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CHAPTER IV
Pablo Neruda‟s Love Sonnets and Tender Odes to the Sea
I surrender this century to you:
Wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life
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The sonnets are “joyfully, playfully erotic... passionate and imaginative”
(Tapscott). These poems written for Neruda‟s third wife, Matilde Urrutia, are among
his most appealing works, justly counted as classics. The expressions of erotic feeling
and human affection conveyed in the sonnets provide warmth and immediacy that is
direct, delicate, subtle and strong by turns.
A sonnet is traditionally a lyric poem of fourteen lines, highly arbitrary in
form and adhering to one or another of several set rhyme conventions. Although
Pablo Neruda calls the fourteen line poems in the volume One Hundred Love Sonnets,
he uses the traditional sonnet form in widely different ways - from a virtual free verse
order within the framework of a sonnet to the more conventionally strict forms. My
thesis includes, few chosen sonnets on the basis of diversity and representation. These
sonnets are the love poetry inspired, in his mature years by his muse and wife,
Matilde Urrutia, showcasing a mature shared love. In these poems, Matilde is the only
micro universe the poet inhabits: “kiss by kiss I travel your little infinity, / your
borders, your rivers, your tiny villages” (Sonnet IX 9-10). These love sonnets, employ
many of the master poet‟s signature of sensuality and vivid imagery.
Neruda‟s later sonnets focused on his great love, Matilde Urrutia, called upon
the traditional vocabulary of the love sonnets. Words like „heart‟ and „soul‟ abound
frankly. They are brutally honest and charged with emotion. Neruda‟s One Hundred
Love Sonnets are some of the finest love poetry. He wrote poems on subjects ranging
from rain to feet. By examining common, ordinary, everyday things very closely,
according to Duran and Safir, Neruda states: “Time to examine a particular plant, a
stone, a flower, a bird, an aspect of modern life, at leisure. We look at the object,
handle it and turn it around, all the sides are examined with love, care and attention.
This is in many ways, Neruda… at his best.” (84)
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Charged with sensuality and passion Neruda‟s love sonnets caused a scandal
when published anonymously in 1952. These sonnets captivate readers with
earthbound images that reveal an erotic re-imaging of the world through the prism of
a lover‟s body: “today our bodies became vast…/ and rolled melting / into a single
drop / of wax or meteor …” (10-13). These passionate verses, written on the paradise
island of Capri, embraces the seascapes around them, saturating the images of endless
shores and waves with a new, yearning eroticism. One Hundred Love Sonnets inspired
by Matilde Urrutia, spans a lifetime as they reveal the depth of love that comes from
sharing a life together. Poem XCII, speaks of a love that goes beyond death itself:
“Absence is such a transparent house / that even being dead I will see you there, / and
if you suffer, love, I‟ll die a second time.” In Poem XVIII, Neruda uses nature
imagery, in declaring his love: “You move through the mountains like a breeze, / your
hair in its thickness throbs like the high / adornments of the sun, repeating them for
me” (1-3).
These later love poems, surprised readers by their passion, their clarity and
their submergence of public themes into private and domestic affections. These poems
come full circle, returning Neruda to the image-rich affection of his Twenty Love
Poems. These love songs celebrate falling in love again, but with the middle-age
version and with a happy result, far from the melancholia and sexual excess of his
earlier love poems. They are poems of contended lovers. Neruda called them
„tender‟ as befits his age and some of the poems are „terrible in their anger.‟ The
poems are very direct, they avoid obvious literary echoes and complex metaphors and
continue to combine the poet‟s two passions, a woman and politics. The San
Francisco Examiner said that Neruda‟s One Hundred Love Sonnets is “sensual as a
tropical night swirling in honeysuckle and jazz….”
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Neruda frankly wrote to Matilde Urrutia, in October 1959, about the happiness
he derives in dedicating, the One Hundred Love Sonnets, for her:
My much loved wife, I suffered so, writing these inappropriately
named sonnets to you. They gave me such pain... cost me so much.
But the happiness of offering them to you is more than anything
that can be found in a fine meadow. When I decided to do them, I
knew very well that down one side of every sonnet, by chosen
affection and elegance, poets from every age have arranged rhymes
that have had the sound of silver or crystal or the firing of cannon.
With great humility I made these sonnets out of wood and gave
them the sound of that opaque and pure substance and just so
should they come to your ears. Walking through forests and on
beaches, past lost lakes and through ashen latitudes, you and I
gathered up fragments of purest timber, of wood subject to all the
vagaries of water and bad weather. And from such extraordinarily
softened ruins I made this wood yard of love and built up small
houses, each with fourteen boards and all with the help of just an
axe, a knife, and a penknife. All for those eyes I adore and of
which I sing. So now, the reasons for my love established, I deliver
to you these one hundred sonnets of wood that rose up only
because you gave them life. (Memoirs)
These passionate and imaginative sonnets, journeying from the erotic
celebration of the body to the spiritual depths of eternal union, shows why “two happy
lovers make one bread” (1) and “waking they leave one sun empty in their bed” (4).
Neruda simply and inspiringly tells in Sonnet II:
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Love, how many roads
to obtain a kiss,
what lonely wanderings
before finding you!
trains now trundle
through the rain
without me. (1-7)
Love Sonnet IX, contains many images all centered on the main theme of love
everlasting. In this poem, the persona speaks of many occurrences, usually of
destruction, that can occur in our lives and tear others apart. Despite all, the persona
and their loved one will stay together, making this a truly love poem. Neruda by
keeping to a fourteen line structure for each poem, he rather modestly did not regard
his sonnets to be of the more refined type. Passion, tenderness and sensuality are the
acclaimed characteristics of his love sonnets.
The poem, Sonnet XII by Pablo Neruda translated by Stephen Mitchell, is a
four stanza poem about the universe and love. Each stanza of four lines describes the
love between man and the universe. In the first stanza, Neruda describes the charm of
the world and life. He recounts things like women, apples, hot moon and the thick
scent of seaweeds, mud and light to describe the beauty of the universe. He says there
is a glimpse of brilliance in all columns of life. He wonders how a man feels in the
night with all these excellent fortunes. The second stanza describes love between two
people. Neruda compares love to a journey with water and stars. Further he states love
as a journey with smothered air and rapid storms. He goes ahead to describe love as
lightning bolts clashing where two people get defeated by love and give in.
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The third and fourth stanzas show the romantic and intimate part of loving.
