of
Despair is a fine example of Pablo Neruda‟s love poetry. Its rich deployment of
sensuous and imaginative language is overwhelmingly mind-bogging and the readers‟
senses are caught up in spell-binding magic. A Song of Despair signals the tone and
mood of bitter anguish to come:
The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
… River mingles its stubborn lament with the sea (1-2).
Unequalled in their grace, earthiness and expression of sensual longing, the
love poems of Pablo Neruda are perhaps the most lyrically written and widely read of
this century. For the poet, communion with this natural world requires a mediator.
Language is an ineffective tool in this land of archetypal forces. In “So that you will
Hear Me,” “the wind of anguish still hauls on them” (18) and “hurricanes of dreams
still knock them over” (11). It is only through woman that the poet can find
reconcilation with nature. Like nature, women communicate not with words but
through elemental forces and through her fecundity. She is synonymous with nature
and the cosmos; she is the sun, the sea, the universe itself. She is “the earth shell in
whom the earth sings” (7) and the “dark river beds where the eternal thirst flows” (3).
55
Through her, man can participate in the creative force of nature, the poet wants to do
with her “what spring does with the cherry trees” (35).
In the article “Pablo Neruda: Overview,” Rene de Costa notes that the book
was a “success of scandal,” when it first appeared in 1924. Judged to be shamelessly
erotic and faulted for its bold departure in form and style, Twenty Love Poems is
Neruda‟s style of surreal, almost magical imagery, as well as his graceful use of free,
unmetered verse. An example of his early style, in the love-poem entitled “Ah the
Vastness of Pines”:
Ah the vastness of pines, murmur of waves breaking,
slow play of lights, solitary bell,
twilight falling in your eyes, toy doll,
earth-shell, in whom the earth sings! (1-4).
Each poem with staggered repetitions, an irregular temporal exposition and a
prosaic syntax resulted in a highly charged confessional intimacy that challenged and
charmed the sensibility of its reader. This created in the process a contemporary „stil
nuovo‟ which continues to resonate in the language of love in Spanish. Poem XV, in
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, “I like you quiet because it is as if you are
absent.” The lover is in unbearable pain because he had lost the woman he loved; he
struggles with this fact and is constantly trying to deny it. In this poem, the lover is
speaking to a silent woman. It establishes a link between mourning and regression.
Mourning triggers regressive states of mind. In this poem Neruda expresses a denial
of loss and how this unbearable situation sets in motion a regressive attitude towards
the lost loved object: “I like you quiet because it is as if you are absent” (1).
This introductory line is explanatory for the state of mind that will find
expression throughout this poem. It appears to be a denial of the loss, when the
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speaker says that he would rather think that his object was just quiet, but still there.
When saying “I like you quite…” it can mean both, “I like you becoming quiet” and
“I want you to be quiet” … and you hear me from far away and my voice doesn‟t
touch you” (2).
At this point, the speaker states that he is going to attempt a dialogue with the
lost object. It is a phantasized dialogue. “It seems that your eyes had flown away / and
it seems that a kiss is closing your mouth” (2-3). Not only she is not seeing him, but
she is not talking to him and this is because she is receiving a kiss from someone else.
This could be the phantasized explanation for the loss. Neruda concisely presents a
summary for this story:
As all the things are filled with my soul
you emerge from the things, filled with my soul.
Dream butterfly, you look like my soul,
and you look like the word melancholia. (5-8)
Now the poem expresses more concretely the way in which massive projective
identification is carried out. The ego fills everything with his soul and no object has a
soul on its own. The “filling” suggests the perception of emptiness in the object, a
lack of soul that approximately matches with the title of “Things”:
I like your quiet and it is as if you are distant.
And you are as if complaining, you cooing butterfly,
and you hear me from away and my voice doesn‟t reach you:
let me be quiet with your silence. (9-12)
The first line of this verse shows a variation from the first line of the poem.
When saying “I like you quiet because it is as if you are absent” there is a chance of
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substituting „absence‟ with „quietness.‟ The difference now is that there is an
assumption that the object is not there. He is identifying with a quiet / absent object.
