Analysis of Pablo Neruda's poem -

'Las Alturas de Machu Picchu' :

Part 2

'The Heights of Machu Picchu' is a long narrative poem forming book 2 of Pablo Neruda's monumental choral epic, Canto general (general poem), a text comprising 250 poems and organized into twelve major divisions, or cantos. The theme of Canto general is humankind's struggle for justice in the New World. 'The Heights of Machu Picchu' is divided into twelve sections, the first six of which was reviewed in last week's column.

The poet, adopting the persona of the native South American man, walks among the ruins of the great Inca city Machu Picchu. It is a poem of symbolic death and resurrection in which the speaker begins as a lonely traveller and ends with a full commitment to the American indigenous people, their Indian roots, their past and their future. This week's column (Part 2) will examine the final six sections of the poem.

VII

You dead of single abyss, shadows of one ravine,

the deepest, thus on a scale with your greatness there came

the true, the most consuming death and from the drilled-out rocks,

from the red-topped columns,

from the laddered aqueducts

you plummeted as in autumn

to one sole death.

Today the empty air does not weep,

is not familiar with your clayey feet,

forgets your pitchers that filtered the sky

when knives of lightning spilled it out,

and eaten by mist the might

tree was cut down by gusts.

It held up a hand that fell suddenly

down from the height to the end of time.

You're no more now, spidery hands, frail

fibers, entangled web-

whatever you were fell away: customs, frayed

syllables, masks of dazzling light.

Yet a permanence of stone and word,

the city like a bowl, rose up in the hands

of all, living, dead, silenced, sustained,

a wall out of so much death, out of so much life a shock

of stone petals: the permanent rose, the dwelling place:

the glacial outposts on this Andean reef.

When the clay-colored hand

turned to clay and the eyes' small lids fell shut,

filled with rugged walls, crowded with castles,

and when man lay all tangled in his hole,

there remained an upraised exactitude:

the high site of the human dawn:

the highest vessel that held silence in:

a life of stone after so many lives.

Section 7 picks up the contrast between what endures and what has vanished. The speaker sees 'the true, the most consuming death' as having slain those ancient men; their death being nobler because it was a collective experience. What they left behind was their citadel 'raised like a chalice in all those hands,' their blood to make 'a life of stone.' The speaker believes that he can 'identify' with the absolute 'Death' he finds on the heights. Yet his search for this death has also been a search for a more positive kind of identity and for identification through nature with his fellowmen. The speaker's journey teaches him (more by means of feeling than by means of thought) to see new facets of the truth, both about himself and about the nature of existence. The journey does not end, however, with the discovery of the city.

VIII

Climb up with me, American love.

Kiss the secret stones with me.

The torrential silver of the Urubamba

sends pollen flying to its yellow cup.

The empty vine goes flying,

the stony plant, the stiff garland

over the silent mountain gorge.

Come, miniscule life, between the wings

of the earth, while-crystal and cold, a buffeted air

dividing the clash of emeralds-

oh wild water you come down from the snow.

Love, love, until the sudden night,

from the Andes'ringing flintstone,

to the red knees of dawn,

study the blind child of the snow.

Oh Wilkamayu of resonant threads,

when you shatter your bands of thunder

into white spume, like wounded snow,

when your steep gale

sings and slashes arousing the sky,

what language do you bring to the ear

barely uprooted from your Andean foam?

Who seized the lightning of the cold

and left it chained on the heights,

split into its chilling tears,

shaken in its rapid swords,

beating its war-worn stamens,

borne on its warrior bed,

stormed in its rock-bound end?

What do your tormented flashings say?

Your secret insurgent lighting-did it

once travel thronging with words?

Who goes on crushing frozen syllables,

black languages, banners of gold,

bottomless mouths, throttled shouts,

in your slender arterial waters?

Who goes clipping floral eyelids

that come to gaze from the earth?

Who hurls the dead stalks down

that drop in your cascading hands

to thresh their threshed-out night

in geologic coal?

Who flings down the linking branch?

