Female body, white thighs, pale uplands
Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos

OUTLINE

1 She is like the world. His hands work her as if she were the soil.

2 He was empty. He has used her to express himself.

3 But he has also fallen in love—with her body, her melancholy.

4 He will always serve her. She represents his unsatisfied desire and ambition.

SUMMARY 

She represents the world. He uses her to express himself but has fallen in love and suffers an infinite thirst.

COMMENT 

This sequence of twenty poems is certainly not obscure but it does have its layers, in this first poem more so perhaps than in most of the others. I’ll give two examples.

     This is about lovemaking. Using his body to dig or to undermine (socavar) leaves little to the imagination, and it is not hard to see how a lover can create a child. But this is no ordinary child. The phrase ‘del fondo de la tierra’ (from the depths / womb of the earth) links male love-making with cultivating the soil. She is the world and he is using her to make something to last, which he can brandish and show off:

     Later in the sequence he frequently complains of the woman’s absence, of her silence and remoteness even when they are together. Yet in this opening he makes a show of being masterful, in the language which gave us ‘macho’ and ‘machismo’. The physical son he creates must survive him, go out in the world and make a mark. By extension these lines imply a metaphorical understanding of son (hijo) and weapon (arma), alluding in fact to the poetry he will make, inspired by his love for her. Here is a youthful poet declaring his ambitions.

     This is one of the strongest pieces in the sequence, with more logic, of a kind anyway, than is generally present or necessary. A key element comes at the start of the third stanza:

He thought he might use her to produce something that would outlive him, but finds the price (her ‘vengeance’) is that he has fallen in love with her. Without both the exultations and the pains of love one does not derive from it any understanding. I mentioned logic, yet this is not on the whole the poetry of thought but rather of exuberant physical ecstasy:

     Poetry uses various weapons or tools, paradox being one of them: a river cannot slake thirst, just as woman, to this young man of nineteen, cannot satisfy an endless lust for her, or the speaking earth give up all its secrets.

Within its mortal flame the light enclothes you
En su llama mortal la luz te envuelve

OUTLINE

1 She is mournfully engrossed in the twilight.

2 She embodies the day that is ending.

3 New ‘night’ things emerge to be nourished by her.

4 She is slave of day and night (i.e. slave of Creation or Nature), and could make the world perfect.

SUMMARY 

She is born of Nature yet she also mystically embodies it and the sorrow it contains. He implore her to mitigate the effects of death and suffering.

COMMENT

A loose symbolism begins to develop. Mortal life is associated with fire and flowers and the colour blue; death is linked to twilight and night. Once I’ve deciphered the code to my own satisfaction, many of the lines that seemed obscure become clear, commanding and evocative. Others might not agree point by point with my decoding yet feel the same gist. In making his woman into a mourning incarnation of the vitality and suffering in Nature, Neruda creates a feminine, sexualised equivalent of the Christ figure. The poetry emerges from, and draws on the power of, a long and specific religious tradition.

     Structurally there is a tight interlacing of death and life allusions:

(a) Death: mortal flame; weather-vanes of twilight; your dark dress; black and gold. Yet from death, from the inanimate, life emerges:

(b) Life: mortal flame; lives of fire; a bunch of sunshine; a creation so alive; black and gold.

These lines are full of daring and powerful invention; to choose but one (there are many others):

     My mind wanders with pleasure around the idea that a day can be destruido. And I pause to work out the implications of this beloved woman being not just the heiress of the ruined day, the embodiment of it, but a ‘pure’ heiress at that. Is he suggesting ‘chaste’, after Poem 1? I would not have thought so. She is pure in the sense of being absolute, the very essence of Nature in all its forms. He exaggerates, of course. Poets do that, they make large gestures.

Ah vastness of pines, murmur of waves cascading
Ah vastedad de pinos, rumor de olas quebrándose

OUTLINE

1 The end of the day is reflected in her eyes.

2 The earth’s song emanates from her, and she directs his soul.

3 He makes love to her but she torments him with her distance.

4 Her mysterious voice resonates with intimations of death.

SUMMARY 

From her comes Nature’s love-song of life and death, presence and absence.

COMMENT 

The tokens of life continue to proliferate: conch, archer’s bow and arrows, pines, waves, rivers, light, flower- or corn-spikes (espigas); and so do implications of death: wind, fog, silence, evening, a church bell.

     The symbolism is becoming richer, more complex, though mercifully no more systematic and organised than it should be. The poet’s muse is addressed fondly as ‘muñeca’ (doll), yet she torments him with fog and silence. He feels a moist yearning (húmeda ansia) for her yet her arms are transparent stone (piedra transparente).

     In the first two stanzas she expresses, even at day’s end, life’s exultant and hopeful singing. He wishes to escape on the rivers in her: the sexual connotations are discreet yet clear enough:

     In the last two stanzas the emphasis is on bewilderment, the withholding of love, the dying day, the shaking of tufts / fronds / flower-spikes / wheat-ears (espigas) in the wind. Espiga occurs four times in the sequence (in 3, 7, 11 and 19). It would diminish the translation not to keep the same English word for it throughout. I have chosen ‘frond’, since neither ‘(wheat-)ear’ nor ‘(flower-)spike’ can capture all the flavours. I think the image symbolises what is soft and delicate in Nature: in 11 it is equated with the young woman herself.