The author describes how by a kiss, he moves across his woman‟s infinity, borders
and other obstacles to get intimately involved with her. Further, he describes the
delight of love-making and how it runs through her blood veins. Additionally, the
genital fire and delight described in the poem is used to illustrate the pleasures of life.
Finally, the delight is said to fall like a dark carnation and he compares it to a flash in
the night.
Neruda‟s metaphor compares the life he loves to plants and other worldly
phenomena. He compares it to a fleshy apple and hot moon, emphasizing the
attractiveness of life and the rest of the world. The poet uses the scent of seaweed and
mud to describe the sweet scents that man experiences every day. Every aspect of
love and loving, show how two people can love just as man and the world love each
other. Sonnet XVII is part of Neruda‟s collection of One Hundred Love sonnets.
Neruda divided the book into four parts, „Morning,‟ „Afternoon,‟ „Evening‟ and
„Night‟ and number XVII found its way into „Morning‟. In the fourteen lines that
make up Sonnet XVII, Pablo Neruda uses the word “love” nine times. In the poem the
speaker attempts to define love in some rather odd ways. The poet states that love is a
mystery no matter how particular the readers get. It is about trying to understand your
own personal experience with love and here the speaker just cannot do it.
The speaker is addressing his lover and begins by saying that he does not love
her in the way that someone would love beautiful flowers or gems. First, he loves her
in secret. He also loves her as if she were a flower that was not in bloom, which is full
of beauty on the inside. The first eight lines describe his love. His love is simple and
humble. This poem is divided into two quatrains (a group of four lines) and two
tercets (a group of three lines). The first eight lines are filled with metaphors, as the
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speaker tries to explain his love (the problem). The last six lines show us that the
speaker is resigned to the fact that it is just not possible (resolution).
The speaker is in love. He does not love this woman because of the way she
looks, but because of what is on the inside. This woman‟s love for him is just as
important as his love for her “thanks to your love” (7). The last part of the sonnet is
straight forward. It is a love that is bent on loving and has no other aims, there is no
pride in this love, it can only love, and love in this way because it knows no other
way. It is a love that blurs the boundaries between the self and the other, where two
people become two halves of a single entity.
The poet uses „salt‟(1) as a hyperbole here and in the process may also regard
it as an essential element of life forms. The image of „rose‟(1) stood for the brevity of
life and to love as long as life lasted. The poet implies that he does not love her
because life is short, but for the sake of love itself. „Topaz‟ (1) has been a symbol of
beauty and splendor. Therefore, the speaker implies that he loves her not for her
ephemeral beauty. These apocalyptic (topaz) stones were professed to serve as a
shield against enemies. The poet also refuses to compare his love with the fire
(passion) of the arrow of carnations.
Biographically, Neruda‟s love sonnets without rhyme, celebrates the poet‟s
relationship with Matilde Urrutia. The collection was popular, as an autumnal version
of his teenage love poems. Neruda‟s sonnets are essentially private and sometimes
sensuous and erotic. The imagery can be very conventional like the terrible line in
Sonnet VII : “ Oh love, now let us forget the star with thorns”( 1) and some seem like
exercises in rhetoric, like Sonnets X and XIII, where the woman is compared to wheat,
bread and grain. But most moving is Neruda‟s continuing exploration of geography
and love, especially in Sonnet XXXI:
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You are, like the one who loves you,
from the green provinces,
from there we brought the mud that
runs in our veins, in the city
we walk, like many, lost scared that
the market will close. (5-10)
In Love Sonnet XI there are references to the speaker as a hunter. A large
beautiful, puma padding around, on empty, cobbled streets, with a twitch of its tail
and a flare of its nostrils. Hungry, hunting: “bread does not nourish me” (3). The
rightness and the resonance of the phrases leaves one dazed: “The liquid measure of
your steps” (4), / “for your hot heart” (13). Here, Pablo Neruda places Matilde as his
subject. He describes himself as “silent and starving” (2), he means that he is starving
for her body and for her love. The poem reveals that there is music and drama and
poetry in living, that makes it hard to feel indifferent. Neruda is sublimating his
passion by using verbs of the culinary persuasion: “hunger for the pale stones of your
fingernails, / I want to eat your skin like a whole almond” (5-6). He claims that his
life is not so flamboyant in being colorful. It is deep and dark and secretive and
therefore an enigma. Its beauty lies in its inscrutable quality. Its proximity is between
the shadow (reflection) and soul (essence).
The poet loves her as the plant that never blooms. It carries in itself the light of
hidden flowers, the essence of which is yet to be realized. The poet ascertains that he
is grateful to his lady-love‟s love for now he is characterized by a “solid fragrance”
(8). He loves her without any time constraints, without any regard to her history,
present or future. He adores her regardless of stature and regionalism, marginalizing
boundaries. He does not want to “rationalize” his love by prefixing the tags „how‟ and
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„when.‟ More significantly, he loves her because for him, that is the only option that
exists. In the last stanza, the poet eliminates all distinctions - physical and spiritual as
they form a union - that is at once neutral, stable and in complete harmony: Where I
do not exist, nor you, / So close that your hand on my chest is my hand, / So close that
your eyes close as I fall asleep. (12-14)
Love Sonnet XVII embodies the feelings of vanity a person could have. This
piece has a masculine rhyme scheme as each ending word is only one syllable for the
most part. In the fourth stanza, the poet switches his perception from another to
himself. The resolution in this sonnet is that he loves himself and he knows it is
wrong but will never strive to love another. This poem describes a mature, pure and
intensely deep love that connects two people in the most beautiful way.
The sonnets of Neruda are indeed full of sensuality some of them go into the
dangerous realm of the erotic. Sonnet XII is immensely rich in imagery. In very small
space, Neruda surveys the realm of the sensual from several points of view. From the
stars, down to earth, the poet explores the geography as a feature of the female body.
He transforms the natural phenomena into domestic events. He surveys the entrails of
the beloved and the feelings and sensations of physical love.
Sonnet XIV, expresses Neruda‟s desire:
Whoever desired each other as
we do ?Let us look
for the ancient ashes of hearts
that burned,
and let our kisses touch there,
one by one,
till the flower, disembodied,
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rises again. (1-4)
Sonnet XLV is a brilliant example of Neruda‟s love poetry:
Don‟t go far off, not even for
a day because…
because… I don‟t know how
to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you,
as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off
somewhere else, asleep. (1-4)
Sonnet LXIX , declares the oneness of their being:
Perhaps not to be is to be without
your being,
without your going, that cuts
noon light
like a blue flower, without
your passing
… suddenly, inspiringly, to know
My life. (1-10)
In Sonnet LXXXIX he expresses his wish: “when I die, I want your hands on
my eyes / I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness
over me once more / I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny” (1-3).
