The poetic universe of Pablo Neruda

[Part 2]

The fourth feature that lends distinctiveness to twenty love poems is the author’s characteristic way of handling nature. Indeed, this is a feature that marks much of his later poetry as well.

He sees a close and mutually constitutive relationship between human beings and nature.

As Christina Garcia says, ‘Neruda trusts and celebrates his sense and inextricably links his experiences, quite specifically to the natural world he loves; to the damp forests of Southern Chile, to the thick gnarled toots of the pines deeply penetrating the earth, to the lonely rains that that occluded the sun and cast the world through its fine veils; to the roiling rivers and seas that brought renewal and hope and sometimes destruction.’

She goes on to make the point that for Neruda, the tautly woven web of nature symbolism assume the status of a template by which he could make greater sense of his life as well as probe the intersections of the material and spiritual worlds.

Neruda had a remarkable ability to fuse the natural and human worlds into a seamless unity through his evocative language and imagery.

Passages such as the following bear witness to this fact.
Ah vastness of pines, murmur if
waves breaking
Slow play of lights, solitary bell,
Twilight falling in your eyes, toy doll,
Earth-shell, in whom the earth sings.
Emotional world

This feature marks much of his poetry. Fifth, although some of his poems may appear to be obscure, Neruda always had in his sights the world of the common man – his material and emotional world were the spaces that he wish to illuminate. Through this conjunction he sought to direct the gaze of the reader to larger causes, undiminished by egoism, manipulation and pettiness and underscore the inevitability of transfigurations in life as in nature.

My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.
The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
Want to sing your name with their eaves of wire.

Sixth, it is my belief that Pablo Neruda’s poetry bears the impress of what I term a cosmological imagination. I said earlier that he fuses the natural and human worlds into a seamless unity.

His imagination, however, is not satisfied with that. It wishes to go further and rise above the limitations imposed by the phenomenal world. This fact is evident in his metaphors. In this regard, I have always felt that there is a kinship between Neruda’s and Tagore’s poetry. To be sure, they come out of different traditions; Neruda displays the power if European pantheistic thinking while Tagore draws on Rig Vedic poetry and Upanishadic thinking. However there are similarities as well.

It is indeed interesting to observe that the sixteenth love poem in Twenty Love Poems, titled ‘In My Sky at Night’, is a paraphrase of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Gardener. This is how Neruda’s poem ends.

You are taken in the net of my music. my love
And my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the sore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begins

Spiritual worlds

The cosmological imagination, that in my view, both Tagore and Neruda favoured grows out of their desire to perceive a unity in the natural, human and spiritual worlds.

Seventh, Neruda sought to address the reader directly finding a common space between the poet and reader. There are very few obscure literary allusions in his poetry. He sought to deploy ordinary language and create rich and tangled metaphors on the basis of that. His poetry is a blending of the common language and uncommon imagery. As one critic observed, Neruda was from the beginning to end a sophisticated peasant. He appealed t imagination and intuition rather than to cognition and logic. Or to phrase it differently, his logic was essentially a poetic as is attested to by passages such as the following.

Between the lips and the voice something goes on dying
Something with the wings of a bird, something made of anguish ad oblivion
The way nets cannot hold water.

Neruda wrote Twenty Love Poems at the age of twenty, and it has exercised a global influence in a way that no other collection of modern love poems has. By all accounts, Neruda is the most widely translated modern poet.

To be continued