Who yet again buries farewells?

Love, love, do not touch the brink

or worship the sunken head:

let time extend full span

in its hall of broken wellsprings,

and between ramparts and rapid water

gather the air in the pass,

the wind's parallel plating,

the blind channel of the cordillera,

the bitter greeting of the dew,

and climb through the denseness flower by flower,

trampling the serpent flung to earth.

In this cliff-hung region, stone and forest,

dust of green stars, jungle clarity,

Mantur breaks out like a living lake

or a new ledge of silence.

Come to my very being, to my own dawn,

up to the crowning solitude.

The dead realm lives on still.

And across the Sundial like a black ship

the ravening shadow of the condor cruises.

The speaker's hopeful mood lasts through poem eight and nine. This eighth poem, with its vivid evocation of nature, pre-Columbian man, and his gods all fused together in an all-embracing love that the poet summons up from the past to transform the present and to anticipate the future.

IX

Sidereal eagle, vineyard of mist.

Bulwark lost, blind scimitar.

Starred belt, sacred bread.

Torrential ladder, giant eyelid.

Triangled tunic, pollen of stone.

Granite lamp, bread of stone.

Mineral serpent, rose of stone.

Buried ship, wellspring of stone.

Lunar horse, light of stone.

Equinox square, vapor of stone.

Final geometry, book of stone.

Iceberg carved by the squalls.

Coral of sunken time.

Rampart smoothed by fingers.

Rood struck by feathers.

Branching of mirrors, ground of tempests.

Thrones overturned by twining weeds.

Rule of the ravenous claw.

Gale sustained on the slope.

Immobile turquoise cataract.

Sleepers' patriarchal bell.

Collar of subjected snows.

Iron lying on its statues.

Inaccessible storm sealed off.

Puma hands, bloodthirsty rock.

Shading tower, dispute of snow.

Night raised in fingers and roots.

Window in the mist, hardened dove.

Nocturnal plant, statue of thunder.

Root of the cordillera, roof of the sea.

Architecture of lost eagles.

Cord of the sky, bee of the heights.

Bloodstained level, constructed star.

Mineral bubble, moon of quartz.

Andean serpent, brow of amaranth.

Dome of silence, purebred homeland.

Bride of the sea, cathedral tree.

Salt branch, blackwinged cherry tree.

Snowswept teeth, cold thunder.

Scraped moon, menacing stone.

Crest of the cold, pull of the air.

Volcano of hands, dark cataract.

Silver wave, direction of time.

In this ninth poem, a solemn chant, the speaker builds up to the final two lines that bring the reader back to the ancient men who built the citadel and to the passing of time.

X

Stone upon stone, and man, where was he?

Air upon air, and man, where was he?

Time upon time, and man, where was he?

Were you too then the broken bit

of half-spent humankind, an empty eagle, that

through the streets today, through footsteps,

through the dead autumn's leaves,

keeps crushing its soul until the grave?

The meager hand, the foot, the meager life . . .

Did the days of unraveled light

in you, like rain

on pennants at festival,

give off their dark food petal by petal

into your empty mouth?

Hunger, coral of humankind,

hunger, hidden plant, root of the woodcutter,

hunger, did your reef-edge climb

to these high and ruinous towers?

I question you, salt of the roads,

show me the trowel; architecture, let me

grind stone stamens with a stick,

climb every step of air up to the void,

scrape in the womb till I touch man.

Macchu Picchu, did you set

stone upon stone on a base of rags?

Coal over coal and at bottom, tears?

Fire on the gold and within it, trembling, the red

splash of blood?

Give me back the slave you buried!

Shake from the earth the hard bread

of the poor, show me the servant's

clothes and his window.

Tell me how he slept while he lived.

Tell me if his sleep

was snoring, gaping like a black hole

that weariness dug in the wall.

The wall, the wall! If every course of stone

weighed down his sleep, and if he fell underneath

as under a moon, with his sleep!