When I die, I want you to be with me. Not for you to tell others how much I love
them, or to tell you, but I want you to be with me. I want all the things that you did to
change my life to come once more before I die: “I want you to live while I wait for
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you, asleep” (4). Dying is not considered an end, but a transition of soul mates from
material earth to a perfect after life: “I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want
you / to sniff the sea‟s aroma that we loved together, / to continue to walk on the sand
we walk on” (5-7).
The poet wishes to keep and relish the memories that they have then and love
him the same as when they made those memories. And continue to do the things that
made them happy, not only in remembrance of him, but also in anticipation of
afterlife, when they will meet again. The sand and the aroma of the ocean are very
familiar sensory experiences and are a reference to memories. The natural world is a
big factor in this poem: “I want what I love to continue to live, / and you whom I love
and sang about everything else / to continue to flourish, full-flowered” (8-10).
Do not slow down now that I will be gone. Keep living and continue to do the
things that make you happy. You can still be a complete individual without me by
your side, because I will always be with you in spirits: “So that you can reach
everything my love directs you to. / So that my shadow can travel along in your hair. /
So that everything can learn the reason from my song” (11-13). If you do these things,
then you will reach Heaven, the place that my love for you is drawing you towards.
Then my memory will become reality once more and we can live happily and I can
show you, not just tell you, how complete and happy you truly make me. By running
through her hair, he is, accepting that she is a woman and becoming a part of her once
more, this time in a literal sense.
Sonnets XCIII and XCIV are about two extremes in life - love and death.
These are a couple so to speak like Pablo Neruda and Matilde Urrutia. In Sonnet
XCIII, Neruda descriptively celebrates his love:
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If some time your breast pauses, if something stops
moving, stops burning through your veins,
if the voice in your mouth escapes without becoming word,
Matilde my love, leave your lips half-open:
because that final kiss should linger with me,
it should stay still, forever, in your mouth,
so that it goes with me, too, in my death.( 1-7 )
In Sonnet XCIV:
…Absence is such a large house that
you‟ll walk through the walls,
hang pictures in sheer air.
Absence is such a transparent house
that even being dead I will see you there,
and if you suffer, love, I‟ll die a second time. (9-14)
One Hundred Love Sonnets, intimately overflows with the master poet‟s
signature sensuality and inventive imagery. Neruda‟s earnest adoration leaps off the
page in poem after poem: “Your heart is a clay toy shaped like a dove; / your kisses
are clusters of fruit, fresh with dew” (1-2). Neruda‟s sonnets are made of wood, rather
than the “silver, or crystal, or cannon fire” of a more refined sonnet. He describes his
simple dedication to Matilde: “…I am like a scorched rock / that suddenly sings when
you are near, because it drinks / the water you carry from the forest, in your voice”.
(1-3)
During his lifetime, Neruda seemed to experience the spectrum of emotional
highs and lows very vividly and his poetry reflected this experience. In times of
inspiration he was capable of unparalleled romanticism. His passionate love affairs
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often provided him with a living muse, his third wife brought him such inspiration
from their marriage until his death. Despite his illness, Neruda was extremely happy
during his final years in Chile and his love for his country served as an equally,
powerful contributor to his poetry. Neruda‟s capacity for joy and reverence toward
life is especially evident in his One Hundred Love Sonnets.
The spirit and verbal dexterity of One Hundred Love Sonnets are
bold and sexual. It was the most influential and beloved of the Nobel Laureate.
Against the backdrop of „Isla Negra,‟ the sea and wind, the white sand with its
scattering of delicate wild flowers, the hot sun and the salty smells of the Pacific,
Pablo Neruda sets these joyfully sensual poems in celebration of his love. The subject
of that love: Matilde Urrutia was, the poet‟s “beloved wife.” In his native Chile and
throughout Latin America, Neruda has always been cherished as dearly for the earthly
sensuality and eroticism of his sonnets. To know the sonnets, then is to understand the
poet‟s art more thoroughly. No one can speak of love better than Neruda, in his
sonnets.
Pablo Neruda‟s love poetry cannot be complete if the readers ignore the body
of love poetry produced in his middle age. The Captain’s Verses, which form part of
the large body of mature love poetry, is another example of Neruda‟s passionate love
poems. The love poetry produced in his last twenty years, allows us to follow the
evolution of his romantic sensibility over five decades. The older poet possesses, a
mature love. In The Captain’s Verses, One Hundred Love Sonnets and Barcarole
happiness is not fleeting, but sustained. He appreciates, without fear of loss, the
shared love and sensuality that joins him to the earth and gives meaning to the world.
The Captain’sVerses, is not just a testament to love, but it is Neruda‟s personal
journey, of self-exploration. Written in 1952, while in exile on the island of Capri,
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surrounded by sea, sun and Capri‟s natural splendors. Neruda addresses these poems
to his lover Matilde Urrutia, before they were married. This collection has become a
classic for love-struck readers around the world – passionately sensuous and
exploding with all the erotic energy of a new love.
It is in the love poems that other, less grim association of the seashore - love,
peace and a sense of purpose, come to the fore. These redeeming associations and
their particular values are made over to Matilde. Nowhere in Neruda‟s poetry are the
readers in a more private world. Although it denies the existence of tomorrow,
invents its own continuity and looks to the past for its vital gift, “Final,” simply and
quietly, leads to a moment of finality in which Matilde is strength and Pablo
weakness.
Heavy with sexually charged innuendo, Neruda‟s Sonnet LXXIII dramatizes
the process of lust transforming into genuine love. The speaker in Neruda‟s sonnet
from One Hundred Love Sonnets dramatizes the theme of lust preceding love. The
sonnet form employed by Neruda is the American, or innovative sonnet: “you will
perhaps recall that pointed sharp man” (1). Looking back in time, the speaker is
addressing his lover, reminding her that in the early stages of their relationship they
tried to guard their hearts against falling in love. He suggests to her that she might
remember how suddenly his lust was aroused, calling his male member “that pointed
sharp man (1),” he reminds her how it “slipped out of the darkness”(2) ready for
penetration. He then credits that organ with knowledge that the two lovers did not yet
understand, that they would actually fall in love; that the sex act was not just for sex
alone. Unlike the two lovers, however, the man‟s sexual organ “detected smoke”(4)
and knew that lust would motivate the two to come together: “The pale woman with
long black hair” (5).
