24 July 23 Poetic Spirits 02: Pablo Neruda

A Poet of Love, Death, and Pets: Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973), a Chilean poet, was arguably most famous for his poems of love and death. Sometimes it seems he doesn’t separate the two. He would have approved of me saying that.

There is so much to love about Neruda’s poetry, and so much to say, but in the interest of readers’ time, we’ll give you a brief story about yours truly, and then continue with one of Senor Neruda’s love poems. It’s not about the love of one human being for another, but rather the poet’s relationship with poetry itself. If any of you out there are poets, and/or enjoy poetry, you will probably identify with this peon to the art. Actually, the sentiment applies to any activity that one engages with a passion: music, dance, race car driving, raising children. The first line says it all: a passion “arrived,” an unearned gift. Note who seeks whom: “Poetry arrived / in search of me.” Isn’t that the way it is? In a blue-magic moment, the passion “arrives.” 

I remember when I fell in love with words and soon after with poetry. Actually, there were two “arriving” moments. The first arrival found me sitting beside my father while he read “Prince Valiant” (a comic strip from the 50s). I asked him how he knew the story. He said, “Because of these words, see?” he answered me while pointing out the strange squiggles in the bubbles above the characters’ heads. “Oh,” I said, completely mystified. 

The second “arriving moment” took place during my first day in the first-grade classroom. After a lot of rustling around, the Notre Dame nun, Sister Earnest, got us to settle down. Then she held up a large piece of construction paper which had a few of those odd squiggles on it. She held the paper up high with her right hand, and pointed to the squiggles while intoning “G–O–D.” There were yellow sunbeams all around what she called “letters.” She lowered the paper, and repeated, “G–O–D.” I knew about G-o-d. My mother always told me that G-O-D would throw me in the fire for doing “God knows what.” 

I became wary of just what was going on in that classroom. The good Sister then repeated the lesson: “g” and “o” and “d” were letters, and that together they made a word. She went on to say that everything we saw, touched, thought, and dreamed could be written in such squiggles, and other people would know what we meant – usually. And that was my “arriving moment” with words. Not too much later, I was visited by my heart work – poetry. And that’s another valiant story.

Now I give you Senor Neruda’s version of his “arriving” moment when poetry searched for and found him. 

Poetry

by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadow perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

I felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke free on the open sky.   (English version by Anthony Kerrigan)

Just as Neruda didn’t write traditional love poems or odes, he also approached the elegy, or poem of mourning, in a new and original way. He wasn’t the first to write a poem about the death of a pet dog, but "A Dog Has Died" is remarkable for its unsentimental attitude toward death – describing the burial of the beloved pet in rather matter-of-fact terms – even while Neruda embraces the idea of a heaven for dogs.

A Dog Has Died

by Pablo Neruda

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,

but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion

who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

withholding its authority,

was the friendship of a star, aloof,

with no more intimacy than was called for,

with no exaggerations:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

he never climbed all over my clothes

filling me full of his hair or his mange,

he never rubbed up against my knee

like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,

paying me the attention I need,

the attention required

to make a vain person like me understand

that, being a dog, he was wasting time,

but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,

he'd keep on gazing at me

with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life,

always near me, never troubling me,

and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail

as we walked together on the shores of the sea

in the lonely winter of Isla Negra

where the wintering birds filled the sky

and my hairy dog was jumping about

full of the voltage of the sea's movement:

my wandering dog, sniffing away

with his golden tail held high,

face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,

as only dogs know how to be happy

with only the autonomy

of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,

and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,

and that's all there is to it.

Next, let’s have a look at the infamous Senor Neruda waxing poetic about what appears to be his favorite theme: love and death – one or the other or both.

Although we may miss someone whom we remember a great deal, we can sometimes forget – unwillingly – the love and touch of someone we held dear to us. This Neruda poem is touching and true: ‘I have forgotten your face, I no longer / Remember your hands’, he tells his lost beloved.

Love

by Pablo Neruda

Because of you, in gardens of blossoming

Flowers I ache from the perfumes of spring.

I have forgotten your face, I no longer

Remember your hands; how did your lips

Feel on mine?

Because of you, I love the white statues

Drowsing in the parks, the white statues that

Have neither voice nor sight.

I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;

I have forgotten your eyes.

Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound to

My vague memory of you. I live with pain

That is like a wound; if you touch me, you will

Make to me an irreperable harm.

Your caresses enfold me, like climbing

Vines on melancholy walls.

I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to

Glimpse you in every window.

Because of you, the heady perfumes of

Summer pain me; because of you, I again

Seek out the signs that precipitate desires:

Shooting stars, falling objects.

And here is another exploration by Pablo Neruda who dares to speak the unspeakable. Again, this one combines two of his greatest themes: love and death. From its striking opening line onwards, this sonnet sees the poet wishing and hoping that, when he dies, he can do so knowing that what he loves will go on living. But as so often in Neruda’s poetry, the nexus for this wish is the human body: her hands, his eyes.