     The symbolism in general in this piece is perhaps especially complex and ambiguous in the lines:

Now ‘tu voz ... que el amor tiñe y dobla’ is a puzzle: it literally means ‘your voice which love tinges (in the sense of colouring with a dye) and tolls.’ I didn’t want a translation which over-explains; choices had to be made. For one thing, I don’t think it necessary to personify love by being literal and saying that love actually tolls her voice. Also, tolling is usually associated in English with death-knells, and I have not suppressed this idea, yet I think the pealing of a happy voice should be allowed as well. Also, doblar means ‘to double or fold’, which could suggest that love changes the inflection of her voice.

     Then there is tiñe. Tiñe (from teñir) can imply that love colours, dyes or imbues her voice with any hue at all, light or dark. More usually teñir is used to tinge a voice with a tone of some sort—with sorrow, irony, disbelief and so on. Teñir also mean ‘stain’ in phrases like ‘a bloodstained history’ (una historia teñida de sangre). Her voice could therefore be either stained with love in some dark manner, or drenched in love—erotic and life-affirming. I’ve tried to produce a reading that leans towards a contrast between the life that love imbues her voice with and the death which descends on the day.

In the heart of summer
Es la mañana llena de tempestad

OUTLINE

1 This summer morning is stormy.

2 The wind uses the clouds to wave goodbye.

3 The mysterious wind throbs above our love.

4 The wind is divine and warlike.

5 The wind sweeps away dead leaves, deflects the flight of birds.

6 The wind is weightless, it slants like fire.

7 Her kisses wrestle with and oppose the wind.

SUMMARY 

Love struggles against menace and death.

COMMENT 

By now it is becoming clear that the woman, although a very palpable muse, is not precisely defined. Only a few traits emerge. She is constantly silent. Out of stupidity or aloofness or what? I can’t say. Details of time and place, or of specific acts of lovemaking, do not feature here. It’s possible that Neruda is making a great deal out of very little. There is much mention of her withholding. He may have been favoured with no more than a grope. It’s possible he is consoling himself with exaggeration when he speaks of the volume of her kisses (su volumen de besos), as if it is she who is making the advances.

     The piece dwells on the notion that love and indeed life itself is surrounded by threat. A stormy wind hums among the trees like a supernatural presence presaging war.

     Neither poetry nor commentary has a duty to be philosophically consistent. A ‘supernatural presence’ is a paradox, a logical self-contradiction, an oxymoron at most. Presence and existence are attributes of the natural. If I can momentarily conceive of a thing controlling Nature, then that thing immediately, at the moment of conception, becomes part of what I mean by Nature. Of the Super-natural I can say nothing sensible, not even that it exists or has a presence, for such statements rope in the Supernatural and corral it within the confines of that very Nature it’s supposed to transcend. Nevertheless, the feeling that there are forces ‘beyond’ Nature is common, and poetry deals with common feelings. Literary commentary has feet in the two camps, within ordinary presumption and, as far as possible, within the domain of logic also. Explanations do not have to continually flag which foot they stand on; their tone should make it obvious.

     So, standing aside as one who believes that the very idea of the supernatural is meaningless, I nonetheless admire the wild abandon which this evidently young poet speaks of the gusty weather as if it comes from an inscrutable world outside us.

How admirably he builds up a bodily feeling for this wind, a turbulence which deflects birds, tumbles like ocean waves, twists like fire: against this threat to life he contrasts, in his defiant last two lines, her kisses:

To him love, physical passion, is what we must use to confront and triumph over the menaces that surround us. This is the ever-popular, romantic conceit. And the world is a bit short of lovers.

So that you may hear me
Para que tú me oigas

OUTLINE

2 His words are a drunken necklace to be placed in her hands.

3 He gives them to her. They speak of his pain.

4 She is cruel to him and guilty of making him suffer.

5 He is empty. She fills everything.

6 His words once spoke of her. They know more of his suffering than she does.

7 He wants her to hear him as he wishes to be heard.

8 His words are dragged along by anguish and dreaming.

9 In his pain is the ancient pain of others. He exhorts her to love him and share his pain.

10 Her love stains his words. She fills all his thoughts.

11 He is making his words into an infinite necklace to give her.

SUMMARY 

His words to her speak of the pain she causes him. He beseeches her to love him.

COMMENT 

Into her hands the poet delivers his anguished words as a necklace (collar), a gift she may wear on her bosom or fondle like a rosary. This piece is repetitive and not so intense and invent-ive as most of the others. It is a conventional complaint about a lady’s distance causing the poet to suffer: the stuff of countless pre-Modernist poems. Neruda makes us aware of the tradition to which this exercise belongs:

There is some interest in the fact that he addresses her as ‘compañera’, companion or political comrade, a touch which gives the sequence a hint of a possible historical setting. The wind appears again. This time it is not the storms of outrageous fortune but the gale of his own distress (el viento de la angustia). The lover protests too much for my liking and I pass on.