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The speaker then turns his attention to the woman, actually the man‟s female
counterpart, who “surfaced like a fish from the deep” (6). Their initial satisfaction of
lust caused them to “erect against love / A machine armed and fanged” (7-8). Even
though they were unable to rein in their sexual desires, they were unwilling to commit
to a love relationship. They, therefore, built an elaborate system of shields against the
possibility of falling in love. The speaker calls their system a machine that resembles
a weapon with teeth. Those tender feelings that begin with falling in love are to be
chewed up and spit out, so that the two remain unaffected by the grasp of true love.
The speaker implies that their affection should remain a romantic adventure but not
progress to the status of love: “The man and woman hacked through mountains and
gardens” (9).
In the first tercet, the speaker takes his lover back to all the traipsing around
that they did while they were trying to keep love out of their relationship. They visited
mountains, gardens, rivers and walls, but between them, they kept the defensive
“weaponry” against love: “At last, love recognized itself as love” (12). But finally,
love won. They had to call love by its, proper name, “love.” The speaker reminds his
lover that finally when he saw her name, he had to admit that he could see, that her
heart was beating for him and that after he knew that she truly loved him, he finally
had to admit that he loved her”:
Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among objects:
nothing mattered or had a name:
the world was made of air, which waited. (Sonnet XXV 1-4)
In Sonnet XXV Neruda explicitly reasons his cause of love in The Captain’s Verses:
I love
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all things,
not because they are passionate or sweet-smelling
but because,
I don‟t know,
because
this ocean is yours,
and mine. (15-22)
Neruda‟s love, ecstasy, devotion and fury for Matilde Urrutia reached its
glory, burning with erotic energy in “Your Feet”:
When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet. (1-4)
The poet loves her feet all the more because:
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon the wind and upon
the waters,
until they found me. (16-20)
Neruda spent three years writing the One Hundred Love Poems to Matilde
Urritia. These love poems expose his dedication: “to Matilde Urrutia … Now that I
have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden
sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.” In writing, the One Hundred Love
Sonnets Neruda divided them into groupings - „Morning‟ representing the early
passionate stages of love, from the more mature love represented by „Afternoon‟ and
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„Evening.‟ The poems from „Morning‟ are erotic, sensual and full of fire while the
poems of „Night‟ are haunting and sad - dealing with separation, the end of love and
death. The first is fresh love - in the morning of a relationship and the second a
deepening love which one might see in an elderly couple who have loved long,
through both good and bad times.
In „Morning‟ Sonnet XII “Full Woman, Carnal Apple, Hotmoon”: “Loving is a
clash of lightning bolts, / and two bodies, defeated by a single drop of honey” (7-8).
In „Night‟ Sonnet XCI “Age covers us like Drizzle”: “My life, which I gave you, fills /
with years like a swelling cluster of fruit, / The grapes will return to the earth” (9-11).
In Sonnet LXVI “I Do Not Love you Except Because I Love You.” Sonnet LXVI is
famous from the „Night Section‟ of One Hundred Love Sonnets. In it Pablo Neruda
plays with the paradox that sometimes both love and hate can exist at the same time
and each can swing to the forefront in a strong bond. “I do not Love You except
Because I Love You” abounds in paradoxes. Neruda is deeply in love but also feels
hate, perhaps in the loss of control,” stealing the key to true calm,” (11-12) that is part
and parcel of a particularly wild and passionate love affair. Neruda spent many years
in a clandestine affair with Matilde before he left his wife to live with and eventually
marry her. The love he felt was at times wrapped in hatred for the complications that
it entailed.
Rarely, has a muse served as the inspiration and driving force of such a large
body of poetry, as did Matilde Urrutia to Pablo Neruda when he wrote the famous
One Hundred Love Sonnets. Her inspiration did not end with One Hundred Love
Sonnets. There were other love poems in The Captain’s Verses and Barcarole,
showcasing a mature shared love rather than the youthful infatuation of his youth.
One Hundred Love Sonnets, were highly passionate and imaginative. In these poems,
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Matilde is the only micro universe the poet inhabits. In his own words, “kiss by kiss I
travel your little infinity / your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages” (9-10).
This intimate travelogue is also juxtaposed with imagery and metaphor from
Neruda‟s mountainous homeland and provides a surrealistic tinge to their intimacy:
“...I am like a scorched rock / that suddenly sings when you are near, because it
Drinks / the water you carry from the forest, in your voice” (11-13). One Hundred
Love Sonnets, employ many of the master poet‟s signatures of sensuality and vivid
imagery. Some of the lines are simple and unforgettable: “your kisses are clusters of
fruit, fresh with dew” / “your heart is a clay toy shaped like a dove” (14-15).
In his last twenty years Neruda produced an astonishing amount of work,
much of it love poetry inspired by his passion for Matilde Urrutia. This collection
allows us to follow the evolution of his romantic sensibility over five decades. The
older poet possesses mature love. In The Captain’s Verses (1952), One Hundred Love
Sonnets (1959), Barcarole (1967) happiness is not fleeting, but sustained. He
appreciates, without fear of loss, the shared love and sensuality that joins him to the
earth and gives meaning to the world: “... A new door opened between you and me /
and someone, still without a face, / was waiting for us there, (“September8”15-17).
In these years, Neruda wrote poignantly of aging and of his past. The theme of
alienation, self censored in the 1940s, returned. He also wrote of his estrangement
from people. These poems have an atmosphere of stillness and contemplation,
especially in contrast to the turbulence of his youth. It is as if he is settling into
himself as just a man, not a famous poet. Matilde Urrutia, was not only the raison
d‟etre of One Hundred Love Sonnets but also the source of peace and domesticity in
his mature life and the keeper of the flame after his death. The Captain’s Verses was a
collection of Neruda‟s love poems that expresses Pablo‟s different emotions to his
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love and nature. Here, Pablo treasured the time, living with Matilde in the adorable,
island of Capri. Similarly, in her Memoir, Matilde tells her legendary love for Pablo.
