Oral Presentation

Pablo Neruda [1904 - 1973]

Pablo Neruda was Latin America’s most prominent and prolific poetic voice whose
work has been translated into many languages. Critic and biographer Alistair Reid
has stated that Neruda is the most widely read poet since William Shakespeare
while Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez called him ‘the greatest poet of
the twentieth century – in any language’. He is even quoted in The Simpsons
episode ‘Bart Sells His Soul’:
Lisa: Hmm. Pablo Neruda said, "Laughter is the language of the soul."
Bart: I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.
He was not only a Nobel Prize winning poet: he was a diplomat in Asia, an
ambassador to France, a communist senator, a candidate for the presidency of
Chile, a political fugitive, and a winner of three international Peace Prizes. His
friends ranged from Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Arthur Miller, Che Guevara and
Salvador Allende to carpenters, fishermen and the common man in the street.

Neruda created romantic and epic poetry that captured the essence of Latin America. His love for his home country, Chile, burst forth in
images of the sea and the flora and fauna in his nature poetry. His simple words also inspired generations of lovers, celebrated everyday
human experience and objects, and gave voice to the struggles of peasants, miners and factory workers. He was a poet of the people: ‘I
have always wanted the hands of the people to be seen in poetry. I have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show. A poetry
of loam, where water can sing. A poetry of bread, where everyone may eat.’. Lover, lyrical poet, political activist, visionary, the voice of
the common man, Pablo Neruda speaks to today's concerns and all people:

‘There really is a Neruda for everyone, there’s Neruda the love poet, Neruda the surrealist poet, the poet of historical epic,
Neruda the political poet, Neruda the poet of common things, with the odes, the poet of sea and so on. But throughout it all, we
see with Neruda, first of all, a great compassion for other human beings, no matter which phase of his career we're talking
about. And secondly, a deep appreciation of the fact of being alive, which again we see at every stage for Neruda.’
Martin Espada

His body of poetry developed along four main directions: love poetry, the surreal poetry of Residencia en la tierra [1933], poetry calling
for social justice and finally his poetry about common, everyday objects, animals, and plants. In all his work, Neruda has an
extraordinary command over words, and a talent for a powerful and expressive use of language:
‘You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling
to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for
greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop...’ Pablo Neruda

Neruda's innovative techniques, range of subject matter [including a concern with politics and social issues], use of tight metaphors,
sensuous and elaborate imagery, interior rhyme, repetition, and alliteration, and the use of multiple points of view, have had a
revolutionizing influence on subsequent Chilean poetry and indeed all of Latin American literature. At his death, he left 34 books of
poems, essays, and drama in print as well as eight more volumes of poetry and a memoir which he had hoped to publish on his
seventieth birthday. His poetry covers a wide range of topics – love, hope, introspection, nature, history, society, death, isolation,
despair, politics – and exhibits a wide range of different modes of composition. Poetry was not, for Neruda, simply an expression of
emotions and personality:

‘Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions. The poet confronted
nature's phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation...Today's social poet is still a
member of the earliest order of priests. In the old days he made his pact with the darkness, and now he must interpret the light.’

However, it is the breathless, exhortative quality of his early love poetry, published when he was only twenty, as well as the rebellious
and somewhat romantic trajectory of his life – exile, love affairs, political struggle – that accounts for much of his popular following. The
1994 film Il Postino, which tells the story of a lonely postman who befriends Neruda (played by the French actor Philippe Noiret) in exile,
also did a lot to bolster the poet's popularity. His work was banned in Chile until 1990 under the Pinochet regime.

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A Guide to Analyzing Poems by David Coogan, Assistant Professor of English, Lewis Department of Humanities, Armour College,
Illinois
[Taken from Tribute to Pablo Neruda Educational Guide for Teachers prepared by DFW International for the 2004-2005 Tribute
[Link]]

Poems can sometimes mystify us. Other times they can affect us so strongly, we hardly know where to begin talking about what we felt,
heard, or understood from the poem. To get started, we usually ask ourselves “what did it mean?” but that question doesn’t always help.
It’s too general. It may help to break down the intent behind the question and ask ourselves “what has been said” and “how was it said”
and “why was it said in this particular way?” Here’s how.

