The poetic universe of Pablo Neruda

Continued from last week

This collection of poems grew out of his intensely felt personal anguish and rapture.

Speaking of this volume of poetry, remarked that, ‘Ten years of lonely work, ten years that make up exactly half my life, having brought to my writing different rhythms, opposing literary styles. By fusing all of this, by weaving different styles, without finding something everlasting – because I know nothing lasts for ever – I have managed to create Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. These poems are as divergent as the unstoppable flow of thought/they are both bitter and sweet’.

Eighth, in this volume one can discern a clash of pastoral and urban values. I referred to this phenomenon very briefly earlier on. This slender volume of poetry is organised around two women – Marisol and Marisombra. The first who is from the rural area represents pastoral beauty, tranquility and meditation. He says

Wide open pine groves, the noise of
waves breaking ashore
Slow interplay of lights. Lonely bell,
The sunset falling into your eye

She has inspired half the poems in this collection; the other ten points have been stimulated by Marisombra who his from the city. (This country/city duality is very familiar to readers of early modern Sinhala poetry and early popular Sinhala cinema).

Two commentators on Neruda’s poetry, Manuel Duran and Margery Safir claim that, ‘the interplay between the county woman and the city woman is symbolically represented through images of light and darkness.

It is indeed this interplay that invests the book with its unmistakable texture and density.

Dual tone

This interaction also serves to give the volume a dual tone, a complex emotional pulsation that an engagement with a unitary subject may not have been able to do’.

Twenty Love Poems, then, is a remarkable volume of poetry by a twenty year old young man. It captures his anguish and ecstasies through evocative images.

It is a celebration of youthful love in its cycle of anxieties and raptures as it seeks to move beyond itself. The poet has inordinate faith in his senses to transform his experiences into images and the images into voice. In Neruda’s love poems the certitudes of reason are successfully challenged by the splendors of the imagination..

This volume appealed to a group of readers who were weary and dismayed after World War I; it introduced into Latin American poetry a new combination of eroticism, natural beauty and cosmological imagination.

Three L’s, it seems to me, dominate the collection – Love, Lust and Loneliness. This volume, then, marks an important stage in the growth of Pablo Neruda as a poet.

Next I wish to focus on the collections of poetry that are referred to as the Residence Cycle. It consists of three books, Residence on Earth 1, Residence on Earth 2 and Third Residence.

Residence 1 and 2 share many affinities of interest both thematically and stylistically, while Third Residence opens up to newer and more public-oriented themes.

Residence 1 covers a period of six years from 1925-1931 and Residence 2 a period of four years from 1931-1935.

The third volume deals with a period of ten years - from 1935-1945. Many of the poems contained in the first volume were written in Asia – Rangoon and Colombo- although some of them may have had their origin prior to his visit to Asia.

A large number of the poems contained in the first two volumes deal with the themes of decay, disintegration, chaos, alienation, solitude and even nihilism. In a letter to written to a friend of his from Colombo on April 24, 1929, he states that, ‘I have surrounded myself with a certain secret atmosphere and I suffer horribly to articulate something, even to myself, as if no word could represent me and I suffer enormously because of it.’

The sense of alienation experienced in foreign topographies intensified his darkened mood. In that letter sent to his friend from Colombo he remarked, ‘Endi, there is no one more alone than I. I take stray dogs to keep company, but then they leave me, ungrateful wretches.’

Passages such as the following, taken from different poems gathered in Residence 1, attest to this fact.

I work silently, wheeling over myself,
Like the crow over death, the crow in the mourning.
I think, isolated in the expanse of the seasons,
Central, surrounded by silent geography.
I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and tomb.
Alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
Half frozen, dying of grief.
It so happens I am sick of my feet and my nails
And my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

It is indeed true that the sense of alienation and loneliness experienced by Neruda in this period had much to do with the dark and somber tone audible in many of these poems. However, this is not the only factor in the equation. During this period, after Word War I, there was evident in the literature produced in Europe some of these dark imaginings. Neruda followed avidly the developments in Europe, so that the ideas of decay, disorientation and chaos encountered in his poems have an important link to certain trends in European literature as well.

Contrary to the beliefs expressed by many literary critics, I do not think that these poems are totally pessimistic. Many of these poems deal with the inexorability of time, how time determines human life. However, it seems to me, Neruda is presenting a complex argument about time and selfhood. What Neruda is seeking to do, in my judgment, is to demonstrate the stranglehold that time has on selfhood and how the self might escape the clutches of time.

Central theme

Time is a central theme in the three volumes comprising the Residence cycle. The term residence in the titles is time-bound and time-laden; most often, it signals a temporary stay. It is the intention of Neruda to overcome the limiting power of time through poetic textuality. In other words, these poems, which basically assume the form of memories, are a way of transcending the negative effects of time. In that sense, contrary to what most critics say, Neruda’s poems are not totally pessimistic

The poems gathered in the Residence cycle are interesting from the point of view of style and technique as well. Notions of decay, disorientation, discontinuity and chaos are often the subject-matter of the poems.

And this subject matter finds expression in the style and the techniques deployed as well. The audacious images, rhythmic variations, enjambment of words, fragmented syntax all serve to capture that frame of mind. A poem like ‘Ars Poetica’, with its complex imagery and willed obscurity, illustrates this point.

Between shadow and space, between trimmings and damsels,
Endowed with a singular heart and sorrowful dreams,
Precipitously pallid, withered in the brow,
And with a furious widower’s mourning for each day of life,
Ah, for each invisible water that I drink somnolently
And from every sound that I welcome trembling
I have the same absent thirst and the same cold fever

Residence on Earth 1 and 2 share many features in common, although there are certain noticeable differences as well. Many of the poems contained in these two volumes deal with the problem of maintaining one’s sanity, ones equilibrium, in a highly oppressive and decaying world.

His imagers serve to capture the alienation, loneliness, claustrophobia and self-loathing. The third volume in the cycle, The Third Residence by contrast, reflects the author’s desire to break out of that restrictive and self-diminishing frame of mind into one which engages his passions related to social and political issues. His experiences in Spain had much to do with this transformation. With this collection a distinct note of political urgency enters his work which was to find fuller articulation in his book Canto General. The Spanish civil war, the effects of World War I and other social upheavals were beginning to shape and challenge his imagination. His ardor began to burn with a new-found interest in public issues.

With eyes still wounded by sleep,
With guns and stones, Madrid,
newly wounded,
You defend yourself. You ran
Through the streets
Leaving trails of your holy blood

This is another representative
passage.
For from so many bodies an
invisible life
Arises. Mothers, flags, sons
A single body alive as life.
One face of broken eyes watches
the darkness
Like a sword filled with terrestrial
hope

The three volumes of poetry, Residence on Earth 1 and 2, and The Third Residence, then, mark an important stage in the evolution of Pablo Neruda as a poet. The eroticism and celebration of life and love gave way to a kind of alienation, loneliness and misery and that in turn yielded to a form of socially engaged and politically-oriented public poetry.

To be continued