Pablo Neruda, As young poet.

Here I am presenting a paper on critical work on select poems by Pablo Neruda, where I have selected two poems from Neruda’s first collection of poetry; “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”. Though this work I will try to put forward my views on Neruda’s poems, and will also work on the themes and the stylistic feature used by Neruda in constructing these poems. Finally I will also try to study the background of the poem and the poet, so that by the end of this work one can create or have an opinion on Neruda’s poetry.  

Introduction:  Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto born on 12 July 1904 and died on 23 September 1973 is better known by his pen name Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 10 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language", and Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.

Neruda composed his first poems in the winter of 1914,(when he was 10), his father Carmen Reyes Morales, opposed his son's interest in writing and literature, but he received encouragement from others, including the future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed the local school. On July 18, 1917, at the age of thirteen, he published his first work, an essay titled "Entusiasmo y perseverancia" ("Enthusiasm and Perseverance") in the local daily newspaper La Mañana, and signed it Neftalí Reyes. In 1919, he participated in the literary contest Juegos Florales Del Maule and won third place for his poem "Comunión ideal" or "Nocturno ideal". By mid-1920, when he adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poems, prose, and journalism. He is thought to have derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda. The young poet's intention in publishing under a pseudonym was to avoid his father's disapproval of his poems.

Tonight I Can Write…

This poem is the twentieth in the collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair published in 1924. It was and still continues to be an international favorite, especially among young readers. It is a simple lyrical composition in free meter in which the poet talks of a heartbreak which he finds difficult to come to terms with as the hurt is still fresh. The inspiration behind the collection is his romantic relationship with Rosa Albertina Azocar whom he met in 1921 at the University of Chile. The title of the poem cues us to Neruda’s emotional turmoil. The word “can” and the ellipsis (…) in the title are significant to show the sentiment which the poem describes is neither final nor precise. The poem begins with a claim by the young poet that he could write an extremely melancholic poem by painting everything bleak. He explains that he could do this by describing the night as “shattered” and the disquietude amplified by the stars that seem to quiver and scatter in the sky. The stars are blue because they appear alone and the distance adds to their isolation. The poem shifts alternatively from subjective introspection to a description of the outside weather which mirrors his emotional state. Further he tells us that the love that they had shared was heady but a passing fancy: “I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too”, and later “She loved me, sometimes I love her too”. Between these two observations the poet tells us that he misses the shared intimacies. The poem implies that their relationship lacked maturity and steadiness. The description of the girl’s eyes as “her great still eyes” suggests a complete absorption in the moment and mysteriousness; it also hints at her shallowness and lack of passion. Images of/from nature are used to capture an emotional state which can only be felt.. Neruda says that loneliness colors his life like the deafening silence of the night which is rendered alliteratively – “To hear the immense night, still more immense without her”. The only balm to his overwhelming sadness is his ability to compose poetry which helps him face his inner disquietude: “And verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture”.

The poem uses repetition to create an echo of memories. The “shiver” of the stars resounds in the “shattered” night to suggest fragmentation and fracture. The word “distance” is used thrice in the poem and in context to subjects removed from immediate spatial/ auditory vicinity to create a paradoxical image which suggests that the painful experience though no longer central to the poet’s present continues to traumatize him. He feels incomplete without his sweetheart.

An undercurrent of irony runs through the poem. The poet realizes that the exuberance of youthful romance is short lived. Young lovers grow out of love as time passes. The paradox that the poem builds on is the bittersweet truth that memories never die even though the relationship does. The young poet is haunted by the intimacies he and his sweetheart shared, and feels sad over her betrayal and the breach of his trust in her. Regret and nostalgia overwhelm him and he writes emotionally, “Another's. She will be loved by another’s”. Despite being distanced in time and physically from his beloved he is unable to cork a surge of memories that make him realize that he continues to miss her: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long”. The poem ends on a note of loneliness where the young lover realizes that his memories continue to haunt him and he will never ever have his love back. The poem ends on a heart wrenching nostalgic note –

“Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again under the endless sky”.

Poem XIII: I Have Gone Making From the very title of the poem one can state that the poet is in desperate need for a partner, here the speaker is out hunting for someone to love and is willing to lure the lover in possibly by seduction.  
This is a poem written in the traditional quatrain form for the first four stanzas with a 6 liner as the final stanza. But by using the imperfect “I loved", he is suggesting that his love for this girl lasted over a period of time in his past. By this device, Neruda is cunningly suggesting that his relation with that part of his life in the past involving that girl is not as cut and dry as it first appears to be or as he would have liked.

A swan, a tree, something far away and happy. The season of grapes, the ripe and fruitful season.”(7-8) The subjunctive form suggests the narrator’s uncertainty about his subjective interpretation of the state of the girl! Then this ambiguity is further implied and confirmed by the next line "a swan, a tree" two completely different conception of the girl. One is a more passive plant, which must stay put on the ground and wait for its fruits to be picked and the other is a peaceful, beautiful and powerful bird which may fly long distances in search of warm weather and better living conditions. And again there is another ambiguity in the next line. Time for grapes, time hard and fruitful. Time for grapes may refer to harvest time when the grapes are ripe for picking. If so, its reference is more to the narrator than to the girl. It is time for grapes for the narrator. He shall harvest the ripe grapes. I do not need to suggest the connotation of grapes in terms of its shape. But it is also a time when one must exert himself: it is hard yet it is fruitful. Then further the writer writes I who lived in a harbour from which I loved you.(9-10). By the using “from”, Neruda is suggesting that the narrator regarded the point of reference in the narrator’s subjective time frame is the period when he started to love the girl. The poem ends on a happy note, where the poet is happy for his love has attain the emotional stage, here he is happy for their relationship has finally reached its highest point. This brings back the passionate mood of feeling happy about his relationship with his lover like in the beginning of the poem.

 “Sing, burn, flee, like a belfry at the hands of a madman.

My sad tenderness, what comes over you all at once?

When I have reached the most awesome and the coldest summit

my heart closes like a nocturnal flower.” 

In conclusion I want to say that Pablo Neruda was an excellent poet, who at the early Twenty published his first collection of poetry, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and this collection has some heart melting poems, which makes it difficult to believe that is was by such young poet. One more thing that I have notice in this collection is, one can see different stages of love in this collection that is, the first poem Body of a woman where Pablo’s emotions were driven by lust, where he is appreciating his beloved’s physical beauty. Then in the next three poems we can he has reached the next second stage of infatuation. Then comes the third stage of impression, where the guy focuses on getting the girl to like him; in poem ‘So that you will hear me’, where he want everything to more together to help him show her how he loves her. Then come the stage where both realises that they are more than friends, poems 7-10. After this comes Sexual stage poems 11-13, then comes Trust stage, poems 1417, followed by Spiritual stage 18-19, and finally Break up, when he wrote ‘Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Line’  and finally the post Break-up stage, where he is trying to show his despair and wrote, Song of Despair.