1. Experience before you analyze. If you have seen the film about Neruda ‘Il Postino’, do like the postman Mario did: simply explain how
the poem makes you feel. Write it down. Then return to the text and identify the passages that made you feel this way.

2. Make a chronology of what happened in the poem so you can say it back to yourself. Why is it important that the lines appear in this
order and not in some other order? If you rearrange the lines or take away certain words or sections, what happens to the meaning of
the poem? Can you divide the poem into sections or movements?

3. What is the author’s attitude toward his subject? Does he offer any moral lessons, warnings, jokes, statements of truth, complaints, or
provocations? If so, what do they imply?

4. Describe the voice you hear in the poem. Is it angry, sad, impatient, jealous, exalted, wise, suspicious, or something else? Question
the poet’s choice of words — the diction and the vocabulary — and his line breaks. If you change the vocabulary or the break the lines
another way, can you change the voice or the intent of the poem?

5. Listen to the sounds of the language. An example of alliteration from ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’ in its English translation is “bandits
with black friars spattering blessings’. Do these sounds create any effects? If so, how do they guide your experience of the theme?

6. Explore the logic of the metaphors. Begin by separating the elements and defining them. Then ask yourself how one normally
experiences or understands each thing. Finally, put the metaphor back together again.

For example, in ‘Ode to the Seagull’, Neruda says to the seagull, ‘lift up / your emblem across / the shirt / of the cold firmament’.

Separating and defining the elements: An emblem is an object that functions like a symbol. We all know what a shirt is. And the
firmament is a fancy word for sky, the expanse of the heavens.

How do we normally experience/understand the elements? Normally, we see emblems in society, not in nature. And we wear shirts to
protect our body from the elements and to hide it from other people. And we don’t see firmaments. We see the sky.

Putting it all together. To say that the bird is an emblem is to say that the bird is functioning as a symbol. By placing this symbol in the
firmament, Neruda endows it with cosmic or heavenly significance. This, of course, fits the purpose of the odes — to praise common
things. But the seagull is not the only thing getting praised. Neruda places this symbol of heavenly wisdom on the ‘shirt of the cold
firmament’. By choosing to endow the heavens with this human quality (wearing a shirt), he seems to be saying that the heavens are
really here on earth: the mysteries of life are human mysteries that can be analysed from a human point of view, in this case, a person
watching a bird. Ultimately, what the person observes out there is not God but humanity.

7. Finally, return to your original question—what does the poem mean? Although individual poems will have individual meanings, they
will also share something in common with the author’s other work. In what ways is this poem like the author’s other poems you read?
To answer this question is to define the author’s poetics, where ‘poetics’ = what was said (content) + how it was said (form).