Let me speak to you also with your silence
clear as a lamp, simple as a ring
you are like the night, quiet and constellated.
Your silence is a star‟s so far and so simple. (13-16)
The taking in of the quiet / absent object is used to avoid the separateness,
being used as an alternative to continue, the relationship through identifications. The
star‟s silence is perceived as simple, not linked, responding to an attempt for denial. A
lamp appears to be a solution for this conflict, as it provides a controllable alternative
for the presence of the object.
Perhaps the lamp is linked to a loving memory of the nights shared with the
object. The ring is a commonly used symbol for the union is endless love, related with
expectations of commitment:
I like you quiet because it is as if you are absent.
Distant and painful as if you had died.
A word then, a smile would do.
And I‟m happy, happy that it isn‟t true. (17-20)
This verse represents a final stage in the evolution of the states of mind
expressed throughout the poem. The resentfulness and hatred has built up in such a
way that murderous phantazies can easily slip in the rest of the speaker‟s expressions.
Finally, a word and smile would be enough, the presence would do. “And I‟m happy,
that it isn‟t true!” Here, Neruda is expressing a painful integration of these emotions.
It appears as an acceptance of the state of madness triggered by the loss of the loved
object.
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Neruda has the ability to express beautifully the ways in which emotions and
states of mind develop and entwine. In this particular poem, denial of loss is the aim
which fuels all the stirring emotions that the speaker experiences. “I am sad, but I am
always sad,” was considered unintelligible or unnecessarily repetitive by Neruda‟s
hostile critics. “I don‟t love her anymore, that‟s true, but perhaps I love her,” Neruda
explained, “For ten lonely years my poetry has obeyed differing rhythm and
conflicting currents. Joining them, braiding them together unable to find a permanent
essence because it doesn‟t exist, I‟ve composed Twenty Love Poems and a Song of
Despair” (100).
Neruda seems to have realized that an integral poetry, must aim to reproduce
or represent that level of authenticity and concatenations of contraries. These are the
differing rhythms and conflicting currents he alludes to fidelity. His own feelings had
forced Neruda to do violence to the niceties of language and to defy the logic of
identities which, because it ignores time, can maintain that A is always A. The poet‟s
discovery that you can be sad now and then again sad, you can love this way and that,
but never in the same way consecutively. In Twenty Love Poems love and unloved,
trust and mistrust alternately beat out a rhythm which is locked in time and which
come to rest in any permanent essence “because nothing of the sort exist in time and
nothing at all can exist outside it” (Yglesias 100-01).
Neruda‟s love poems are tender, sensuous, melancholic, erotic and passionate.
Neruda‟s capacity for joy and reverence toward life is evident in Twenty Love Poems.
These love poems appeal to our great sense of love, trust and just being human, as the
wonderful world of the art of poetry and faith and to allow us the divine opportunity
to believe in ourselves. Another prevalent theme in his works is that of romance.
Many of his poems are clearly romances, in which he describes the passion, joy, pain
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and all other emotions that can come with love. Neruda was an adolescent romantic
and his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair made him famous among Latin
American readers. Twenty Love Poems is artfully simple. The Cuban American
novelist Cristina Garcia has written: “These poems have been my companions when
I‟ve fallen madly, adolescently, in love, how often have I read them to loves, who,
too, fell under their spell? In the bitter-sweet throes of break-up anguish” (XVII).
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which was first published some
years before he left for the Far East, had already brought him a degree of fame in his
homeland. It is overtly romantic and sentimental in tone, “I Like it when you‟re
Quiet” selected from Twenty Love Poems:” It‟s as if, a butterfly in dreams, you were
my soul” (6-7). Such lines are saved only by the disarming naivete of a young poet. In
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Neruda moved to a more individual style
that moved between elaborate structures and imagery and free verse. Here, his two
lifelong obsessions, nature and sex, are clearly revealed.
Pablo Neruda was nearly twenty years old when this second collection was
published in „Santiago de Chile‟ by Carlos Nasciment. It was innovative and
experimental. He defended his „expression of thought‟ and his complete „sincerity‟
and claimed that these poems poured out, without rational control: freely,
uncontainable, these poems freed themselves (45).