I remember you as in that final autumn
Te recuerdo como eras en el último otoño

OUTLINE

1 In their last autumn together her liveliness also suggested demise.

2 He was passionate about her. She was cool in his arms.

3 He still feels her presence, towards which his desire was drawn.

4 She was remote and mysterious. Life and death were around her.

SUMMARY 

In their last autumn he was on fire for her. She was coolly composed. Life and death were around her.

COMMENT 

Clear enough in essence, this would still read as a private and in many places inscrutable piece if one had not worked out a key to its main images. If I am correct in surmising that here light, fire, water and the colour blue symbolise life, while autumn, smoke, fog and darkness signify death, the poem becomes clearer. Neruda alludes to his erstwhile love for a calm, remote woman who wore a grey beret and probably had blue eyes. And the recital contains already familiar themes.

     Now absent, she continues in her dual role of past lover and ever-present mythical goddess of all things, even of death. Once I’ve decided that nothing essentially new is being said, I can settle into the music and enjoy Neruda’s novel ways with his favourite leitmotifs.

     The concurrence of life and death, for instance, becomes fairly moving and evident in the line

     Death, in the withered leaves, is immersed in water, an image of life. It must be admitted, even if one favours the goddess interpretation, that in this piece there is less deification and more of a mortal woman:

     Neruda is now more parsimonious with verbs, laying down his images without having to say too much about what they are up to. While there can be no doubt that the blue hyacinth in the following lines relate to the woman, there can be less certainty about whether the bonfire image (signifying passion, presumably) is to be allied to the writer, to the woman, or to both:

     Her distance in memory is given poignant and grandiloquent expression in

Leaning into afternoons I throw sad nets
Inclinado en las tardes tiro mis tristes redes

OUTLINE

1 He searches her eyes.

2 There he sees reflected his painful passion for her.

3 He make passionate signs but she ignores them.

4 In her is a frightening darkness.

5 He searches her eyes sadly. In them is the ocean of everything.

6 The dead night contains stars that sparkle like his love for her.

7 Dark death scatters blue, living flowers.

SUMMARY 

In her eyes he sees the ocean of everything, a non-living darkness from which life and love emerge.

COMMENT 

It’s now clear that this string of poems is not an account of a love affair told sequentially. The pieces are probably not even assembled in the order in which they were written. The previous poem (Number 6) speaks of the love as a past event; this one is back in the present tense of the affair. Also increasingly evident is the metaphysical nature of the series. The woman’s remoteness becomes a symbol of all darkness, distance, non-being, death:

     If I have it right, he is making the point that although darkness is more pervasive than light, nevertheless it is from darkness that life is born. It does not, after all, need a deeply theological or scientific mind to conclude that if Nothing exists, it yields Something, or Something yields it, or they exist side by side. Not that Nothing ‘existing’, other than as an idea, makes sense to me. In appealing to what we would like to be the case, poetry can be very powerful. Neruda favours the idea of a mysterious darkness as the source of life; it’s unnecessary for him to go deeper.

     His loneliness even when with her makes him sad. Although water means life to him, he makes a distinction between a sea and an ocean. Her eyes contain the sea of life, but that sea is part of a larger and, I suggest, much darker and horrific ocean:

     Literally sacude (from sacudir) means ‘shakes’ and oceánicos means ‘oceanic’. Ese mar que sacude tus ojos oceánicos is not easy to understand or translate—a sea is in her eyes which are already ‘oce-anic’—unless one decodes the line somewhat as I’ve suggested.

     There is something overwhelming about the sea that is in her eyes; he sees the fire of his ardour reflected in them yet he flounders like someone shipwrecked (un náufrago). I have bent things around somewhat in order to convey the double sense of passion and torture in these lines:

     There is much I might also say about the way the lighthouse works in stanza 3, and how exactly the nocturnal birds peck at the early stars in stanza 6, but something must be left for readers to unravel. Not everyone will agree with me anyway.

Drunk on honey, white bee, you buzz in my soul
Abeja blanca zumbas—ebria de miel—en mi alma

OUTLINE.

2 He is in despair, he has lost everything.

3 She is the final tether and thing of beauty for him.

4 She is so silent.

5 She is naked. He tells her to close her eyes.

6 She has deep eyes, cool arms and sex like a rose.

7 Her breasts are like conches. A butterfly sleeps on her belly.

8 She is so silent.

9 But really she is absent. It is raining. He is alone.

10 The streets are wet and the leaves groan.

11 Although absent, she is present in his soul.

12 She is so silent.

SUMMARY 

She is absent but he remembers when she was beautiful and naked before him.

COMMENT 

The whole sequence is usually published with another poem, a coda called The Song of Desperation (or Despair). It looks as if these twenty ‘love poems’ could also more aptly have been called ‘poems of desperation’. Her silence, like a pulse, is alluded to throughout, as are references to the poet’s loneliness and pain.