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 Studying Neruda’s poetry
Theme What is the poem’s message/ purpose/ ideas? What is the human impulse behind the poem [its intention]? Is it descriptive,
meditative, lyrical, didactic? Is it subjective, recapturing and shaping a significant personal experience, or does it offer a universal
comment about life/ human nature? Does it try to come to terms with an event/ experience or attempt to solve a problem/
dilemma? Does it express a point of view or an argument, or is an attempt to engage the reader emotionally?
Points of entry into the poem:
Title Comment on the effect of the title. Does it What is the speaker’s attitude to his subject matter?
complement the poem’s mood/ content/ theme, or is
there a difference between title and content? Tone – this is conveyed through most of the elements of diction,
imagery, sounds... and is to do with the feelings/ attitude of the
Tensions within the poem Most poems are crafted narrator towards the subject. The tone of voice might, be disappointed,
around a tension or contrast that gives them edge and bitter, melancholy, exuberant, compassionate, ironic ... There may also
interest, meaning and effect. Look for antitheses, be shifts in tone.
contrasts, opposite ideas/ words/ image clusters/
viewpoints. Mood - the emotion expressed by the poem as a whole [aggressive,
elegiac, joyful …]. There may be shifts in mood/ emotional atmosphere.
The tension might be a ‘problem’ that is resolved in the
course of the poem [or not].
Structure
Poet and date – biographical and historical details might ● the development of the ideas in the poem – linear, circular …?
help you put the poem in context Is there a turning point?
● Is it a sequence of images?
● closure [the end of the poem]?
Sounds Rhythm
● alliteration, sibilance [can be hushed/ ● cadence [movement of sentences/ pacing] - do sentences flow
whispering, hissing, splashing – depending on leisurely/ are they lilting? Or are they disjointed/ jolting? Are
the content], assonance, onomatopoeia; there many caesuras within lines? [commas, full stops, colons,
● long or short vowel sounds; dashes …]
● hard or soft consonant sounds; ● Are lines mainly end-stopped or is there enjambement?
● rhyme – end rhyme, internal rhyme; complete ● Syntax [order of words in the sentence]. Are particular words
rhyme, half rhyme [also called consonantal stressed/ foregrounded because of the rhythm? Note first and
rhyme]; eye rhyme [sight rhyme]; last words of lines
● repetition, anaphora, parallelism; ● type of sentences [declarative, interrogative, imperative,
● refrain exclamatory].
Diction Imagery
● key words ● the key images and their role in the poem
● individual words choices [lexis] and their ● [similes, metaphors, personification, pathetic fallacy];
connotations; word patterns ● Sensory imagery [visual/ aural/ tactile/ olfactory/ gustatory
● parts of speech - adjectives, verbs, nouns imagery, synaesthesia];
[abstract or concrete] ● allusions
● formal or colloquial? ● symbols
● compound words Verse form
● tenses [present, past, future, conditional …] ● type of poem [lyric, sonnet, free verse …];
● hyperbole; irony; oxymorons; anticlimax; ● stanza lengths [tercets, quatrains …]
bathos; euphemism; cliché; superlatives ● the shape of the poem - regular or irregular stanza length;
● literal or figurative diction? regular or irregular line length

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Potential Global issues in Neruda’s Poetry for Social Justice
● Exploitation
● Greed
● Corruption
● Destruction of Nature
● Totalitarianism/Oppression
● Capitalism vs. Socialism
● Violence/War/ Fear

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Poetry for Social Justice: Neruda, the Voice of the People

I’m Explaining a Few Things [1937], From Spain in my Heart, translated by Nathaniel Tarn
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds? 5

I'll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks and trees.
From there you could look out 10
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.

My house was called

the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was 15
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafael?
Federico, do you remember 20
from under the ground
do you remember my house with balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!

Everything 25
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons, 30
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish, 35
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down to the sea.

And one morning all that was burning, 40

one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on, 45
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
5
 came through the sky to kill children 50
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,

stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate! 55

Face to face with you I have seen the blood

of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous 60
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers, 65
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which you will one day find 70
in the house of the heart.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry

speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets, 75

come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!

Taken from Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems, edited by Nathaniel Tarn [Penguin Books, 1975, Translated by Anthony Kerrigan,
W.S. Merwin, Alastair Reid and Nathaniel Tarn] page 103

Questions for Discussion on ’I’m Explaining a Few Things’

1. Read the poem aloud, underlining words and phrases that ‘jump out’ at you for some reason. These heavily
charged words contribute to the overall tone of the poem.
2. How does the speaker in the poem feel about his subject matter? What words let you know his attitude?
3. For the second reading, read the stanzas aloud again, this time labeling the emotional tone of each stanza. Where
are there subtle and dramatic shifts in tone? Where is the most sudden shift in tone? Explain Neruda’s purpose in
creating the contrast in tone. What purpose does this serve, and how successful do you think it is?
4. To whom is this poem addressed?
5. What general statement(s) does Neruda seem to be making about war? About life? About flowers? About poetry?
Is the poem limited by its Spanish Civil War context or is it relevant to the bombing of any civilians [eg Madrid 2004,
Syria, 2013]?
6. If Neruda had only written the second half of the poem, and not described life in Argüelles before the war, how
would that change the poem?

6
 ‘The United Fruit Company’, translated by John Mitchell
[Link]/faculty/dean/Upload501B.../[Link] [accessed July 20 2013]

When the trumpet sounded

everything was prepared on earth,
and Jehovah gave the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other corporations. 5
The United Fruit Company
reserved for itself the most juicy
piece, the central coast of my world,
the delicate waist of America.