The second edition of Love Poems was not published until 1932, when Neruda
returned to Chile after nearly five years in the Far East. From 1932 and then, Twenty
Love Poems has been continuously in print, by far the best-selling book of poems
written in Spanish. For the most popular poems in Spanish of the past millennium
Neruda‟s Poem XX came first and his Poem XV, came third. Neruda‟s love poetry
had become oral, part of ordinary lover‟s talk, outside bookshops and high culture.
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Much poetry till date has been inspired by these love poems. The poet Carol Ann
Duffy, in her poem “Dear Norman,” has the newspaper boy turned into a diver for
pearls, whom she names „Pablo.‟
Neruda developed the theme of „parting as continuous suffering.‟ A summary
of his love philosophy would be „the further off I am the more I long for her‟ (81).
And „she‟ is either in Temuco, has dropped him or loves another. Neruda‟s Twenty
Love Poems is as much about love as it is about remaining painfully alone and
becoming a poet, as loneliness drives creativity. Although most of Twenty Love Poem
is written in fourteen-syllabic Alexandrine and free verse, the metrical deftness stands
out, as Dominic Moran noted: “Besides being passionate love poems, they are also
painstakingly wrought exercises in style and form” (Wilson 52).
This celebrated poem articulates the relationship between craft and integrity.
Neruda opens, this famous poem, “I can write the saddest lines this night.” That he
„can‟ is the issue, he could pretend to a great passion, or not admit that she took
revenge on him in her absence. “The wind spins in the sky and sings” (4). „wind‟ is
another crucial world in Neruda‟s poetics.
Poem XX, then summarizes the affair: “I loved her and she at times also loved
me” (6) in the past. He repeats, as a musical variation, that she once loved him and he,
sometimes, loved her. He concludes briskly: “That‟s all.” But the pain still hurts: “My
soul is not happy with losing her” (6). Here, „soul‟ is that deeper irrational part of the
self that still seeks her and she is not there. And the poem closes with the thought that
she might not cause more pain and this poem will “be the last lines that I write her”
(33). The colloquial, everyday tone of the poem makes it very modern.
Poem XX from his book Twenty Love Poems, talks about his love for a
woman, but she has apparently hurt him and so he feels he should let go off her. He
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feels that simply with the idea of losing her, he can write the saddest lines ever
written. Pablo Neruda described the pleasures and torments of erotic love with such
unsentimental directness and sensual precision. Twenty Love Poems, was an ambitious
project of Neruda. Neruda confessed that he lost many of the original poems and ten
years later, saw them as a „document of an excessive, ardent youth‟ (Wilson 77).
Pablo Neruda was a great love poet. Love poems form the core of his
abundant output and he wrote his love poems from the start to the end of his career as
a poet. Many believe that Neruda is the finest love poet of the century. Beautiful,
heart-wrenching, songs of love and loss. On August 20, 1924, the poet explained how
the book came to be: “I‟ve only put a song to my life and to the love of several dear
women I‟ve known” (957).
The leitmotif of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is of an adolescent
lover trained in the art of longing. He sings in order to survive, to overcome the
misery of obsession. “I no longer love her, that‟s certain, but maybe I love her” (31),
Poem XX states. Neruda once told how he wrote The Song of Despair in a long,
slender bodied lifeboat left over after a shipwreck. He also talked about the women in
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. “I‟m always asked who the women are…
The two women who weave in and out of these melancholy and passionate poems
correspond, to Marisol and Marisombra: sea and sun, sea and shadow” (958).
The influence of these love poems, on subsequent love poetry in Spanish has
been extraordinary. Neruda‟s love poetry is viewed as a natural and beautiful
expression of male / female love relationships. He is lauded for the adept way in
which he captures the intensity of emotion between the lovers. These poems speak of
love as a shared experience, one which impacts on the male and female with equal
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force and constitutes in equal measure the essence of their being. Neruda is praised
for his idealized treatment of woman as earth goddess or icon of desire.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair begins with an evocation of the
beloved‟s physical presence and ends with acceptance of her absence. Besides, love in
these poems, the quality of yearning is most important for the poet. He idealizes his
passion. Twenty Love Poems, became a bible for lovers in the Spanish language and
confirmed Neruda in his poet‟s vocation. Neruda‟s capacity for joy and reverence
towards life is evident in these poems.