The sonnets were set against the backdrop of „Isla Negra,‟ the sea, the wind, the white
sand with its scattering of delicate wild flowers, the hot sun and the salty smells of the
Pacific. In the poem "Wind on the Island," Neruda speaks of his inspiration by his
beloved:
Hide me in your arms
just for this night,
while the rain breaks
against sea and earth
its innumerable mouth. (7-11)
Pablo Neruda‟s love poetry cannot be complete if we ignore the body of love
poetry he produced in his middle age. “The Captain’s Verses,” form part of the large
body of mature love poetry it is another example of Neruda‟s passionate love poems.
Neruda is absolutely the most compelling love poet ever. The Captain’sVerses, is not
just a testament to love, but it is Neruda‟s personal journey, of self-exploration.
Written in 1952, while in exile on the island of Capri, is surrounded by sea, sun, and
Capri‟s natural splendors. Neruda addressed these poems to his lover, before they
were married.
This collection has become a classic for love-struck readers around the world
passionately sensuous and exploding with all the erotic energy of a new love.
One Hundred Love Sonnets contain a series of extremely personal poems – warm,
humorous, self-questioning, and reflective. Neruda was a self-declared love poet not
only of human love, but of an intimacy he seemed to feel with the secret lives of
objects.
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The poems seem to span a lifetime as they reveal the depth of love that comes
from sharing a life together. Some of his poems speak of a love that goes beyond
death itself. An excerpt from Poem XCII of the collection reads: “Absence is such a
transparent house / that even being dead I will see you there / and if you suffer, love,
I‟ll die a second time” (9-11). Neruda‟s poetry consists of an earthiness, using nature
in much of the imagery that he writes about in declaring his love. In Poem XVIII, the
first verse reads:
You move through the mountains like a breeze,
like a quick stream dropping from under the snow:
your hair in its thickness throbs like the high
adornments of the sun, repeating them for me. (1-4)
Another component of Neruda‟s poetry is the erotic sensuality that speaks to
the heart and soul of the reader. Poem XII, is beautiful in its sensuality:
Kiss by kiss, I travel your little infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages;
and a genital fire . . . transformed delicious . . .
Slips through the narrow roadways of the blood
til it pours itself, quick, like a night carnation, til it is :
And is nothing, in shadow and a glimmer of light. (9-14)
Neruda‟s poetry is beautiful in the imagery it portrays. The San Francisco Examiner
said that Neruda‟s One Hundred Love Sonnets is “Sensual as a tropical night swirling
in honeysuckle and Jazz . . .”
The One Hundred Love Sonnets is based on a love affair, Neruda had while
staying on the island of Capri. The poems are deeply impassioned, sexual and yet,
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quite gentle. There is a true love of women, as well as of the island itself, conveyed –
and sometimes his love for each seem inseparable:
We have grown together
but we did not know it
the sea knows our love, the stones
of the rocky height
know that our kisses flowered
with infinite purity. (1-6)
Everything about the love he writes of is raw, pure and organic. These later love
poems speak of passion and submergence of public themes into private and domestic
affections.
Neruda manages to capture the elusiveness of love with overpowering lyricism
in these passionate love sonnets. Matilde Urrutia, inspired some of the most
passionate Spanish love poems of the twentieth century. Each one of these poems is a
flash of light, a lightning strike of love. Charged with sensuality and passion,
Neruda‟s love sonnets caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. These
sonnets captivate readers with earth-bound images that reveal an erotic re-imaging of
the world through the prism of a lover‟s body:
Today our bodies became vast . . .
and rolled melting
into a single drop
of wax or meteor . . . . (10-13)
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These passionate verses, written on the paradise island of Capri, embraces the
seascapes around them, saturating the images of endless shores and waves with a new,
yearning eroticism.
One Hundred Love sonnets, span a lifetime as they reveal the depth of love
that comes from sharing a life together. In Poem XVIII, Neruda uses nature imagery,
in declaring his love: “you move through the mountains like breeze. . . . / your hair in
its thickness throbs like the high / adornments of the sun, repeating them for me” (14). In his interview with Rita Guibert, Neruda says that he discussed his poetry in
terms of his personal life, “a poet‟s life must naturally be reflected in his poetry.” One
Hundred Love Sonnets are the perfect examples to show how grateful Neruda was for
being alive and for having the opportunity to love.
On Neruda‟s hundredth birthday, Rosemary Sullivan says in Hundred Love
Sonnets: “These sonnets bring us to the core of Neruda‟s genius…. These are the
poems of his solitude… that filtered out or over-refined the poet‟s raw human voice…
a poetry that was barbaric, inclusive, contradictory and celebratory.” Neruda‟s
sonnets are both intimate and an epic – a recuperation of love against death and an
affirmation in the midst of sorrow. He achieves it through his verbal sophistication
and his fluid rhythms. One Hundred Love Sonnets, begin in delight and ends in
exhilaration. Neruda, who gathers so many things of this world into his large embrace,
brings us closer to the loving, humorous and compassionate source of all these things.
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I need the sea because it teaches me.
I don‟t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it‟s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining one,
a suggestion of fishes and ships
the fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves
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Pablo Neruda‟s poems on the sea are at times passionate and at other times
peaceful, providing an endless view of the sea and the pulse of the eternal waves. As
the years passed, Neruda more often sought the refuge of his „Isla Negra‟ home by the
sea. He aged gracefully until he became the poet, so famously described in the
introduction to an interview with Rita Guibert:
…in whatever part of the world he happened to be… frequented
antique shops and junk shops… in which he sought all kinds of
objects, from doors and windows to ship figure heads, sextants,
lanterns, bells, anchors, sea shells. His home was decorated in a
shipboard motif. Visitors were ferried through a gallery furnished
with a bide and pipe organ to a patio bar overlooking the sea.
Neruda emphasizes in his poems the infinite places and objects of inspiration,
from seashores to coal mines to the faces of people he loved and the things which
benefitted to his wonderful poetic writing. Each poem shows the love that Pablo
Neruda had and which allowed him to write and help to voice the struggles of the
people from Chile. In Neruda‟s poetry, his concern for the common man is heard in
“We are Many”:
While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me. (6-39)
In the poem, “The Sea and the Bells” the major motifs of Neruda‟s
posthumous poetry meet, solitude as an inalienable right, the sea as the embodiment
of the poet‟s secret self, death as a recognized unity, as a “sunken song”… which
joins the total song of the great ocean. Neruda‟s power as a poet was connected
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intimately to his people, his land and his sea. He loved the sea and everything about it:
sand, ships in bottle, figure heads of beautiful maidens from the prows of ships and
seashells. At „Isla Negra,‟ his coastal home in Chile, over seven hundred seashells
crown the tops of dressers, are tucked into corners, line book shelves or are embedded
like jewels in the floors. Neruda did not just collect things he loved. He consecrated
them with religious fervor, believing that beloved objects preserve the spirit of their
owner. This kind of love can turn the most mundane items into magical treasures with
its seemingly, endless collections, ocean views and ship motifs. „Isla Negra‟ has come
to personify Neruda‟s mystical spirit.