It rebaptized these countries 10

‘Banana Republics’,
and over the sleeping dead,
over the unquiet heroes
who won greatness,
freedom, and flags, 15
it established the comic opera:
it abolished free will,
gave out imperial crowns,
encouraged envy, attracted
the dictatorship of flies: 20
Trujillo flies, Tachos flies
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies sticky with
submissive blood and marmalade,
drunken flies that buzz over 25
the tombs of the people,
circus flies, wise flies
expert at tyranny.

With the bloodthirsty flies

came the Fruit Company, 30
ravaging coffee and fruits
in ships which put to sea like
overloaded trays with the treasures
from our sunken lands.

Meanwhile Indians collapsed 35

into the sugary abysses
of the harbours
and are buried in the
morning mists;
a corpse rolls, a thing without 40
name, a discarded number,
a bunch of rotten fruit
dumped in the rubbish heap.

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 ‘Standard Oil Company’, from Canto General, translated by Jack Schmitt
[Link]/.../standard-oil-co-by-pablo-neru, accessed 29 July 2013

When the drill bored down

toward the stony fissures
and plunged its implacable intestine
into the subterranean estates,
and dead years, eyes 5
of the ages, imprisoned
plants’ roots
and scaly systems
became strata of water,
fire shot up through the tubes 10
transformed into cold liquid,
in the custom house of the heights,
issuing from its world
of sinister depth,
it encountered a pale engineer 15
and a title deed.

However entangled the petroleum’s

arteries may be, however the layers
may change their silent site
and move their sovereignty 20
amid the earth’s bowels,
when the fountain gushes
its paraffin foliage,
Standard Oil arrived beforehand
with its checks and its guns, 25
with its governments and its prisoners.

Their obese emperors

from New York are suave
smiling assassins
who buy silk, nylon, cigars, 30
petty tyrants and dictators.

They buy countries, people, seas,

police, county councils,
distant regions where
the poor hoard their corn 35
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
The Paraguayan fights its war, 40
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun*.
A president assassinated
for a drop of petroleum,
a million-acre 45
mortgage, a swift
execution on a morning
mortal with light, petrified,
a new prison camp for
8
 subversives, in Patagonia, 50
a betrayal, scattered shots
beneath a petroliferous moon,
a subtle change of ministers
in the capital, a whisper
like an oil tide, 55
and zap, you’ll see
how Standard Oil’s letters
shine above the clouds,
above the seas, in your home,
illuminating their dominions. 60

*The Chaco War (1932-1935) was fought between the Republics of Bolivia and Paraguay over control of part of the Gran Chaco region
where oil had been discovered

● What is significant about how Neruda stages the encounter between the earth and ‘a pale engineer / and a title deed’? What
images does he use to signify the earth and how it is violated and exploited?
● What do you make of the temporal relation between the two verb phrases ‘However entangled the petroleum’s arteries may
be’ and ‘Standard Oil arrived beforehand’ in the second stanza? Is there dissonance that jars the reader? What is the value in
presenting events un-chronologically?
● Make a list of the phrases and metaphors used to describe foreign economic interests and powers and the Latin American
regions and resources they exploit. Are the relationships between them Manichean (representative only of good vs. evil)?
● Is the poem successful in representing the complex relations between Standard Oil and the Latin American companies it
operates in? Why or why not?

This next poem is not political in terms of opinions or propaganda. Instead, its language demonstrates the psychic landscape of an
unnamed South American country in a dictatorship. It works with surprising images to penetrate the cruel reality of political life under a
dictator. Without proclaiming a revolutionary message or sounding the call to action, it uses objects abstractly for the impact of their
overtones - that is, the associational values of words, and the social-political atmospheres that accumulate around them and that
communicate the feeling of what it is like to suffer a dictatorship.

‘The Dictators’ Translated by Robert Bly

[Link]/~spirko/[Link] accessed 26 July 2013

An odor has remained among the sugarcane:

a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles. 5
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times 10
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light. 15
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence

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 ‘In Vietnam’
from The Hands of Day [1967-68], translated by Ilan Stavans The Poetry of Pablo Neruda [Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 2003] page 774]

And who made war?

It’s been pounding since the day before yesterday.

I’m afraid.

