Category: Pablo Neruda

“I like for you to be still” by Pablo Neruda is a very meaningful and deep poem written from him to someone else. In summary, the poem is about how someone, referred to as I, pleads to someone to stop and hear him out. It is all about love and how the I person seems to be having a one-sided conversation with a possible lover. The first-person character is most likely Pablo himself, as many of his other poems have this first-person view as well. The second person is someone who means a lot to him and seems to be ignoring him. He describes them as ‘remote’ and ‘candid’ furthermore proving the point of the one-sided relationship. It ends with him admitting to how even a smile from this secondary character would’ve been enough for him, showing his deep fondness towards this person.

There are quite a few poetic devices in this poem. One example is the repetition of the same few phrases in each stanza. Some good examples are “I like for you to be still” and “It is as though you are absent”, which are both said multiple times. These phrases are important because they show us the clear separation between the two characters, one trying and failing to get the attention of the other character. These two lines help build an image of their relationship and help add emotion to the text. Another example of a poetic device is the use of connotation, more specifically the use of butterfly. Throughout the poem, the primary character refers to the secondary character as a butterfly multiple times. This is important because butterflies are associated with evolving and transformation, and have a positive connotation. Within the text, the author writes about how the secondary character, i.e the butterfly, emerges from everything else like it would from a cocoon. This adds to the poem’s message because it once again shows the importance of the second character, and how much they mean to the primary character. The tone of the poem is sadness, and the evidence is all throughout the text. In the entire poem one character tries desperately to get the love and attention of the other character, only to fail. Many words that describe sadness, such as ‘melchonaly’ and ‘lamenting’, are used to give the reader a sense of sadness and despair towards the primary character. Near the end, though it seems to get happier when the character says he’s happy, we know it’s still sad because had he truly been happy, he would have never thought about anything written in the poem. The point of view in this poem is the first person. The use of the pronoun I show it is through the eyes of either a new character or possibly the author themselves. This ties into the speaker because it is most likely Pablo Neruda who is the person in this poem. Many other poems written by Pablo Neruda have been in the first person, and many tell tales from his own life. One example of symbolism is the butterfly. During the text, the author tells us how the butterfly is this secondary character. Butterflies are associated with the soul and sadness in many cultures and in this poem the butterfly does those exact two things. I believe the butterfly represents how precious this person is to him and she seems to float away from him. There was also so uses of imagery within the poem, a good example being the piece about the still night and silent/remote star when describing him as a lover. It paints a strong image of solidity and loneliness, once again adding to the one-sided nature of this poem. This poem was written in free verse because it didn’t rhyme and didn’t seem to have a structure.

The title is significant because it ties into the theme of the poem. Throughout the piece, the author talks about how the secondary character is far away and distant as if to suggest she’s leaving. The title helps us feel how the man feels during the poem. His love is leaving/ is distant and he wants just to talk to her, even for one split second. He talks about how we would be still in her silence, to suggest how he would do anything for her, but to no avail. The title also ties back into the butterfly piece. Butterflies are in constant motion and you have to be quick to see them. Because he views his lover as a butterfly, this may also be a plea to slow down, so he could express his feelings for her.

Pablo Neruda was a very talented man. He won the Nobel prize for literature and was a great man but the one thing that stood out with him was his love life. Pablo married three times and cheated on his wife multiple times, usually with his soon-to-be brides. The only woman who was ever really remembered to be important to him was his third wife, Mathilde Urrutia, whom he said was the love of his life. Though the date of publication is unknown, it is widely believed this poem, like many of his others, was based towards her and his love towards her.

The poem “I like for you to be still” has a very deep meaning to it. It is almost certainly written in the first person view of Pablo and is most likely about his love life with his third wife. The poem is all about love and regret, and how he was thankful none of it happened.

In conclusion, the message he is trying to tell us that love is rare. Many take for granted loved ones and almost always expect them to say/do something and support you. Without that special person, life is really hard and miserable, so the message is when you find love, do not blow it, and never take love for granted.