     There are more hints of physical lovemaking here than in any single poem so far, yet it is all a memory: in stanza 2 he says ‘I am he who ... once had everything’ ([Soy] el que todo lo tuvo). Although in stanzas 5 to 7 he speaks as if she is present in his arms, in stanza 9 it’s clear that her naked presence is a thing of the past.

     This is for me an effectively moving expression of a poet’s exhilarated recollection of a lover’s body, inextricably mixed with the pain caused by her absence. There is much palpitation that is shadowed with foreboding. She, as white bee, twists in the smoke of his passion; the night flutters in her eyes; a butterfly of shadow (mariposa de sombra) settles on her belly; gulls wander over wet streets.

     It is almost as if this is about a final lovemaking. In stanza 3 she is ‘last [mooring] cable’; his yearning is última also. The many meanings of última are present: ‘last’, ‘final’, ‘ultimate’.

     I’m not sure of some of the lines. It seems almost certain that the rose, following a long literary tradition, signifies both the loveliness of woman and also that most secret and rose-like part that lies between her thighs. There is the ‘final [or ultimate] rose’ of stanza 3, and ‘rose of the loins’ (literally ‘lap of rose’, regazo de rosa) in stanza 6. More enigmatic, to me at least, is this line in stanza 7:

     The insistence of the dreariness of rain in stanzas 10 and 11 are in touching contrast to what has gone before. Repetition—of ‘Ah…, silent woman!’ (Ah silenciosa!) and ‘white bee’ (stanzas 1 and 11)—helps the musicality of the structure. A surreal air is present in the unrelatedness of rain, cable, smoke, statue, bee, gulls, conch, butterfly and sea wind, but this is not the total irrationality of extreme surreality. There’s much tender beauty to return to with pleasure: the naked body like a frightened statue, the water that walks barefoot…

Drunk on turpentine and long kisses
Ebrio de trementina y largos besos

OUTLINE

1 He makes intoxicated love to her as if steering a sailboat.

2 The weather around them is sad, grey and dangerous.

3 He concentrates on his passion for her sweet body.

4 He shivers in sexual ecstasy.

5 She meets his passion with equal ardour.

SUMMARY 

He makes love to her, concentrating on her body and their mutual ecstasy.

COMMENT 

This is the most carnal account of their lovemaking so far. There is little explicit statement about what they are actually doing but many evocative images. The sailboat of roses may be a bed, a real boat or the woman’s body, but more important are the water images: sea, wave, foam, all suggestive of the sweat and other fluids of passionate lovemaking.

     Intoxication is alluded to in the opening line. At first ‘Drunk on turpentine’ seems a beautiful intimation of languor, a line not to be considered too inquisitively. It is true that those who work in the production of turpentine risk intoxication, dizziness, headaches and even unconsciousness. And I suppose exposure to the turpentine which is used as a paint thinner in an artist’s studio might have the same effect. To be properly drunk I imagine that one would have to inhale the vapour deliberately, as some people sniff glue. This line could also rely on a private code to do with the woman’s background. Perhaps she is a painter and the ‘sailboat of roses’ a couch in her studio. Not likely, but any reading like this is possible.

     Anyway, this is splendidly roving celebration of the physical act. He cannot altogether escape the bitter thought that always haunts him, that this affair will not last, that she is remote and so on. This bitterness is in contrast to the heady, perhaps even desperate, passion that informs the poem as a whole, but it is plainly alluded to throughout the second stanza:

     The whole poem is an exuberant wander through the drugged state of shared, prolonged sexual pleasure, with its surges of passion and dreamy dips into languor. It is unnecessary to single out phrases (although I do) in this poem about lovers who are

     He speaks of the ‘fortunate isles’ which are ‘like thighs’—they are thighs, hers. Passion is not obliged to be logical. The beauty is all.

We have lost even this nightfall
Hemos perdido aun este crepúsculo

OUTLINE

1 They were not together that evening.

2 He watched the sunset alone.

3 A fleck of sunlight burned in his hands.

4 He remembered her with his usual sadness.

5 Why does love come upon him when he is jealous and low?

6 His book fell and his cloak slipped to the floor.

7 In the evenings she is never there.

SUMMARY 

Alone one evening he felt depressed and jealous without her.

COMMENT 

This is one of the slighter pieces. Neruda doesn’t say much that is new about his depression and loneliness without his woman. The love affair seems over. There are the usual crepuscular images, the usual melancholy.

     The language is not at its most inventive. What he means by having a piece of the sun burn in his hands must have something to do with the heat of the passion celebrated in the previous poem, a reminder of which occurs when a touch of late sunlight through a window burns his hand. He clutches lost love, a small piece of burning gold.

     The free-verse ‘stanzas’, not all with the same number of lines, could have been in a different order: there is no inevitability. Rhythmically and in tone this is one of those ‘dying fall’ poems. The whole has the feel of weary jottings, though it does end strongly, with the poet’s fallen cloak lying like a wounded dog, the nightfall erasing statues.

Almost beyond the sky, between two mountains
Casi fuera del cielo ancla entre dos montañas

OUTLINE

1   It is night; he looks at the stars in a pond.

2   1 – 3 He is mad with a turbulent anguish.

     4 – 7 She is like a tempest in his heart.