It pounds like a stone

against the wall, 5
like thunder with blood,
like a dying mountain.
This is a world
I didn’t make.
You didn’t make it. 10
They made it.
Who threatens it with terrible fingers?
Who wants it decapitated?
Wasn’t it about to come into being?
And who kills it now it is born? 15

The cyclist is afraid,

so is the architect.
The mother with a child at her breasts
hides in the mud.
This mother sleeps in the cave and suddenly, 20
war,
war arrives big,
arrives full of fire
and already dead,
dead 25
are the mother and her milk and her son.

They died in the mud.

Oh pain! From then

till now,
should one stay covered in mud 30
up to the temples,
singing and shooting? Holy God!
If only you had been told
before you lived, almost before you lived…
If at least 35
they had whispered it
to your relatives and non-relatives,
children of love’s laughter,
children of human sperm,
of that fragrance 40
10
 in a new Monday and with a fresh shirt…
But they had to die so suddenly,
without ever knowing what it was all about!

They are the same ones

who come to kill us, 45
yes, the same ones
who come to burn us,
yes, the same ones,
the winners and the braggers,
the smiling ones who enjoyed so much 50
and took so much,
now
by air
they come, will come, they came,
to kill the world within us. 55

They have left a pool

made of father, mother and child.
Let us look
in it,
look for our own blood and bones, 60
look for them in the mud of Vietnam,
look for them among so many other bones;
they’re charred, they no longer belong to anyone
but to everyone,
our bones are burnt, 65
look for your death in that death,
because they are after you too,
and the fate they bring you is that selfsame mud.

‘Come with Me’

From A Call for the Destruction of Nixon and Praise for the Chilean Revolution,
translated by Teresa Anderson The Poetry of Pablo Neruda [Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003] page 829

For this reason I am here in your company:

for Chile, for her blue sovereignty,

for the ocean of fishermen,

for copper and the struggles in the office,

for the bread of nightingale children, 5

for the good companion and woman friend,

for the sea and the rose and ear of grain,

for our forgotten countrymen,

students, sailors and soldiers,

for the people of every land, 10

for the bells and the roots,

for the roads and the footpaths
that lead to the light of the whole world

and for the liberating will

11
 of red flags in the dawn. 15

All my happiness flows from this union.

Fight beside me and I will deliver to you

all the weapons of my poetry.

‘The Way Spain Was’ [1947]- translated by Jodey Bateman

From Third Residence, which Neruda had written when he was a member of the Communist Party of Chile.

Spain was a taut, dry drum-head 

Daily beating a dull thud 
Flatlands and eagle's nest 
Silence lashed by the storm. 
How much, to the point of weeping, in my soul  5
I love your hard soil, your poor bread, 
Your poor people, how much in the deep place 
Of my being there is still the lost flower 
Of your wrinkled villages, motionless in time 
And your metallic meadows  10
Stretched out in the moonlight through the ages, 
Now devoured by a false god. 

All your confinement, your animal isolation 

While you are still conscious 
Surrounded by the abstract stones of silence,  15
Your rough wine, your smooth wine 
Your violent and dangerous vineyards. 

Solar stone, pure among the regions 

Of the world, Spain streaked 
With blood and metal, blue and victorious  20
Proletarian Spain, made of petals and bullets 
Unique, alive, asleep - resounding.

‘Hunger in the South’ from Canto General [1950], translated by Jack Schmitt

Woe in the charcoals of Lota, I see:

The dishonored chileno in a black corrugation
Rifling the bitter recesses,
Dying or living, born to the pitiless cinder
In a posture of kneeling, felled 5
Between bogs and black powder,
As a world might create and undo itself,
For only a winter's survival of coughing,
Or the step of a horse through the pitch-colored water, where lately
The perishing knives of the stripped eucalyptus have fallen. 10

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 ‘The Men’ Translated by Alfred Yankauer

I'm Ramón González Barbagelata from anywhere,    

from Cucuy, from Paraná, from Rio Turbio, from Oruro,   
from Maracaibo, from Parral, from Ovalle, from Loconmilla,    
I'm the poor devil from the poor Third World,    
I'm the third-class passenger installed, good God!     5
in the lavish whiteness of snow-covered mountains,    
concealed among orchids of subtle idiosyncrasy.    

I've arrived at this famous year 2000, and what do I get? 