The problem of self-identification is a frequent topic for reflection by philosophers and psychologists. Each person can express himself in different ways in different conditions and situations. The speaker of Pablo Neruda’s “We Are Many” is very puzzled by his own uncertain identity and wants to understand who he really is. In various life situations, his opposite personal qualities come into conflict with each other giving him additional discomfort. Finally, the speaker understands that the problem of self-identification may be inherent not only to him; each person is so multifaceted that this issue requires in-depth study. Therefore, in Pablo Neruda’s “We Are Many,” the author shows internal conflicts which the speaker must overcome on the path to self-identification.

The speaker tries to reveal his true identity. He doubts who he really is. Among the many personal qualities, the speaker tries to allocate one to self-identify: “Of the many men who I am, who we are / I can’t find a single one” (Neruda 1-2). He tries to study himself as best as possible to understand which personal quality prevails and plays a leading role in his decision-making. He realizes that, due to circumstances, he behaves like different people, but he emphasizes that he wants to be one person. The speaker wants to change the situation, but he does not succeed. The main reason why he cannot understand his essence is a large number of people with whom he identifies himself: “I never know who I am, / nor how many I am or will be” (Neruda 30-31). The speaker recognizes that a multitude of selves lives inside him and each of them expresses his different and changing facets. He is very concerned about this issue. Thus, self-identification is the task that the speaker must solve in a given period of his life.

In addition, the numerous personalities of the speaker come into conflict with each other. The speaker is concerned about the unpredictability of his own behavior. He tries to be a highly intelligent person, but in some cases, he acts like a fool:

When everything seems to be set

to show me off as intelligent,

the fool I always keep hidden

takes over all that I say

(Neruda 5-8)

The speaker recognizes that identity is not fixed and static. It is always moving. He tries to control himself, but it is not possible. He really wants to be courageous, but the inner coward does not allow him that: “And when I look for my brave self, / a coward unknown to me / rushes to cover my skeleton” (Neruda 11-13). The speaker is desperately trying to find nobility in his soul and to be a hero, but something inside of him prevents this. Thus, the author emphasizes the fact that there are many different, contrasting, and even contradictory personalities within him who are not controlled.

The speaker wants to know how widespread this problem is among other people. He assumes that, by achieving intrapersonal balance, he will succeed in achieving balance throughout the world. The speaker wants to know whether the identity conflict is internal only for himself, or if there are people with the same problem:

I would like to know if others

go through the same things that I do

have as many selves as I have

and see themselves similarly.

(Neruda 38-41)

The author wants to make sure that someone else besides him is also concerned with the issue of self-identification. In addition, he is interested in how these people perceive this situation. He wants to understand whether it is important to them as much as to him. Also, the speaker considers that the discovery of various and contrasting aspects of personality is similar to the discovery of various places and reliefs on earth: “That when I explain myself, / I’ll be talking geography” (Neruda 44-45). Comparing the many personalities with little-known alien lands, the speaker tries to explain to himself that multifacetedness is a common phenomenon in our world. He suggests that it will take a lot of effort to understand why this is happening and how to control it. The author believes that the secret corners of the human soul are as mysterious as distant lands requiring detailed study. Thus, the narrator wants to recognize whether each person is really made from many different selves and how common this phenomenon is.

As demonstrated by Pablo Neruda in his poem “We Are Many,” the speaker needs to overcome internal conflicts in order to self-identify. He wants to figure out who he really is. Also, the speaker is especially concerned about the conflict between his different personal qualities. As result, he decides to investigate this problem more deeply to understand how important and common it is among other people. Since the behavior of the same person in different situations may vary, this question may be relevant for many people.

Works Cited

1. Neruda, Pablo. “We Are Many.” Introduction to Literature, edited by Kathleen Shine Cain et al., Pearson, 2016, pp. 279-280.

Deriving his name from a Czech Republican poet named Jan Neruda, the Chilean poet with a Spanish background, Neftali Ricardo Reyes’ life was always kaleidoscopic. His life was subjected to a multitude of colours like the Spanish Civil war, being a ‘Consul General’ in Mexico, communism and exile. From being a prolific poet to donning a prominent political persona, he mustered awards like the International Peace Prize (1950) and even the Nobel Prize in Literature (1971). Born in 1904, time set him up perfectly to be part of the surrealistic art movement of the early 20th century. As his poetic career went, he predominantly wrote poems that featured intimacy and endearment, evident history and open political agendas. Quite interestingly, it is said that he even symbolized the colour of ink that he used to write in. As it goes, he manoeuvred the mighty pen that put to use green coloured ink as he was of the opinion that the colour stood for hope and desire.