     8 – 9 The wind of death threatens her too.

     10 – 13 She was made by the wind. She is made of all things.

3   1 – 2 He wants his desire to settle upon another.

     3 – 4 Why does the tempest of his desire persist in making her unhappy?

     5 – 7 He wishes to be rid of his anguish.

SUMMARY There is the tempest of peril and death; there is the tempest of desire; there is the tempest of the pain she causes in him. He wishes to escape them all.

COMMENT 

Any paraphrase must be extremely tentative. The symbol of a tempest, always related in some way to the anguish which he suffers, shifts around in what precisely it signifies. In turn it represents the woman herself, crossing the poet’s heart but not stopping there; then it is outside them both, destructive and deadly, and he implores it to avoid her:

then it is what made her, but no, she is (was) made of all things (era hecha de todas las cosas); then in section 3 it seems associated both with the poet’s tormented desire and with the destructive forces in the world which ‘buries’ church bells:

     I believe this hazy ambiguity is intentional and one of the admirable features of this piece, blurring together life’s violent perils and a personal, passionate unhappiness. The poet admits that cannot say exactly what he means:

     There is much else to ponder in a similar vein. The night is a forge of blue metals and also an excavator or digger of eyes (la cavadora de ojos): both figures imparting sensation before sense—the world is an alien place, tense and frustrating.

Your breast suffices my heart
Para mi corazón basta tu pecho

OUTLINE

1 They are enough for each other. He will praise her.

2 She is the illusory world. She is present and absent.

3 Everything pervades her like a song, yet she causes sadness.

4 Old voices echo in her. He awakes from these thoughts. Sometimes the essence of her soul escapes him.

SUMMARY 

Everything pervades her, or he once thought so. The feeling of her inspiring presence too often deserts him.

COMMENT 

That the world of appearances is an illusion is, in some great systems of thought like Platonism and Buddhism, made to seem a more profound notion than it really is. Even without the modern science, it must have always been obvious that the world does not look the same to any two different types of animal. Each sees what it needs to. No creature sees the whole on all its levels. The picture is always partial and it’s foolish to think otherwise.

     Neruda makes this not very profound observation, along with the old conceit that his mistress embodies the world, in the line

     He continues to mythologise her as somehow an embodiment or incarnation of Nature, the spirit of reality as it truly is. It follows that as a kind of goddess she must also be present in that tiny part of reality which we access and distort with our limited awareness. He does not conclude, since it is not his habit to be disputatious, that his myth-making distorts her, as the essence of the world, just as any reading of life distorts it. Nevertheless, his words throughout the sequence do betray ideas of this kind.

     I find, as the poem washes over me pleasantly enough with its rich hyperbole (look at every line in the second section), there are two matters of special interest. One concerns his argument, the other the structure. When he says in his opening lines

the statements seem, in the light of what he has already said about his lover’s remoteness, to be wishful thinking. I suppose a touch of quasi-religious self-comfort is not out of place in any text about love.

     The other matter which I suppose I’m intended to find arresting is the finality of the past tense in the penultimate line: ‘I awoke’ (Yo desperté). The verb despertar can mean both ‘I awakened [some-thing]’ (the birds?—the grammar does not easily support this) and also simply ‘I woke up’, which is the most obvious reading. This sudden jump into the past tense suggests, to me at least, that what he has been saying about his lover pervading all things is a fantasy from which he has awoken, having come to his senses. When he has finally ceased mythologising her, he finds that his inspiration, symbolised by the birds of the last two lines, has deserted him.

Or something like that. Perhaps he just means that sometimes, but by no means always, he wakes up uninspired. In any case, this further hint of finality, only just past the middle of the sequence, makes me hope that there is more than just mournful recollection in the verses to come.

13 I have been marking with crosses of fire
He ido marcando con cruces de fuego

OUTLINE

1 He has just been exploring her body with kisses.

2 He has things to tell her about the fruitful world her to make her happy.

3 He has loved her in sad solitude.

      4 1 to 3 The pain of his loss is fading.

      4  to 6 Something in him goes on singing.

      7 to 8 If only he could celebrate her as she deserves!

      9 to 11 But sadly his compassion is dying.

SUMMARY 

He loved her ecstatically, making poems for her in sad solitude. But his pain and compassion are fading.

COMMENT 

There is more logical progression here than might at first be apparent. He describes his ecstatic lovemaking very clearly, though he stops short of an actual naming of parts:

     The imagery continues to be vigorous: the white atlas of her body, the spider, swan, grapes, gondoliers, belfry, madman and nets that do not hold water. And the tone is hectic, with full stops in the middle of sentences: look at the third verse.

     There is enough randomness and a new oddness to fortify the feeling that in his love affair (or affairs) there has been bliss and desperation, recklessness and forgetting.

     What is one to make of the gondoliers? His solitude is

     This is obvious surrealism, and it fortifies the hectic derangement of the senses which Neruda doubtless wants to communicate.

You play every day with the light of the universe
Juegas todos los días con la luz del universo.