With what do I scratch myself? What do I have to do with    
the three glorious zeros that flaunt themselves     10
over my very own zero, my own non-existence?    
Pity that brave heart awaiting its call    
or the man enfolded by warmer love,    
nothing's left today except my flimsy skeleton,    
my eyes unhinged, confronting the era's beginning.     15

The era's beginning: are these ruined shacks,    

these poor schools, these people still in rags and tatters,    
this cloddish insecurity of my poor families,    
is all this the day? the century's beginning, the golden door?    

Well, enough said, I, at least, discreet,     20

as in office, patched and pensive,    
I proclaim the redundancy of the inaugural:    
I've arrived here with all my baggage,    
bad luck and worse jobs,    
misery always waiting with open arms,     25
the mobilization of people piled up on top of each other,    
and the manifold geography of hunger.

13
‘The Arrival in Madrid of the International Brigades’* translated by Jodey Bateman

One morning in a cold month

In an agonizing month, spotted with mud and smoke
A month that wouldn't get on its knees, a sad
       besieged, unlucky month
When from beyond my wet window panes you could
       hear the jackals 5
Howling with their rifles and their teeth full of blood
       then
When we didn't have more hope than a dream
       of more gun powder, when we believed by then
That the world was full of nothing but devouring 10
       monsters and furies,
Then, breaking through the frost of that cold
       month in Madrid, in the early morning mist
I saw with my own eyes, with this heart which looks out
I saw the bright ones arrive, the victorious fighters 15
From that lean, hard, tested rock of a brigade.

Is was the troubled time when the women

Carried an emptiness like a terrible burning coal,
And Spanish death, sharper and more bitter
       than other deaths 20
Filled the fields which until then had been honored by wheat.

Through the streets the beaten blood of men had joined

With water flowing out of the destroyed hearts of houses
The bones of dismembered children, the piercing
Silence of women in mourning, the eyes 25
Of the defenseless closed forever,
It was like sadness and loss, like a spat-upon garden
             Comrades,
             Then
             I saw you, 30
             And my eyes even now are full of pride
Because I saw you arriving through the
Morning mist, coming to the pure brow of Spain
             Silent and firm
             Like bells before daybreak 35
    So solemn with blue eyes coming from far, far away
coming from your corners, from your lost homelands,
from your dreams
Full of burning sweetness and guns
To defend the Spanish city where freedom was trapped 40
About to fall and be bitten by beasts.

Brothers, from now on

Your purity and your strength, your solemn story
Will be known by child and man, by woman and old one,
May it reach all beings who have no hope, may it 45
       descend into the mines corroded by sulphuric air,
May it climb the inhuman stairways to the slave
May all the stars, all the wheat stalks of Spain and the world
Write your name and your harsh struggle
And your victory, strong and earthy as a red oak tree. 50

14
 Because you have given new birth by your sacrifice
To the lost faith, the empty soul, the confidence in the earth
And through your abundance, your nobility, your deaths,
Like through a valley of hard, bloody rocks
Passes an immense river of doves 55
Made of steel and hope.

* The International Brigades were volunteers from a number of countries, including the United States, who fought on the side of the
left-wing Spanish Republic in the civil war of  1936 to 1939 against the fascist General Franco. Neruda, who worked in the Embassy of
Chile in Madrid, was in the crowds who were watching when the International Brigades arrived.

‘The Chosen Ones’ translated by Angel Flores

And we, the dead, arrayed in time,

scattered in arrogantly practical cemeteries
or fallen into the charnel houses of poor Bolivians,
we, the dead of I925, '26, '33,
I940, I9I8, nineteen hundred and five, 5
thousands of nineteen hundreds, in short,
how goes it with us who died before this foolish millennium?

I, Pedro of the High Plains, Pedro of the Seeds, Pedro Nobody,

didn't I have the right to the millennium and the resurrection?
I want to see the resurrected so I can spit in their faces, 10
the future generations about to be killed
in airplanes, railroads, wars of hatred,
those who barely had time to be born
and present arms to the new age
and who will end up dismembered, 15
rotting away in the midst of revelry and wine!
I, a dead man, want to leave my grave - and why not?

Why should those who died before their time be forgotten?

Everyone's invited to the party!