From an analytical point of view, it may seem that a load of meaning may have been lost during the time of translation of all his, Pablo’s, poems because all were composed in his mother-tongue, Spanish. Although, there are many of them in which Neruda has encompassed numerous stylistic elements and literary devices which appended figurative language, sound techniques and structure, and this makes it logical even having gone through the Spanish-English translation.

When taken into account holistically, Pablo Neruda’s poems present him as the ever-present voice and using his talent of rigorous personification, he speaks as a seer in all of them. This is because he mostly speaks in first-person, that is, “I…”. Moving on, the structures of his works and the language he portrays them in are affected greatly by his vivid life. At age thirteen, despite his father’s dissent, Pablo was encouraged by Gabriela Mistral (also a Nobel Prize in Literature awardee) to publish his first work “Entusiasmo y perseverancia” (Enthusiasm and perseverance). He continued then on under a pseudonym. After having completed his college, and studying French, he wrote entire sets of poems, the most celebrated of which is ‘Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada’ (Twenty love poems and a song of despair). To continue describing his life anymore would be a futile exercise as I will deviate from my primary topic.

From my understanding, I think a part of Pablo Neruda’s unexcelled success as a romantic poet could be attributed to his utilitarian stylistic elements and literary devices. The very first of which is imagery. His use of imagery has associated significant facets of nature to his personal poetic experience and this gives the reader something interesting. More than experiences, it is his emotions that talk volumes. The fact that he found and embraced his creativity in many of his poems, progressing in time, is one that engages a reader even further. Another explanation could be that his fixated inclusion of personification along with imagery, in parts of ‘Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada’ presented the majesty of the human figure and the splendor that is possessed by the female human body. These can be found in the lines, “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world, lying in surrender…”. If we throw light on another poem, “If You Forget Me” is an example where Pablo utilized an impressive diction to help the reader comprehend the words he structured in his unique format. His unique format basically is a format-free structure and therefore, is a free verse. Despite the inconsistent pattern of the poem, elements of rhyme can affirmatively be found. This is evident in the lines, “But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower”.

When we move on to Pablo’s acclimation to being a more sensual poet, he has strategically placed numerous metaphors in his twenty poems from the aforementioned set. A random example of a metaphor could be, “es tan corto el amor” from the twentieth poem in ‘Veinte Poemas de Amor’. It is Spanish for “love is so short” and the essence of this, at its core, is the “love is time” allegory. As we go ahead, a reader would notice that in the course of his twenty love poems, Neruda has effectively realized the need of repetition via the reiteration of common metaphors. Maybe because all his twenty poems (and the others) hold interconnected themes of love, nature, etc. Repetition is also an influential literary device when reading “Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines”. Neftali devoted his life to writing about love and intimacy, additionally, he married thrice. This suggests that the man stayed in love for most of his time, though the topic that his love-conquests met closure or not is totally something apart. He repeats the titular lines thrice (up until the 11th line only) and this, one can assume, expresses his sense of loneliness and solitude and the fact that perchance he will never ever have back that one woman (many women, actually) he loved and cared for with all his heart. These emotions are apparent in the lines, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To think that I do not 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”.

Picking up from where I wrote of ‘If You Forget Me’, symbolism and personification play a humungous role abiding by which Pablo benevolently grants many vivid things basic human characteristics. This encompasses the aspect of personification quite illustratively when he talks of “aromas, light and metals” as the things that carried (reminded him of) him to his love. Along with this, Neruda so diligently symbolized him being intimate with the love of his life even when he inhaled his last, that it efficiently coloured the mood and atmosphere of the poem, permitting the reader to ponder upon the same.