Pablo Neruda’s greatest poems, because they combine both intense feeling and a more realistic and level-headed approach to love. Although we may miss someone whom we remember a great deal, we can sometimes forget – unwillingly – the love and touch of someone we held dear to us. This Neruda poem is touching and true: ‘I have forgotten your face, I no longer / Remember your hands’, he tells his lost beloved.

When I Die I Want Your Hands On My Eyes

by Pablo Neruda

When I die I want your hands on my eyes:

I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands

to pass their freshness over me one more time

to feel the smoothness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep,

I want for your ears to go on hearing the wind,

for you to smell the sea that we loved together

and for you to go on walking the sand where we walked.

I want for what I love to go on living

and as for you I loved you and sang you above everything,

for that, go on flowering, flowery one,

so that you reach all that my love orders for you,

so that my shadow passes through your hair,

so that they know by this the reason for my song.

John Keats may have written odes to the nightingale and the Grecian urn, but Pablo Neruda’s greatest ode was written to his socks: specifically, the socks his friend brought to him. Maru Mori (a friend of his) gave him a pair of socks which she had knitted herself. She is a ‘sheepherder’ or shepherdess by profession, so she works with sheep and their wool.

For Neruda, they are ‘heavenly’ socks, which he was tempted to lock the socks away so that he might preserve them forever as rare gifts. But he resisted this impulse, instead sliding the socks on over his feet and wearing them. The poem’s ‘moral’? That things are twice as good when we’re talking about a pair of woollen socks worn to keep the feet warm in the cold winter months.

Ode to My Socks

by Pablo Neruda

Maru Mori brought me

a pair

of socks

which she knitted herself

with her sheepherder’s hands,

two socks as soft

as rabbits.

I slipped my feet

into them

as though into

two

cases

knitted

with threads of

twilight

and goatskin.

Violent socks,

my feet were

two fish made

of wool,

two long sharks

sea-blue, shot

through

by one golden thread,

two immense blackbirds,

two cannons:

my feet

were honored

in this way

by

these

heavenly

socks.

They were

so handsome

for the first time

my feet seemed to me

unacceptable

like two decrepit

firemen, firemen

unworthy

of that woven

fire,

of those glowing

socks.

Nevertheless

I resisted

the sharp temptation

to save them somewhere

as schoolboys

keep

fireflies,

as learned men

collect

sacred texts,

I resisted

the mad impulse

to put them

into a golden

cage

and each day give them

birdseed

and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers

in the jungle who hand

over the very rare

green deer

to the spit

and eat it

with remorse,

I stretched out

my feet

and pulled on

the magnificent

socks

and then my shoes.

The moral

of my ode is this:

beauty is twice

beauty

and what is good is doubly

good

when it is a matter of two socks

made of wool

in winter.

Background

Neruda, who was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda was his pen name, though he later changed it officially), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and is widely regarded as one of the major poets of South America, and, in some circles, as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, with his love poems receiving much admiration.

Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in the town of Parral in southern Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923, he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario (“Twilight”). He published the volume under the pseudonym “Pablo Neruda” to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved of his occupation. The following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft.

In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic assignments. After serving as honorary consul in Burma, Neruda was named Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1933. While there, he began a friendship with the visiting Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. After transferring to Madrid later that year, Neruda also met Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre. Together, the two men founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la poesîa in 1935. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 interrupted Neruda’s poetic and political development. He chronicled the horrendous years which included the execution of García Lorca in Espana en el corazon (1937), published from the war front. Neruda’s outspoken sympathy for the loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War led to his recall from Madrid in 1937. He then moved to Paris and helped settle Spanish republican refugees in Chile.

Neruda returned to Chile in 1938 where he renewed his political activity and wrote prolifically. Named Chilean Consul to Mexico in 1939, Neruda left Chile again for four years. Upon returning to Chile in 1943, he was elected to the Senate and joined the Communist Party. When the Chilean government moved to the right, they declared communism illegal and expelled Neruda from the Senate. He went into hiding. During those years he wrote and published Canto general (1950).

In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile and married Matilde Urrutia, his third wife (his first two marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and Delia del Carril, both ended in divorce). For the next twenty-one years, he continued a career that integrated private and public concerns and became known as the people’s poet. During this time, Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Diagnosed with cancer while serving a two-year term as ambassador to France, Neruda resigned his position, ending his diplomatic career. On September 23, 1973, just twelve days after the defeat of Chile’s democratic regime, the man widely regarded as the greatest Latin American poet since Darío died in Santiago, Chile. 

Explorations

Exploration 1: In “Poetry,” Neruda uses the phrase, “pure wisdom / of someone who knows nothing.” Does this ring a bell for you? Have you ever had such an experience: knowing everything and nothing simultaneously. Please share, if you would.

Exploration 2: Is Neruda’s combination of love and death in poor taste?

Exploration 3: Love, death, socks, and dogs. Senor Neruda encompasses worlds. Walt Whitman would approve, don’t you think?