It's one more year, one more century, with the dead and the living, 20
and the balance sheets must be heeded, not only to lay out the life,
but also the withered flowers, the rotted wreaths, and the silence,
because silence has a right to the beauty and we, death's delegates,
we want to be there for a single flowering moment
when the gates of future glory are opened. 25

15
Love Poetry
All poems taken from Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair [Jonathan Cape, 2004, translated by W.S. Merwin]
Poem 1 Body of a Woman [page 9]
Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.

I was alone as a tunnel. The birds fled 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.

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.

Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.

My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark riverbeds where the eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and infinite ache.

Poem 10 We Have Lost Even [page 31] Poem 18 Here I Love You [page 53]
We have lost even this twilight. Here I love you.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
while the blue night dropped on the world. The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of the sunset in the distant mountain tops. The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a piece of the sun Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
burned like a coin between my hands.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
I remembered you with my soul clenched Alone.
in that sadness of mine that you know. Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
Where were you then? This is a port.
who else was there? Here I love you.
saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
when I am sad and feel you far away? I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
The book fell that is always turned to at twilight that cross the sea towards no arrival.
and my cape rolled like a hurt dog my feet. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
Always, always you recede through the evenings My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
toward where the twilight goes erasing statues. 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 leaves of wire.
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 Poem 20 [page 57]
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example “The night is starry,

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.”

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. 5

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, and sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes. 10

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I don’t have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her. 15

The night is starry and she is not with me.

That is all. In the distance, someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me. 20

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses. 25

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this I held her in my arms,

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. 30

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

1. Why does Neruda say that ‘tonight’ he ‘can’ write the saddest lines?
2. Which lines most effectively convey the speaker’s memories and reminiscences? Love and passion? Alienation and loneliness?
3. In your opinion, which lines of this poem are really the saddest? Explain your answer.
4. Notice the ways in which Neruda intertwines images of nature with his expressions of sorrow over his loss. What role(s) do various
aspects of nature (stars, trees, the night) play in this poem?
5. What effects are created by repetition?

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6. What other aspects of style do you notice? – its diction and imagery, its rhythms, the verse form …. Comment on their effects.
7. Explain the apparent contradiction in the third-to-last couplet.
8. Do you believe that the poet will be able to forget his lost love? Why or why not?
‘A Song of Despair’ [page 61]
The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.

It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. 5

Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.

From you the wings of the songbirds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.

Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! 10

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.

The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot's dread, fury of a blind diver,

turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. 15

Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,

sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,

beyond desire and act, I walked on. 20

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,

I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness.

and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands, 25

and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me

in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! 30

How terrible and brief was my desire of you!

How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,

still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, 35

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oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force

in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.

And the word scarcely begun on the lips. 40

This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,

and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,

what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!

From billow to billow you still called and sang. 45

Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.

You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents.

Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,

lost discoverer, in you everything sank! 50

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour

which the night fastens to all the timetables.

The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.

Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn. 55

Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

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20
These next love poems are later verse from Cien sonetos de amor [100 Love Sonnets, 1960] when Neruda was forty-six. The poems are
fiery ‘ecstasies of love and fury’ which have become testament to ‘the presence of lasting love’ [Neruda]. The poems are Petrarchan
rather than Shakespearean sonnets [Francesco Petrarca,1304-1374, wrote many sonnets addressed to Laura, and he's often credited
with popularizing the sonnet form]. The Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two parts: the first eight lines are called the octave and
usually pose a problem of some kind. The last six are called the sextet, and they generally offer some kind of resolution to the problem
posed in the octave. This shift in tone/ content in line 9 is often called the volta, or turning point. In a traditional Petrarchan sonnet, the
octave's rhyme scheme is usually ABBA ABBA, and the sextet can have a variety of rhymes schemes (CDE CDE and CDC CDC).

However, Neruda pays only loose tribute to the sonnet by employing a 14-line structure for each poem. His sonnets have quatrains and
tercets, and they usually do not contain a rhyme scheme. As he says, his sonnets are made of wood, rather than the ‘silver, or crystal, or
cannon fire’ of a more refined sonnet. In them, he refers again and again to the natural landscape of Isla Negra, the Pacific island where
he lived: ‘...I am like a scorched rock / that suddenly sings when you are near, because it drinks / the water you carry from the forest, in
your voice.’ .