In “Leaning into the Afternoon” Poem VII, from Twenty Love Poems, Neruda
envisages the grace and charm of his lady love through the incomparable beauty of
the ocean:
Leaning into the afternoon, I cast my saddened nets,
towards your oceanic eyes.
there, in the highest fire, my solitude unrolls and ignites,
arms failing like a drowning man‟s.
I send out crimson flares across your distant eyes,
that swell like the waves, at the base of a lighthouse. (1-6)
According to Julio Cortazar, Argentine novelist and the poet‟s close friend, “All of
Neruda‟s houses were also his poems.”… It was at „Isla Negra,‟ Cortazar recalled,
“that I immediately understood that rigorous correspondence between poetry and
objects, between matter and the word” when Cortazar asked the name of a flower in
the garden, Neruda answered, “Ah, this is the same one that I‟ve mentioned many
times in my poems” (Marjorie).
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Pablo Neruda loved not only the exaggerated geography of Chile, his long and
narrow, windswept homeland, but all of its cities north and south. He wrote about
them with pleasure and amazement. Valparaiso, called “the Pearl of the Pacific,” was
one of the most important ports. Neruda‟s soaring residence in Valparaiso, recalls, the
vibrant spirit of Pablo and his strong ties to this port. Its setting is dramatic. Hills like
precipices - with such poetic names as the Hill of the Happy Butterfly of Flowery
Hill - drop sharply to the sea. Each morning the inhabitants of these hills “wash and
hang their bright clothing out of winged windows, like the sterns of abandoned ships,
where fabric dances to the winds…”
Pablo in his odes is hoping for social equality and ever his own fractured
vision of democracy. As a poet of the people, he is connecting the plight of the people
to the sea and its power, dwarfing human abilities. Before his death in September
1973, Neruda donated his sea- shell collection to his Alma matter. With over fifteen
thousand, shells overflowing from the bookshelves and falling from tables and chairs,
as well as enough books about seashells to fill his library, he boxed up his already
famous collection and sent it to the University of Chile. Neruda was an impulsive,
diligent and obsessive collector of everything from glass bottles and mobiles to
miniature guitars and mastheads.
Neruda‟s Sonnet XXXIV “You are the Daughter of the Sea,” describes:
You are the daughter of the sea,
Oregano‟s first cousin.
When you swim your body is pure water,
When you cook your blood is living earth and your habits are of
flower and soil.
Your eyes look to the sea and the waves rise . . . . (1-5)
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Similarly, Neruda celebrates beauty in “Ode to a Beautiful Nude”: “As in a land of
forests or in surf / in aromatic loam, or in sea music.” (4-5)
He describes „Beautiful Nude‟: “Your ears, small shells of the splendid American
sea.” (9)
Neruda obviously seems to have a strange fascination for the sea and its music
in particular is heard in every line of his poem, where one can find, he draws solace
from the sea. In 1964, nine years before his death, Neruda published his last great
book, Isla Negra, named for the place he called home. Intensely autobiographical, it
looks deep and serenely into his early and middle years, into lost loves and lost
places. The tone is detached, thoughtful and tender. Neruda speaks about the power
and the might of the ocean in “The Wide Ocean,” from Canto General:
Ocean, if you were to give, a measure, ferment, a fruit
of your gifts and destructions, into my hand,
I would choose your far-off repose, your contour of steel,
your vigilant spaces of air and darkness,
and the power of your white tongue,
that shatters and overthrows columns,
breaking them down to your proper purity. (1-7)
Again, in Sonnet IX, “In the wave-strike over unquiet stones” from One Hundred
Love Sonnets, Neruda describes massively about the vastness of the ocean:
Merged, you and I, my love, seal the silence
while the sea destroys its continual forms,
collapses its turrets of wildness and whiteness,
because in the weft of those unseen garments
of headlong water and perpetual sand,
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we bear the sole, relentless tenderness. (9-14)
Pablo loved the playful anarchy of the sea - creative, destructive and
ceaselessly moving. He loved the marriage of wind, water and sand and found
inspiration in the crashing fury and freedom of the waves, the seabirds on the coast,
the endlessness of blue sky: “I need the sea because it teaches me,” (1) he wrote. “I
move in the University of the Waves” (8). He loved how the sea forever renewed
itself, a renewal echoed in his work as well as in his life. He felt that creating poetry
was like constantly being born. The poem “It is born,” captures his endless fascination
with the nearby ocean he chose to live with in his later years:
Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the Sea,
…and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and everyday on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born. (1-9)
Neruda‟s beautifully illustrated “On the Blue Shores of Silence,” is short, powerful
and elegant: “…and everything is blue again like morning”. (10)
The poetry of Pablo Neruda was part of everything he lived. Neruda‟s final
wish before his death was:
Comrades, bury me in Isla Negra,
facing the sea that I know every wrinkled area
of stones and waves that my lost eyes
won‟t see again.
si want to sleep there amid the eyelids
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of sea and earths.(1-6)
Neruda‟s love of the sea was famous, he spent most of his Nobel Prize money
on seashells and mastheads. Architecturally „La Chascon‟ was shaped like a boat. The
library had a wooden floor that creaked like a boat racking on the sea. In his own
words, he usually “navigate (d) on land rather than on the sea” (Memoirs 217). As an
avid collector of antiques, Neruda used his three homes as storage spaces for his
memorabilia from abroad, creating spaces that served as inspiration to him. Neruda
bought „La Chascon,‟ a property hidden in the backstreets of Bella vista, Santiago‟s
bohemian neighborhood. He used the house as a place to see his mistress and later
wife Matilde Urrutia and named it, “La Chascona,” meaning „tousled hair,‟ after her
curly red hair. The property‟s two buildings represent a ship and a light house. Neruda
loved the ocean but was afraid of it and called himself a “sailor on land.” His homes,
which are now museums, are all designed with nautical themes. Everything inside
shows his great love for the sea, many parts of a ship were transformed into furniture.
Neruda‟s eclectic designs earned him the label “organic architect.”
