The poetic universe of Pablo Neruda

Continued from June 30

It is the way in which he subjects the reader to the flow of a diversity of metaphors and establishes a tone of easy familiarity that constitutes a distinct feature of these poems. At the same time they have their source in deeply felt experiences. Neruda remarked, ‘I have never uttered insincere words of love. I could not have written a single line that departed from the truth.’ Here when he says truth, I believe, he is referencing emotional truth.

Neruda has a rare ability to situate erotic love in the phenomenal world with its play of light and darkness. The concluding lines of his poem, ‘Leaning into the Afternoons’, testify to this fact.

You keep only darkness, my distant female, from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets to the sea that bears on your marine eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare shedding blue tassels over the land.

As I stated earlier Twenty Love poems marks an important stage in the growth of Neruda as a poet; it also signifies a newer development in modern Latin American poetry. On the basis of my reading, I wish to make six important points regarding this book. First, the idea of love, as the title suggests, is central to the intent of this slender volume.

The poems chart a course from initial infatuation and eruption of passion into sadness and melancholia. His love is almost always encompassed within the pulsations of nature. As his published letters indicate, twenty love poems are addressed to two different women, Marisol and Marisombra; the one represents the tranquility of pastoral life and the other the chaos of urban living. The structure of the book and the tropes deployed attest to this fact. The poem ends in melancholy, in a farewell.

In the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all timetables
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate
Dressed like the wharves at dawn
only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

Second, the idea of body, especially the female body, is crucial to the poetic discourses of these compositions. The body of the beloved is superimposed in fascinating ways on the landscape. He was able to listen with an inward ear to the desires of the body. His poetry announces a somatic imagination of a rare order. The very first poem in the collection titled, ‘Body of a Woman’ opens with the lines

Body of a woman, white hills, while thighs, you look like a world, lying in surrender.
Similarly, the poem titled ah vastness of pines. Opens with the stanza

‘Ah vastness of pines, murmur of waves breaking, slow play of lights, solitary bell, twilight falling n your eyes, toy doll, earth-shell, in whom the earth sings!

In Neruda’s poetry the body gains definition through nature and nature gains definition through the female body. The sensual body clears a space for deepening of awareness and sharpening of understanding of the reader.

Third, in these poems there is a pronounced yearning for union, union between poet and his beloved. This becomes the driving force of the poetic labor. It is encouraged by the glories of nature that Neruda captures so expertly. At the same time, as the concluding poems in the collection exemplifies, it is an impossible ideal. The poet initially sees as the beloved as a means of survival, even redemption.

I was alone in the tunnel. The birds led from me.
And night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon
Like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling
However, as the poems unfold it becomes evident that it has become an unattainable goal.
This was my destiny and it was the voyage of my longing
And in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

The woman becomes even a destructive force, and this theme is further developed in his book Residence of the Earth 1. Some literary critics, understandably, object to this misogynistic attitude to women.

The compositions gathered in Twenty Love Poems have their origin in deeply felt experience, and the poet expects the reader to appreciate this fact.

As he once remarked, ‘In the house of poetry, nothing remains except that which was written with blood to be listened to by blood.’ With this book of poems written at so young an age, I wish to argue, Neruda was able to alter the landscape of love poetry ineffaceably.

To be continued