All sonnets are taken from [Link]/member/.../pablo-nerudas-love-sonnet [Translated by Terence Clarke], accessed 19 July
2013
Sonnet 11 Sonnet 17
I hunger for your mouth, your voice and hair, I do not love you as though you were the salt-rose, topaz
and up the streets I go, shut up and starving. or the carnation-arrow begot in flames.
Bread does nothing for me.  I grow queasy with the dawn, I love you as are loved certain dark things,
and seek out all day the watery sound of your steps. in secret, between shadow and soul.

I'm hungry for your smile slipping away I love you as the plant that does not flourish, and carries
and your furious-colored grainy hands, hidden within itself the light of its flowers,
hunger for the pale stone of your nails. and, thanks to your love, there lives darkly in me
I wish to eat your skin as I would an almond, intact. the quickening aroma that rose from the soil.

I want to dine on the charred light in your beauty, I love you . . . I don't know how or when or where.
your arrogant face and its sovereign nose, I simply love you, no problem, no pride.
to eat the fleeting shadow of your lashes. I love you thus because I love no other way,

except this way, in which I am not and you are not,

And, still hungry, I come and go sniffing out the dusk,
so close that your hand on my chest is mine,
looking for you, looking for your hot heart,
so close that your eyes close on my dreams.
like a puma in Quitratúe's solitude.

Sonnet 45 Sonnet 89
Don't go far from me, not even for a day, because how . . . When I die, I wish your hands upon my eyes:
because . . . I don't know how to say it. The day is long, I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
and I'll be waiting for you, the same as in the stations to pass once more their cool touch over me:
when, somewhere there, the trains sleep. to sense the softness that changed my fate.

Don't go anywhere. Not even for an hour. Because then, I want you to live while I, asleep, await you.
in that hour, there come together the drops of restlessness, I want your ears to go on hearing the wind.
and maybe all the smoke that goes around looking for home I want you to smell the sea's aroma we loved so together,
would come to kill even my lost heart. and to go on walking the sands we walked.

Ah, may your silhouette not break apart in the sand! I want what I love to go on living.
Ah, may your eyelids not fly away into absence! And you, whom I loved and sung above all else,
Don't go anywhere, not even for a minute, beloved, for all that, flourish again, my flower,

because in that minute you will have gone so far to reach for everything my love demands of you,
that I'll go everywhere on this earth asking so that my shadow is passed through your hair,
if you'll ever come back, or if you'll leave me here dying. so that all can know the reason for my song.

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 Sonnet 94
If I die, survive me with such pure force
that you awake the fury of the pale and the cold.
From south to south, raise up your indelible eyes,
from sun to sun, sound your guitar's mouth.

I don't want them to waver, your laugh nor your steps.

I don't want it to die, my legacy of laughter.
Don't call to my breast.  I'm gone!
Live in my absence as though in a house.

So grand a house, this absence,

that you'll pass into it through the walls,
and hang its paintings on the air.

So transparent a house, this absence,

that, lifeless, I'll yet see you live.
And should you suffer, my love, I'll die once more.

Potential global issues to explore Neruda’s love poetry:

● Communication/connections – death, love, despair, sadness, separation.
● Identity
● Place
● Masculine pride/machismo
● Depiction of women/objectification.

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I had to suffer and struggle, to love and sing; I drew my worldly share of triumphs and defeats, I tasted bread and blood. What more can
a poet want? And all the choices, tears or kisses, loneliness or the fraternity of man, survive in my poetry and are as essential part of it,
because I have lived for my poetry and my poetry has nourished everything I have striven for.

Poetry . . . has to walk in the darkness and encounter the heart of man, the eyes of woman, the strangers in the streets, those who at
twilight or in the middle of the starry night feel the need for at least one line of poetry . . . This visit to the unexpected is worth all the
distance covered, everything read, everything learned . . . We have to disappear into the midst of those we don’t know, so they will
suddenly pick up something of ours from the street, from the sand, from the leaves that have fallen a thousand years in the same forest
and will take up gently the object we made . . . Only then will we truly be poets . . . In that object we will live . . .
Pablo Neruda, Memoirs

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