OUTLINE

1 Like a goddess she plays with light, she enters water and flowers.

2 His love makes her into a myth that is not really herself.

3 Peril and death surround him.

4 The world is falling apart. Only he can save it.

5 She is with him to help, but at times her eyes darken too.

6 She smells sweet and he kisses her as the storm rages.

7 It must have been hard for her to get used to him, but he will bring her gifts.

8 He would like to impregnate her.

SUMMARY 

His love makes her into a myth. Danger and death swirl about him. He kisses her body and desires to impregnate her.

COMMENT 

The theme of opposites, which Blake would have called the ‘contrarieties’, continues. The beloved is mythical and yet a very real, sweet-scented female. The dark wind of chaos is contrasted with the redemptive gifts of light, birds, rain and flowers.

     These established symbolic motifs continue, with smoke occupying a troubling and ambiguous position among them. Neruda has written her name in letters of smoke, dually suggesting passion and ephemerality. In Poem 6 he remembers her ‘as light, smoke, a still pond’: she is sinuous and ungraspable. In Poem 8 she twists tantalisingly ‘in slow spirals of smoke’. In Poem 11 she is a ‘question [formed] in smoke, … radiant’, teasing yet exhilarating.

He continues to swing between symbolism and surrealism. The sky is ‘crammed with funereal fish’, the rain ‘takes off her clothes’, the boats are ‘moored to the sky’. By such tokens the world is absurd. It’s as if he’s experimenting with irrational images to create a vision of the world made exotically strange by the stupor of desire. It’s a world turned upside down, with ships and fish in the sky instead of the sea. The poem is full of magnificently florid hyperbole.

and so on. In a perilous yet beautiful world he is eager to declare

yet he knows how difficult his personality must be for his ‘little one’ (pequeña) to bear, though he’s probably proud of himself.

     This might be pure invention, romantic posturing. Personal poetry is bound to stray into fiction somewhere.

He has picked up the knack of the cryptic utterance which I suspect even he himself doesn’t fully understand, but of which he, like anyone else but no more so, could give a plausible account:

This must drive realists wild, but the popularity of these poems shows there are lovers out there who still get drunk on such words.

I enjoy it when you are quiet, it’s as if you’re not here
Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente

OUTLINE

1 She is quiet and reserved. She seems not to hear him.

2 His soul fills everything. Thus his soul fills her also. She is like his melancholy.

3 He enjoys her silence; he will be soundless too.

4 He will speak with her silence, the silence of a star.

5 One word from her would make him happy that what he has just said about her silence is not true.

SUMMARY 

His sad soul fills her. He will be silent like her, he will speak to her with silence. However, a word from her would make him happier.

COMMENT 

Long before reaching this point any reader of poetry has seen that the writing is of that genre, scarcely changed from the troubadours to the late romantics, in which a male lover worships an unyielding and distant female. To this genre Neruda has added various modernist twists, such as fragmentation, symbolism, surrealism, violations of logic. The only relief from his earnest mantra of frustration is an occasional outburst of carnal exultation, very possibly the product of erotic fantasy, or of memorable experiences with more casual and accessible girls.

     I also get the feeling of a poet trying out techniques which to him are not natural and which he may soon discard. There have already been one or two scraps of throwaway metaphysics. In Poem 4 the wind is said to be ‘orchestral, divine’ (orquestal y divino), the poet can sense within Nature that which is above Nature. Throughout the sequence the beloved (doubtless a blend of several) has been an incarnation of the divine, imbuing all things with her presence. In the present poem Neruda uses the trope of contradiction, seeming to recant, if one takes his thinking and syntax seriously. In stanza 2 it is his soul which fills all thing, and she merely emerges from things with a piece of his soul inflating her.

     The fancy which sustains this poem is that he will share her silence and in order to speak to her he will make a language out of this absence of language. He appears to be trying out a little irony too, when he repeatedly says that he enjoys her silence only to disavow the claim, announcing that one word from her would (more honestly) please him. He’d then be ‘happy this isn’t true’ (alegre de que no sea cierto), ‘this’ presumably being what he has just said about enjoying her silence. If being in love causes one to babble wild and whirling words, this sequence assuredly makes that matter clear. These poems are wonderful if the reader is on their wavelength, but a single touch of scepticism and the following sort of thing crumbles:

     But forget cavilling. There is an excellent delicacy of touch in the way the stanzas slowly push along this business about the beauty of her silence, rising to a mixture of seemingly effortless surprises in:

16 In my sky at dusk you are like a cloud
En mi cielo al crepúsculo eres como una nube

OUTLINE

1 She is his. She is in everything he dreams. Yet his dreams are contained in her.

2 Her beauty (etc) inspires him to praise it. He dreams she is his.

3 She is his, he cries! She may hunt for his essence but he prevents her from seeing it.

4 It is she who is ensnared—by his song. She inspires him.

SUMMARY 

He dreams she is his. She inspires his poetry, which worships and ensnares her.