„La Sebastiana,‟ which Neruda bought in 1961, is built on one of the highest
hills of the port city of Valparaiso, a South American Port in San Francisco about two
hours outside of Chile‟s capital, Santiago. Designed like a boat, the house is perched
above the city‟s sea of brightly- colored houses. „La Sebastiana‟ internalizes the city
around it, with its narrow, winding stair cases and vividly-painted walls. As in all
Neruda‟s homes, oddities abound. An armchair he called „La Nube‟ (The cloud) sits
by the window overlooking the city and the sea. Neruda‟s third home and arguably his
favorite, sits on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in the coastal town he named „Isla
Negra‟ (Black Island) for the volcanic-like black rocks that speckle the beaches. He
bought the stone cottage, where he and Urrutia are now buried.
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Huge windows look out into the waves. Neruda said in his Memoirs: “The
Pacific Ocean overflowed the map. There was no place to put it. It was so big, unruly
and blue that it fit nowhere. That‟s why they left it in front of my window.”
Outside, an anchor seems to attach the house to the ground beneath it.
Inside, the house is decorated with collections of Chilean huaso (cowboy)
stirrups, insects, masks, model ships and nautical instruments, mandolins and of
course, colored glass. One room is devoted entirely to shells Neruda collected on the
shore and a paper-mesh house from Tamuco, the city where he grew up. “In my
house, I have put together a collection of small and large toys I can‟t live without.”
Neruda wrote in his Memoirs: „I confess I have lived”: “I have also built my house
like a toy house and I play in it from morning till night.” In “The Sea and the Bells,”
Neruda uses the bell as a symbol of the contradiction of life,” pure sound with
emptiness at its center,” Neruda assures with grace and wisdom that paradox is
unavoidable as a necessary part of growth and fulfillment in his “Forgive Me If My
Eyes See” :
… This is my loneliness :
… that I am a part
of winter,
of the same flat expanse, that repeats
from bell to bell, in wave after wave,
and from a silence like a woman‟s hair,
a silence of seaweed, a sunken song. (15-20)
In his poem “Dispositions,” Pablo Neruda expresses his wish to be buried by
the sea at „Isla Negra.‟ „Isla Negra,‟ was named after the color of the dark rocks which
contrast the sandy beach and the tranquil isolation which Neruda felt during his stays.
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Exploring the house one can see the vast collections Neruda had - from ships inside
bottles and mastheads, to masks and instruments from around the world and a
collection of over a thousand seashells - together, a true treatment to how welltravelled Neruda was. The bed in his bedroom was purposely placed at an angle
facing the window to take in the spectacular view of the ocean.
With image after arresting image, Neruda charts the oceanic movements of
passion repeatedly summoning imagery of the sea and weather: “On all sides I see
your waist of fog / … my kisses anchor…” (7-8). As irresistible as the sea, love is
engulfing in The Song of Despair: “you swallowed everything like distance. /… in
you everything sank!” (9-10). But also departs as mysteriously as it arrived, leaving
the poet‟s heart a “pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked” (6). In Twenty Love
Poems, reported David P. Gallagher in Modern Latin American Literature, “Neruda
journeys across the sea symbolically in search of an ideal port. In 1927, he embarked
on a real journey, when he sailed from Buenos Aires for Lisbon, ultimately bound for
Rangoon where he had been appointed honorary Chilean counsul.”
Against the backdrop of Isla Negra - the sea and wind, the white sand with its
scattering of delicate wild flowers, the hot sun and salty smells of the Pacific - here,
Neruda, joyfully celebrates his love for Matilda Urrutia. These poems pack power,
peace and great love, embracing the seascapes surrounding, the poet and his beloved,
their waves and shores saturated with a new, yearning eroticism: when you appear /
… In my body, bells / shake the sky, / and a hymn fills the world (1-4). On the Blue
Shore of Silence is at times passionate and at other times peaceful. The readers
experience, with Neruda, the view of the sea endless, the pulse of the waves, eternal.
The book is a new cornerstone in Neruda‟s body of work, expertly weaving together
the poet and the reader. It is the most, eloquent tribute to his love of the sea, and his
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home in Isla Negra, Chile.” “Let us look for secret things / somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence / …of solitude and the sand” (5-7).
Neruda‟s appetite for language and life was endless as confessed in his
Memoirs: “I am omnivorous … I would like to swallow the whole earth, drink the
whole sea.” On September 23, 1973, when Neruda died in Santiago, it was like
something he had already written about: “I want to be buried in a name, some
specially chosen, beautiful-sounding name so that its syllables will sing over my
bones, near the sea.” His last words were “Me voy “(I‟ m going). Pablo loved the
stones of Chile. He wrote about stones by waves onto the beach and stones polished
by sand and salt.
Neruda used to say “I am the captain and the guests are my crew.” He
identifies himself as the sea, in “The Ode to the Sea”:
HERE
surrounding the island
there‟s sea.
but what sea?
It‟s always overflowing.
says yes,
then no,
then no again,
and no,
says yes
in blue
in sea spray
raging,
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says no
and no again.
It can‟t be still.
It stammers
My name is sea. (1- 18)
The “best poet,” according to Pablo Neruda, is the one who sustains us with
our daily bread – with the hopes and dreams of poetry. He sustains us in much the
same way that the “majestic and overflowing” sea might sustain “the meager
communities which gather hungrily on its shores” (Longo). The comparison between
the sea and the poet is provocative. It implies that like the sea, the good Nerudian and
by extension, the Latin American poet is the essential embodiment of natural
abundance. And like the good “comrade ocean,” he is ultimately willing to open his
green coffers, to place gifts of silver in a humble community‟s hands.
Water has emotional significance as air, it has an all-encompassing potential to
create connection, but it can represent an impossible emptiness. The symbol of water,
has no fixed meaning, but is fluid and carries emotional weight. In Barcarole, Neruda
places the imagined possibility of connection (around the sea) and references the
(empty waters) of the sea. The ocean represents a beautiful and powerful spirit, like
the woman Neruda calls to. Water, is a symbolic life force that moves through. The
water is like the solitude of the lonely man - and Neruda reflects onto it, unable to
connect.
