Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Neruda’s Rapturous Conflagration of Verse
- Meri Utkovska
- Mar 7
- 7 min read
Aquí te amo.
En los oscuros pinos se desenreda el viento.
Fosforece la luna sobre las aguas errantes.
Andan días iguales persiguiéndose.
-Pablo Neruda, Aquí Te Amo
Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorus on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.
-Pablo Neruda, Here I Love You. Translated by W.S. Merwin
When Neruda published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in 1924, while the world was still trying to pick up the pieces WWI left in its wake, the public received it in an almost unreal way. After being kept by the confines of its own darkness and loneliness, it was as if the world longed for a testament to its most intimate existence - a testament to its desires and struggles, loves, joys and losses. That this collection was written by the then twenty-year-old Neruda, a young Chilean man with an unbridled lyrical genius capable of guiding the reader through the tenuous path of the senses and into the complexities of their human depth, is remarkable.
Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile on July 12, 1904. When he was an infant, his mother died from tuberculosis, and he was raised by his railroad worker father and his stepmother. At the age of sixteen, he moved to the capital of Santiago to study French literature, having spent most of his childhood in the densely forested Temuco, a region in the south of Chile. An avid reader, he’d read the novels of Victor Hugo, the tales of Jules Verne, and the French symbolist poets, and tried translating Baudelaire as a teenage boy.
Neruda’s father disapproved of his writing poems, preferring that his son take up a more practical occupation, and this led the young poet to change his real name, Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes, to Pablo Neruda (after the Chech historian novelist Jan Neruda). But the heart's will is a force one cannot reckon with. And Neruda’s heart was settled on, as he put it, “hunting poems.”
In the opening lines of Body of a Woman, the first poem in this collection, we are met with a poet who not only sees the existence of poetry in the makings of the world but celebrates it in every verse.
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.
What became rapturously evident in Neruda’s work is that he needn't go far to search for inspiration. Instead, he engulfed himself in the shades of his own life, trusting the forces that moved him and the senses which perceived and transmuted. In a masterly way, all the more poetic because of its contact with the humane, he opened himself up to the experiences already present, lurking under the arms of the beautiful Chilen women, singing in the pine’s roots embraced by the earth, and tolling in the movements of rivers and seas.
In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.
There is no glorification of abstraction in these poems. There’s no idealisation of beauty, nor worshipping of gods and goddesses. They are, rather, lived experiences of love, loss, longing, and solitude, more intuitive than intellectual, more glorious because of the poet’s transcendental sensibility to the ordinary. It is with an almost devastating intimacy that Neruda presents the reader, uncoiling the thread that passes through the individual with the same conviction with which it passes through all things natural. For Neruda, there was no separating his life - or anyone’s life - from the grandeur of existence.
Shop Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair from Bookshop
“It is this connection of the sensory and the natural,” writes Cristina García in the introduction of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, “the subjective and the eternal, the instinctual and the commonly transcendent (coupled with a fierce anti-intellectualism) that distinguishes Neruda’s poetry from that of his contemporaries. He finds the glorious in the ordinary, transforming it, simply and forcefully, with his lyrical genius.”
Leaning into the afternoon I fling my sad nets
to that sea that beats on your marine eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.
In post-war Chile, the new constitution of the Parliamentary Republic (1891 -1925) weakened the power of the Catholic Church. It gave way to a wave of “social reforms that guaranteed civil rights and social justice and established democratic-like precedents.”It was a time of change, globally and individually, and Chileans were ready for it. But no such time could go without a poet of the people. For Chileans, that poet was Neruda. He sang to them of their women, their pines, their rivers and stars, and the “wind that topples her in a wave without spray and substance without weight, and leaning fires,” stirring their national pride. He shed the carapace of their separate lives and exposed the soft tissue of their common identity - their telluric longings, cherry blossom-like passion, roiling loneliness, and love that beats with the sound of blood. “In the house of poetry,” Neruda said at one time, “nothing remains except that which was written in blood to be listened to by blood.”
Vicente Huidobro and Gabriela Mistral’s literary work preceded that of Neruda. Huidobro’s poetry was marked by the use of modern French techniques, and, though admired, it did not seem to speak to Chileans the way Neruda’s poetry later did. Gabriela Mistral wrote her first poetry collection in 1914, followed by Desolación (1922) and Ternura (1924), but it was considered to be more distant from the people than Neruda’s.
Beyond Chile, an entire generation of young Europeans and Americans had their outlook stained by post-war cynicism and disillusionment. Moral expectations were rapidly changing and allegiances to social structures were being severed and discarded. Contributing to this alienation and disruption of social structures and relationships, were the artists who sounded the end of a culture that was seen as discredited, and who sought answers and meaning in different philosophies and movements.
“Though Victorian England and Europe had been characterised by optimism, security, and self-assuredness,” Cristina García goes on in the introduction, “within a few years Freud (who argued for the unconscious), Einstein (who in 1904 argued for relativity), and Heisenberg (who argued for uncertainty in 1927) unseated the categorical assumptions of the nineteenth century as delivered by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Pasteur’s discovery of germs, the worldwide elimination of slavery, the absence of major global conflicts for several decades, and the stranglehold of religious authority.”
This inevitable social and philosophical crisis that engulfed the world resulted in the emergence of several artistic and literary movements. It was the time of creationism, futurism, cubism, Dadaism, surrealism, and the most influential and long-standing modernism, which put the individual’s daily life and experience at its centre.
Neruda wrote poetry that reminded the individual that life was worth living even if they’d experienced the grandeur of pain and suffering. His verses told of the possibility of falling in love, of passion’s most intimate language, of the rapture and beauty of being an ordinary human being among the transcendental cycles of nature. For Neruda, poetry meant the full, raw, experience of being human, not renouncing darkness but transforming it into beauty, not forsaking pain, but using it as a doorway into the most intricate parts of the self. Through it, he inspired readers not to shy away, but to feel the entirety of whatever situation, emotion, or sensation life accorded them with.
You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the afternoon
wind, and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.
Huntress of the depth of my eyes, your plunder
stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.
You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begins.
I got my first copy of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in the winter of 2018, while I was visiting a friend in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It had Andy Warhol’s Heart (stencil-like, c. 1979) as a cover illustration, Neruda’s original poems written in Spanish, and a masterly translation by W.S. Merwin, and I immediately fell deeply in love with everything it stood for. It is a collection that has brought me closer to myself, opening me up and allowing me refuge in the most natural parts of my existence. Reading these poems in the dank furrows of sorrow and ache, the fluttering joy of love and desire, and the poured sunshine, only 8 minutes old, on the body of this earth that we so often forget is our home, has rendered my life awareness and beauty of connection. They’ve been my companions, teachers, guides, and maps to the uncharted parts of my being. Most importantly, however, regardless of the stretched distances they occupy in space and time, these poems have offered me space to become present with the one thing that keeps us afloat: hope.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilight.
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.
-from “Here I Love You”
A RAY OF SIGH is part of the Bookshop affiliate program and may earn a commission from qualifying purchases.
Read more articles here.
Comments