COMMENT 

Again he proceeds by contradiction. He’s like a kidnapper who worships his victim, who in turn is hunting him. Is Neruda aware of this paradox? Just about, I think. After the desperate, unbelievable claim that she is his,

he goes on to say, with equal romantic exaggeration, that she hunts and bags him. One image breeds the next—the verse works more that way than by logical consistency. He, her prize, rests in the water of her eyes like a dam. At least, that is what I assume these fairly opaque lines are getting at:

     The blockage is the very thing she hunts and then steals, namely his soul, or whatever lurks in the depths of his eyes. In the light of what follows I suppose all this just means that she hunts him but gets caught herself:

     Neruda must know that he is fooling himself. He surely intends us to know this too, and to be aware of his abject self-deception:

     There are many pretty lines which stress the power she has to make him see the world grandly, like

and

     Much is made of lips and eyes, and the leitmotif words continue as threads that help hold these poem together: sky, cloud, dream, wind, water, loneliness. This piece, although a paraphrase of someone else’s poem, in feeling and theme fits well enough into Neruda’s own sequence as it has run so far, and the theft is justified.

Pondering, confusing shadows in deep isolation
Pensando, enredando sombras en la profunda soledad

OUTLINE

1   1 – 3 She is remote and pondering, releasing birds and blurring the landscape.

     4 – 6 Like a gloomy miller in a foggy tower, she (or night) grinds out vague, disappointing hopes.

2   1 – 3 She is a stranger to him. He thinks of his life before her, his hard life.

     4 – 7 His crazed cries of anguish rise by the lonely sea.

3   1 – 2 What was she ever? What strange sea creature?

     3 – 5 She is a forest of blue fire, causing pain and collapse.

4   1 His soul dances, maimed by the fire.

     2 The silence is filled with echoes.

     3 – 4 This is his time for memory and loneliness.

     5 – 9 His body is racked with weeping. Everything assails him.

5   1 – 2 She ponders in dim isolation. Who is she?

SUMMARY She is absent. His hopes are destroyed. He does not know what sort of creature she is. He is full of lonely anguish.

COMMENT 

As the end of the sequence approaches, the woman’s absence, about which the poet has complained so much, seems final. Here is an abandoned lover, desperately alone and full of pain. His thoughts are confused and hazy, his utterances choppy, fragmentary. The word ‘pondering / thinking’ (pensando) appears throughout without a subject, and although dark brooding applies to the poet himself, if I read the first section as a whole and not as wildly disconnected cries, changing the first two full stops into commas, it makes grammatical sense to see the pondering, the burying of lamps, and even perhaps the grinding of hope, as activities of the woman addressed. He does once use the verb pensar (think) with himself as subject, in

but this for me does not give less weight to the reading which sees the woman as the one who, at some distance from the poet, is for some reason thinking deeply about something else, not him. About what? About her own life and her work perhaps. They might both be students, she in another part of the country studying in the vacation by lamplight and not answering his letters.

     The vagueness of scenario exists despite the vivid images, which are mostly surreal and only very loosely symbolic. The released birds (v.1, l.3) could be her thoughts, but I think it more likely that the young poet, alone on an empty coast, sees a flock of birds and imagines them discharged by his beloved in her role as Nature goddess. The mysterious reference to her as ‘gloomy miller’ (molinero taciturno) in a ‘bell-tower of fogs’ (campanario de brumas), and as a ‘manta ray’ (raya) are among the poet’s most recherché pieces of opacity: bold, certainly. Other readings are just as valid—it could be the night which is the miller.

     The burning that was present in the bonfires of earlier poems is here again, although this time he sees her as burning in ‘blue crosses’ (cruces azules), and in ‘trees of light’ (árboles de luz). Red passion has turned to cold blue. Again he invokes her as a supernatural entity, and in a way is beseeching her to end his anguish by destroying the whole world.

Here I love you
Aquí te amo

OUTLINE

1   Where he lives now he loves her from afar. The days are all alike.

2   Nature is beautiful but remote.

3   Where he is now, alone in a harbour, he still loves her.

4   1 – 4 He sends his love on a voyage to her; it doesn’t arrive.

     5 – 6 He is stuck where he is like an ancient anchor.

     7 – 8 Wearily, he loves what is not there.

     9 –11 A night of dreams follows his tedious evenings.

5   She is in the stars that watch him, and the pines want to sing her name.

SUMMARY In a harbour town, weary and alone, he still loves her. She is in the stars and the pines would sing her name.

COMMENT 

That the woman is seldom actually with the poet becomes all too clear as the sequence nears its end, and so is the fact that he continues to love her. The imagery of harbour, sea and ship suggests that there is a wide gulf, indeed an ocean, between them.

     The poem improvises riffs on the themes of loneliness, bereavement and unrequited love. The world is cold and alien: ‘The days are all alike … Stars [are] on high … a ship [is] | Alone … The sea resounds, far off … Amidst the cold things here I’m in love with you still … The wharfs are sadder when the afternoon docks … My life wearies, uselessly famished … I love what I don’t have … Tedium struggles with my slow evenings.’

     He finishes on an upbeat, convincing himself that she is still worthy of celebration by Nature itself, even though she has vanished.

