The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda wrote the kind of poetry that all poets hope to some day write. He captured the excitement of falling in love, the raw emotion of a passion that lasts many years and the devastating tragedy of love lost. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Veinte Poemas De Amor Y Una Cancion Desesperada) is a collection of poems chronicling two of Neruda’s relationships when he was a young man and ends with a poem describing the anger and desperation of losing a woman he loved.

The first time I heard Neruda’s poetry was in a song. The band had put the words to the twentieth poem in the book, “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines,” to music. The first line of the song was “El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.” which translates to “The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.” These words intrigued me. I looked up the entire poem and saw that it was about a poet who had decided that tonight he would write the last poem about the woman who had left him, and that writing the poem would also be the last pain she ever caused him.

This is the kind of poem that made me love Pablo Neruda. The other poems in the book are incredibly moving, each more so than the last. Neruda achieves this deep emotion by sometimes coming right out and saying what he means, such as in the fifteenth poem when we writes “I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent, distant and full of sorrow as though you had died. One word then, one smile is enough. And I am happy, happy that it is not true.” Other times he uses metaphors that show us exactly how he feels towards the woman, as in the same poem when he writes “And let me talk to you with your silence that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring. You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations. Your silence is like that of a star, remote and candid.”

Neruda’s poetry is filled with details of everyday life that with his descriptive language and unique word choices are made beautiful. In poem ten Neruda recalls thinking about his love when she is not with him, “Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away? The book fell that is always turned to at twilight and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.” Like most translated works, the poems flow more in their original Spanish, but even when translated to English are felt with full force.

The last poem in the book, the Song of Despair, is possibly the most moving, and certainly the most heartbreaking. At the beginning Neruda writes that the memory of the woman “emerges from the night around me” and then laments that he feels “Deserted like the wharves at dawn.” His passion seems to be exploding in this final poem, the final chapter of his love with this woman. He seems to be screaming at her, or possibly at himself, when he says “Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank!” The poem is finished with Neruda feeling lost and deserted and he says “It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one.”

In today’s world of fast food, instant messaging, and instant gratification, poetry stands out as one thing that isn’t afraid to take a long time to explain something. The author uses rich details and description to describe not only actions but also the emotions that go along with these actions.

Despite my attempt at explaining just some of the things that make Pablo Neruda’s poetry worth reading, it is hard to describe exactly why people should read his Twenty Love Poems And A Song Of Despair, perhaps it is something you can only understand from reading them yourself.