Ancient America, sunken bride,

your fingers too,

leaving the jungle for the empty height of the gods,

under bridal banners of light and reverence,

blending with thunder from the drums and lances,

yours, your fingers too,

those that the abstract rose and rim of cold, the

bloodstained body of the new grain bore up

to a web of radiant matter, to the hardened hollows,

you too, buried America, did you keep in the deepest part

of your bitter gut, like an eagle, hunger?

The poem's last major turning point comes with the question with which the tenth section opens: 'Stone within stone, and man, where was he?' The speaker speculates about whether the people who built ancient America may not have been similar to modern urban people and whether the citadel may have been erected upon a base of human suffering. The speaker wonders in what conditions these people (possibly slaves) lived.

XI

Through the dazing splendor,

through the night of stone, let me plunge my hand

and let there beat in me, like a bird a thousand years

imprisoned,

the old forgotten human heart!

Let me forget today this joy this is broader than the sea,

because man is broader than sea and islands

and we must fall in him as in a well to rise from the bottom

with a branch of secret water and sunken truths.

Let me forget, broad stone, the sovereign symmetry,

transcendent measure, honeycombed stones,

and from the square edge let me this day slide

my hand down the hypotenuse of haircloth and

bitter blood.

When, like a horseshoe of red-cased wings,

the furious condor

hammers my temples in the order of flight

and the hurricane's blood-dipped feathers sweep

the dark dust

on diagonal stairways, I see not the swift beast,

not the blind cycling of its claws,

I see the ancient human, a human slave, sleeping

in the fields, I see one body, a thousand bodies, a man, a P>thousand women under black gusts, blackened by rain

and night, with the stonework's massive carving:

Jack Stonebreaker, son of Wiracocha, P>Jack Coldbiter, son of the green star,

Jack Barefoot, grandson of the turquoise,

Rise to be born with me, brother.

In the eleventh section, the speaker attempts to go beyond the maze of physical matter until he can hold 'the old unremembered human heart' in his hand, seeing behind the 'transcendental span' of Machu Picchu to the invisible 'hypotenuse of hairshirt and salt blood' implied by the geometry of those ruins. The speaker concludes that humankind is what matters because 'man is wider than all the sea'. The poet wishes to acknowledge all the people who died building this city so that they may be reborn with him and through them as his 'brothers.' At this point, the poet uses clear religious symbolism with the urge to rise again to new life.

XII

Rise to be born with me, brother.

Give me your hand out of the deep

region seeded by all your grief.

You won't come back from bottom rock.

You won't come back from time under ground.

No coming back with your hardened voice.

No coming back with your drilled-out eyes.

Look at me from the bottom of earth,

plowman , weaver, voiceless shepherd:

trainer of guardian llamas:

mason on a dangerous scaffold:

water-bearer of Andean tears:

goldsmith with fingers bruised:

farmer trembling over the seed:

potter spilled on your clay:

bring all your age-old buried

griefs to the cup of this new life.

Show me your blood and your furrow,

say to me: here I was punished

when a gem didn't shine or the earth

give forth its stone or grain on time:

mark me the stone you stumbled on

and the wood they crucified you on,

strike light for me from your old flints,

the ancient lamps, the whiplash stuck

within your wounds through centuries,

and the axes' brightness stained with blood.

I come to speak through your dead mouth.

All through the earth join all

the silent wasted lips

and speak from the depths to me all this long night

as if I were anchored here with you,

tell me everything, chain by chain,

link by link, and step by step,

file the knives you kept by you,

drive them into my chest and my hand

like a river of riving yellow light,

like a river where buried jaguars lie,

and let me weep, hours, days, years,

blind ages, stellar centuries.

Give me silence, water, hope.

Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.

Fasten your bodies to me like magnets.

Hasten to my veins to my mouth.

Speak through my words and my blood.

What really matters to the speaker at the end of the poem is that which his own experience has in common with the experience of other human beings. He also needs to reveal people to themselves in such a way that they can feel the identity behind their separate lives and share his insight. He longs for their stories to be told through his words, so that their lives continue to have significance.