‘Leaves of wire’ is strikingly odd, but it makes sense if the pines are to behave like a wind harp, and evergreen pine needles are indeed more like wires, albeit short ones, than are the leaves of deciduous trees. Striking phrases occur periodically without making the texture too dense and detracting from the mournful tone. For instance: ‘the moon phosphoresces’ (fosforece la luna); the snow dances; a ship looks like a black cross (la cruz negra de un barco); ‘the horizon conceals [her]’ (te oculta el horizonte); ‘the afternoon docks’ (atraca la tarde); and the moon rotates a ‘projector of dream’ (rodaje [=filming / shooting] de sueño).

     Above all there is a real feeling of place. Momentarily at least he has ceased to be surreal, and if familiar images recur—birds, wind and sea, for example—it’s as part of the actual scene; if there’s still any symbolism in them it’s almost invisible.

19 Agile tanned girl, the sun that forms fruit
Niña morena y ágil, el sol que hace las frutas

OUTLINE

1 The sun that ripens the fruit made her joyful body.

2 She plays with the sun. It leaves dark pools in her eyes.

3 Everything carries him from her. She is all the forces of Nature.

4 He searches for her. He loves her body and her voice.

SUMMARY As an elemental power she plays with the sun which made her joyful body. He loves her body; he searches for her.

COMMENT 

Virtually throughout the sequence the female is mythologised not just as one force of Nature but all of them, both the living and non-living.

     With regard to this near apotheosis, Neruda is not unduly concerned with logic. If she is all the forces and powers in Nature she must embody every part of it, including the energy of the sun. Yet ‘you play with the sun,’ he says in stanza 2, and so the sun must also in some way be outside her; it makes her what she is, joyful (alegre), and coils within her tresses.

     But it’s silly to quibble. The reasoning is that of rhetoric, which is persuasion by any and every means possible. The poet starts by saying the sun makes his beloved and she plays with it; then he shifts ground in stanza 3, implying something like, ‘No, the sun is not outside you, it is within you, as is every aspect of Nature.’ If I want to split hairs these verses are not for me. To ‘get’ the poem and accept its world I must enter into the exuberant and intoxicated state with which it is abundantly charged. It’s a marvellously sensuous and continually inventive piece, one of the best in the set.

     The focus throughout is upon the young female body, tanned by the sun which also makes her black tresses glisten. In a cornucopia of images she is associated with sun, fruit, flowers, grain, butterflies, water, agility, playfulness and rapture.

     After three stanzas of a happy delight in the idea of her as a hot, ubiquitous, physical presence, with everything palpable and every note happy, in the last stanza he suddenly changes. He reminds himself that she is not his any more. He still loves the memory of her ‘ecstatic body’ (cuerpo alegre), but now he is reduced to searching for her. He is not bitter. The last two lines are unconditional in his praise and worship:

like the wheat field and the sun, the poppy and the water).

OUTLINE

1   Tonight he can write sad poetry.

2   Like ‘The stars tremble and are distant’.

3   The night wind drones above him.

4   He loved her. Sometimes she loved him too.

5   On nights like this they kissed in the open.

6   How could he not have loved her?

7   He feels what he has lost.

8   The night is immense without her.

9   What does it matter that he could not keep her?

10 His soul is not pleased to have lost her.

11 He searches for her but she is not there.

12 They are not the same any more.

13 He loves her no more. How he loved her!

14 She will now be another’s.

15 Perhaps he does love her. Love is short, death long.

16 He is not happy. On nights like this he held her.

17 These are the last lines he will write about her.

SUMMARY 

He loved her. At times she loved him. They are not the same now. He loves her no more. Though perhaps he does. She will be with someone else. These are his last lines about her.

COMMENT 

This final poem carries on with the main theme, which is more about loss than love. For the very first time he confesses (well, almost) what has been implicit all along, that her love for him was not as strong as his for her. In this light-toned, balletic poem the key thoughts are repeated with musical variations. For example:

     v.4    I loved her and at times she loved me also

             Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso

             (I loved her, and at times she also loved me)

    v.6    She loved me and at times I loved her also

            Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería

            (She loved me, at times I also loved her)

     In the light of his repeated complaints about her remoteness there is no doubt which of these statements is closer to the truth. Not that young Neruda the writer is trying to fool us; as writer, he is truthfully, if obliquely, telling us how much Neruda the lover lies to himself. Of course it is logically possible for both of the above assertions to be true, since between them they say that both he and his darling loved each other on and off. However, in the context ‘I loved her’ in v.4 suggests he loved her all the time, and ‘She loved me’ in v.6, if with ‘always’ implied, is a mere whistling in the dark.

     Upon the hypnotic repetitions hang very loose and simple lines. Moody and wilful self-contradiction is, as elsewhere, part of the intention: he does not love her any more (v.13), but perhaps he does (v.15). There are no flamboyant or opaque images. In v.12 the night makes the trees white by means of moonlight, no doubt. Only a few of the poet’s stock allusions remain to carry the burden of this languid lament, notably night, stars, wind, love, loss and searching.

     The poem ends with a consolation. In the penultimate verse he says that his soul is not pleased to have lost her, but the final lines declare that he can be thankful this is the last time she can hurt him: