The wind.” It is something that can only be survived, unlike the “power of men,” against which the speaker can wage war. The wind is the purer image of chaos, and it drives the poet to echolalia: “The wind. The rain, like the sky, is ambivalent, both violent and vital. The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.” Still, the eroticism of “The rain takes off her clothes” makes it clear that this apparent digression is still the encounter between the poet and his lover. The violence of his beloved’s difference, which a dialectician might call her “negative capability,” tears open the poet himself: “Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window. The ambivalence of this image of the sky gives way to the absolute sublimity of the inchoate beloved: “Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.” But first Neruda turns to the night sky: “Who writes your name in smoke among the stars of the south?” It is an image of the sublime overwritten with the beautiful – the sublime of the starry sky that becomes the backdrop for the more manageable name of the beloved. The first flower imagery is suggested by the line, “Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.” This is a plea for happiness, and a gallant seduction, modes which return at the end of the poem. Neruda writes, “you arrive in the flower and the water.” These tropes define the divide between new life on the one hand, and chaos on the other. They are in fact brought to life by their encounter, instead of being destroyed, through an alchemy of sentiment that transmutes the storm. The apparent disconnection between the descriptions of love, and the descriptions of the tempest, at first conceal the fact that for Neruda, love is the only means by which two people “weather” each other. That otherness takes the form of traumatic, destructive passion, and reveals a mutual inchoateness almost beyond endurance. For Neruda, love and eros are confrontations with the real subjectivity of another person. The play of love in the poem is not just with “light,” but between light and darkness in both persons. To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,ĭark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I go so far as to think that you own the universe. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,Īnd over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.Ī long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body. My savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth. While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle, I can contend only against the power of men.Īnd turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.Ĭling to me as though you were frightened.Įven so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes. Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them. The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish. Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window. Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. You are more than this white head that I hold tightlyĪs a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. Merwin:Įvery day you play with the light of the universe. This is nonetheless my first attempt to articulate its passions, and make it speak. Who knows how many times I’ve read it over the years. The poem I’m discussing below is Poem #14 from 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Every copy of Rilke you find in used bookstores has been inscribed to someone.) Yet Neruda is plagued by a curious indexicality, by which I mean our tendency (at least in the English-speaking world of my experience) to share him (“read this!”) without necessarily discussing him. (He has this in common with other writers of sexy, elemental verse, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Mary Oliver. The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum was affected first among other notables to catch the fever was Petitpoussin at Truly Outrageous, and she has links to a number of sites getting in on the game (actually, this post is coming quite late).įor most people, everything you need can be found right around your house, since Neruda is the kind of writer whose readership extends far beyond avid consumers of poetry. ATTENTION ALL READERS: The web now has a bad case of Pablo Neruda.
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