Neruda was an ardent lover of women; he had three wives and countless
flames. He inspiringly states in his poem “Every Day You Play”: “I want / to do with
you what spring does with the cherry trees” (35). In Twenty Love Poems and a Song
of Despair, Neruda focuses on a less diffuse and more personal style. Neruda
describes it as a painful, pastoral book, reflecting his tormented adolescent passions,
mixed with the overwhelming natural beauty of southern Chile, a fusion of
melancholy and joy of living. He describes the poems, as having been inspired by the
romance of Santiago with its streets full of students, its university and the bouquet of
honeysuckle exuded by love shared.
Poem XX deals with nostalgic, ambivalent memories of a love affair then in
the past and with the pain of its unsuccessful conclusion still echoing and demanding
expression. It is comprised of thirty-two lines, all paired in couplets, except for the
first two. The initial stanza is comprised of three lines and the second of a single line.
Each line is comprised of approximately fourteen syllables except for the final one
which has fifteen. Use of beautiful imagery through metaphor is present. The poem
deals more with feelings; it evokes a sense of melancholy and loss.
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A Song of Despair is more of a modern imagistic poem, wherein Neruda takes
to desperate subjects and links them together through the use of simile or metaphor.
The poem, is as fresh, honest and noteworthy as it was upon publication. The tone of
this poem, is serious and foreboding. The dense and lush poetic backdrop laments
love lost, on a deep level. The central conflict found in A Song of Despair is loss.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song a Despair is “a book of love sadness, of love-pain…
Perhaps, this book represents the youthful posing of many enigmas; perhaps it
represents the answers to those enigmas. It is a mournful book, but its attractiveness
has not worn off.”
In these poems Neruda clearly explains that love is a mystery as same as
death. He speaks of love as fleeting, but eternal. Pablo Neruda‟s passion and pain is
well- served in these love poems: “I love you / because I love you, love, in fire and
blood” (13-14). Neruda‟s only purpose in his love poetry is aesthetic and it is
composed in an imaginative style. Twenty Love Poems caused a sensation and made
Neruda famous at twenty. The book‟s technical merits and emotional intimacy made
it endure and its frank eroticism brought attention. His striking images capture the
ecstasies and torments of young love. The familiar themes, such as sex as a way to
unite with the earth and love as a salvation from isolation are replete in these poems
of love.
In Neruda‟s love poems, he tends to express his emotional appeal and feeling
subjectively. For Neruda, love and beauty vied for attention with social justice. His
musings on lost love and the truths of the human heart are timeless: “Love is so short,
forgetting is so long” (32). Neruda is celebrated the world over as a chronicler of
love. His poems remind one that love is woven through all life and that amorous love
is only but the tip of such a powerful emotion. In Poem XV: “I like you calm, as if
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you were absent (1),” is a free verse lyrical narrative by Neruda in which the male
narrator is a first person observer. This poem is about a man‟s extreme emotions
towards a woman he loves, but he feels as though his lover has stopped loving him
and has been looking for love and attention elsewhere.
The title, is a desire in itself and is stated a few times throughout the poem.
„Calm‟ can be interpreted as quiet, peaceful or in a state of tranquility and absence can
refer to being mentally, physically or emotionally absent. The lover goes on further to
explain his feelings of her alienation from him by saying that she seems distant and
that she is not listening to him: “…and you hear me far off and my voice does not
touch you” (2). He infers that she has been intimate and flirting with someone else
and that is why she is not communicating with him: “It seems that your eyelids have
taken to flying: / it seems that a kiss has / sealed up your mouth (3-4). He states
another desire to: “let me commune, then, commune with your silence, clear as a light
and pure as a ring” (13-14). He wishes to bond with her and to reconnect their love.
He has an epiphany at the end of the poem that comes to his conscious. He states: “I
like you calm, as if you were absent, distant and saddened, as if you were dead” (1718). The lover has hope that she will love him again, but soon realizes that the
relationship is dead.
One of Neruda‟s best pieces of love poetry was titled, “Body of a Woman.”
This poem symbolizes his depth of articulation and his steady pounding sensitivity.
His last two stanzas, express his diverse translation of love and perceptions to the love
for women: “But the hour of vengeance falls and I love you. / Body of skin, of moss,
of eager and firm milk” (9-10). “Tonight I can write,” is about overcoming the
misery of obsession. This poem is about the end of a love affair and the internal
struggle that it takes to write the love out of his system. This poem is only a closure, a
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personal therapy for Neruda. The romantic themes are powerfully expressed and
universal: longing, stillness, anticipation and worshipful, passionate love, all wrapped
in teenage urgency. And the seething Song of Despair is a breakup song.
Neruda is celebrated the world over as a chronicler of love. Love is woven
through all life and the master‟s canon offers vibrant verses about love and intimacy.
Pablo Neruda‟s selection of poems speaks of love. Not just desire, not just fleeting,
passionate love but lasting love - naked, exposed, vulnerable and receptive to what
life offers. In a way, all of Neruda‟s poems are love poems. He loved being alive and
recorded his moments of joy and sorrow, beauty and despair, love in its many
manifestations. To him love is an essential life-giving spark. In a word intimacy.
Twenty Love Poems is vigorous, poignant and direct, yet subtle and very
original in its imagery and metaphors. The poem expresses, young passionate
unhappy love perhaps better than most of the books on poetry in the long romantic
tradition. Neruda certainly values the erotic qualities of love and celebrates them. He
felt people would respond to poetry as simple as love, as pure as human desire.
Twenty love poems and a Song of Despair, captured the hearts of its readers through
its powerful romantic sentiments and established Neruda‟s reputation. Twenty Love
Poems moves from poems of high intensity to those of deep melancholy. Twenty Love
Poems introduced Neruda as a meditative young poet of romantic intensity and
confident lyricism. These poems were written in blank verse, a move on Neruda‟s part
to find his own voice. He establishes the theme of love as a means for finding
freedom and companionship as one escapes loneliness. The poet‟s open expression of
amorous feelings was new at the time in Latin American literature. Neruda sees love
as a means for union and transcendence in a lonely and hostile world. These
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innovative poems with surreal images, sparseness, romanticism and sharp poignancy
captured the literary world.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, revealed a break from the formal
poetry of the time and a desire to depict the realities of love at the beginning of the
twentieth century. As a love poet, Neruda was passionate. Unashamed. Nearly
overwrought in his longing and languid attentions to the object of his love. Twenty
Love Poems, about adolescent love, is warm, humane and personal in tone. Its
imagery alternates between exultation and bitterness. Despite their subjective,
melancholic tone, they are a tribute to the joys of life.
The final poem, A Song of Despair is a powerful exploration of the bitter
emotions of failed love. Neruda‟s love poetry written so openly of love and heartache
are tender, sensuous, melancholic, erotic and passionate. Neruda‟s capacity for joy
and reverence towards life is evident in these poems. The verse in Twenty Love Poems
is vigorous, poignant and direct, yet subtle and very original in its imagery and
metaphors. Twenty Love poems and a Song of Despair is a perfect example to show
how grateful Neruda was for being alive and for having the opportunity to love.
Neruda in an interview with Rita Guibert remarks on, Twenty Love Poems:
“It is a book of love sadness, of love-pain, continues to be read by so many people,
by so many young people. Perhaps this book represents the youthful posing of many
enigmas: perhaps it represents the answers to those enigmas. It is a mournful book,
but its attractiveness has not worn off.”
Neruda is always the poet who dares to be, who dares to give himself up to the
unknown muse of poetry. For in Neruda all is animation and essence and his poetry
flows in a dynamic that does not bind, the reader but bears him away in a state of
imaginative rapture. These lush, sensual and passionate poems are elemental,
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evocative and breath-taking, transcending into a universal cry of love to life as it is
lived in the world.