From Neruda‟s beautifully illustrated On the Blue Shores of Silence, this poem
“The Sea,” is short, powerful and elegant. It is from his „Isla Negra‟ period and it
captures his endless fascination with the near-by ocean he chose to live with in his
later year. In “It is Born”:
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…everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
… and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and everyday on the balcony the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning. ( 3-10)
This poem on “The Sea,” beautifully illustrates Neruda‟s love of the sea. He refers to
the “university of the waves (8),”… it is a poetic statement about the essentials of
learning: “I need the sea because it teaches me, / I don‟t know if I learn music or
awareness.” (1-2)
If it is a single wave or its vast existence, or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships. Elegantly, Neruda leads into transformation at the end
of the poem:
…the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering, snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths…
… and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement. (23-28)
From Canto General, translated by Anthony Kerrigan, Neruda‟s poem “The
Great Ocean,” is pretty heavy as the ocean itself:
If, ocean, you could grant, out of your gifts and dooms,
some measure, fruit of ferment for my hands,
I‟d choose your distant rest, your brinks of steel,
your furthest reaches watched by air and night,
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the energy of your while dialect
downing and shattering its columns
in its own demolished purity. (1-7)
Neruda defines an interesting role for himself and perhaps other poets, the
responsibility of bringing to the shrouded heart the sound and freedom of the sea. The
poem, “The Poet‟s Obligation,” is undeniably freeing and opens the pores of our soul:
… the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rushing of salt withdrawing itself,
the grey cry of seabirds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart. (25-30)
“The Words They Sing,” from Pablo Neruda‟s Memoirs is one of his free form
poems from early in his career. Here, he speaks of the power and effect of words, on
him and its depth to the sea:
… like silvers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a ship
wreck,
gifts from the waves… everything, exists in the words… (17-18)
At „Isla Negra,‟ the bar is decorated as a ship‟s salon, with furniture bolted to
the floor and nautical lamps and paintings. The room has glass-panel walls facing the
sea. On the ceiling and on each of the wooden crossbeams a carpenter has carved,
from Neruda‟s handwriting, names of his dead friends. In Twenty Love Poems,
Neruda journeys across the sea symbolically in search of an ideal port. These Love
Poems embrace the seascapes around them, saturating the images of endless shores
and waves with a new, yearning eroticism. These poems contain Neruda‟s most
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passionate verses. Neruda was clearly a man in love with and inspired by the sea, the
crash and gurgling of foam was constant in his mind‟s eye and at the tip of his pen.
“The House in the Sand,” is a poignant love song to Isla Negra, a small
fishing village on the southern coast of Chile, the most beloved place of Neruda.
Besides depicting the landscape and people, Neruda articulates the mysterious
relationship between man and nature as he experiences and understands it through Isla
Negra. His various envisioning of the sea, meditate on the simple truth that human
kind is a tiny and finite part of a limitless and continually procreating force. Neruda
uses the sea as a symbol of the overflowing, ceaselessly birthing, eternal and
indifferent primordial force in which all men live.
As the sea‟s power and indifference does not overwhelm Neruda, so the sea‟s
violent and mysterious song does not daunt Neruda. He implicitly states his purpose
in correlation with the sea: “And the wave, the song and the tale continue to move.
And so does death!” (4). The poet, sings the song of the sea, the tale of the sea - the
continuous movement of loss and gain, birth and death, the unremitting vulnerability
in life and the fortitude it demands from man. Neruda was fascinated and connected
with the sea and the ocean. He thought of the ocean as a vast, inverted sky whose
mysteries were boundless and it was always a great source of inspiration to him.
As a poet, although the hands of the sea shaped him, teaching his fingers, the
freedom of water, he did not make the sea. And yet every object he touches - whether
it be the crystal glass filled with red wine or the ship‟s figure head in his study, the
short paper or his desk chair - was made by someone else‟s hands. Much has been
said about the poet‟s feelings of guilt at not having contributed material comforts to
the many who sustained him, or to their sustenance or their passion.
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Neruda was personally affected by the gorgeous and tortuous sea, in all the
magnificence of the enormous waves crashing against the rocks. The poet envisages
himself as one who belongs to the ocean, a dreamer who somehow realizes that he
originated from the sea. Neruda‟s attachment to the water is so real and powerful that
he is enlightened with the understanding that this will be his final resting place. In “I
Will Return”:
Some other time, man or woman, traveler,
later, when I am not alive,
look here, look for me,
between stone and ocean . . .
for here I will return, without saying a thing. (1-8)
The obsessive soul of Pablo Neruda, the imaginary mariner, lives on in his
house by the sea. Against the backdrop of Isla Negra – the sea and wind, the white
sand with its scattering of delicate wild flowers, the hot sun and salt smells of the
Pacific – Pablo Neruda set these joyfully sensual poems of the sea, in celebration of
his love. These poems are at times passionate and at other times peaceful. They offer
the readers, the view of the endless sea and the pulse of the waves. Neruda offered his
inapproximately named sonnets to his beloved wife, Matilde Urrutia. He states in a
letter to her: “All for those eyes I adore and of which I sing . . . I deliver to you these
one hundred sonnets of wood that rose up only because you gave them life.”
Poetry is a mode of communication that mediates between Neruda, his
experience and the world, as well as between him and society and between society
and the world. But throughout there is the clear presence of the personal “I” of the
poet, so that in the end it is the poet himself and only implicit poetry, which mediates
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between “freedom and the sea” and “the shrouded heart.” In “The Poet‟s Obligation,”
Neruda spells the vibrant power of the sea and awakens man to listen to the sea:
To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or dry prison cell,
to him I come and without speaking or looking
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a long rumble of thunder adds itself
to the weight of the planet and the foam,
the groaning rivers of the ocean rise,
the star vibrates quickly in its corona
and the sea beats, dies and goes on beating. (1-12)
Neruda states in “I am surrounded by the Sea”: “We are salty oh, table of
mine, pants of mine, soul of mine, we are turning into salt” (8). His lyric is enormous,
just like the Pacific Ocean that he loved so much. Neruda articulates the mysterious
relationship between man and nature as he experiences and understands it through Isla
Negra. His various envisioning of the sea, meditate on a most profound and simple
truth – that human kind is a tiny and finite part of a limitless and continually
procreating force.
Neruda uses the sea as a symbol of the overflowing ceaselessly birthing,
eternal and indifferent primordial force in which all men live. He loved the sea and
everything about it: sand, ships in bottle, figure heads of beautiful maidens form the
prows of ships and seashells. The poems of the sea bring out the best and the juiciest
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poems, capturing, defining moments, projecting Neruda‟s one voice, one rhythm, one
song and one thought of universality.