Coming back to square one, I strongly feel that all his decisions (Pablo’s) as a poet, when employing each and every literary device and stylistic element that he has, have stalwartly built him a reputation that has been, is and will be successful enough in keeping readers beseeching the magic that his motifs and themes have created and presented the curious reader with. In general terms, Pablo does not usually have a plot or even a consistent structure for that matter. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that a conventional reader would be subject to ennui. Pablo has made sure that the polychromatic and vibrant mix of stylistic elements and literary devices such as personification, symbolism, imagery, repetition, etc., that he incorporates every time keeps the reader zealous. I think Neftali is unique in his way of painting emotions, love and loss especially, and this is something that he should always be commended for.

Two of the casualties of Cultural Studies have been the author and history. In poststructuralist conversations, the author has become a construct, a historical curio of a simpler bygone age. If biography is discourse, then why take an author’s life and ideology seriously? Compounding the problem is the fact that we are lacking adequate biographies of many of the greats of Latin American literary history. A few years ago, while writing an introduction to an English translation of Ricardo Palma’s Peruvian Traditions, I discovered that no one had written a modern biography of Palma. How could a figure as monumental as this be lacking credible, modern biographies? This is not to say that biography is exempt from contingency and even fiction, or that literary critics and historians must parrot the conclusions and arguments of biographers. Like all forms of documentary knowledge, biographical narratives must be evaluated critically in order to be used fruitfully, if at all.

The broader problem, however, is the impoverished status of history among literary critics. Much contemporary scholarship remains suspended by eclectic methodologies and theories, adrift from history and consequence. Some of the notable exceptions to this drift include scholarship on the Colonial era, and, to some degree, Nineteenth-Century Studies, in which history—to a greater or lesser degree—operates as an important frame for literary enquiry. Marginalizing the author and historical context may be comfortable, easy and even marketable, but it does little to further conversations about the significance of literature and its relationship to broader, interdisciplinary questions. Greg Dawes’s new book on Neruda, Verses Against the Darkness: Pablo Neruda’s Poetry and Politics, is a passionate reminder in favor of the return of the author and of history to literary criticism. This is not to say that his study is a biographical-literary study that draws facile correspondences between a life story and a body of poetry, or a superficial combination of text and context. Rather, Dawes underlines his commitment to understanding Neruda as an author by taking the poet’s Marxism seriously, and illustrating the ways in which Neruda’s dialectical poetry gradually emerged out of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

Although the focus of this book is certainly on Neruda’s poetry and on its reception by literary critics, Dawes’s argument is predicated on valuing the figure of the author enough to ask the right questions about the poet’s work. The problem with much of Neruda criticism, Dawes argues, is that it disdains “Neruda’s knowledge of socialism, his commitment to the Communist Party, or the relations between his poetic method and his politics…”. The end result of this tendency is the rejection of much of Neruda’s art as transparent propaganda and the mischaracterization of the intricacy of poet’s body of work. As Dawes writes in one of many memorable passages that sum up the aims of his study: “Neruda became a communist without surrending the quality of his poetry”.

The centerpiece of Dawes’s examination of Neruda’s revolutionary poetics is the Residencia cycle, which has typically been read by liberal critics as a primarily avant gardist or surrealist body of work, rather than one infused with politics and what Dawes terms “critical realism.” In particular, the poetry of Tercera Residencia (1947) shows that Neruda’s previous preoccupation with alienation, language and isolation had reached a “saturation point,” opening up a space for a new awareness of the possibilities of socially committed poetry. The pain and confusion of Neruda in 1927 is overcome by the more self-confident and empowered witness of fascism and its horrors in 1936.

A poet of Anarchist leanings, relegated to the foreign colonial outpost of Rangoon, grows into a committed Marxist through his experiences in Spain, infusing his poetry with strategies for acknowledging, defining and transforming sociopolitical realities. In short, the facts of biography intertwine with the intricacy of Neruda’s evolving poetry, culminating in the Tercera Residencia. For example, Dawes demonstrates that at the beginning of the Residencias cycle, Neruda’s relationship to nature was that of subordination, whereas by the end he was able to detach himself sufficiently to command its representation in his poetry. While the poetic voice was once disenfranchised by nature’s overwhelming power, in Tercera Residencia it begins to emerge as an active agent, capable of delineating social realities and marshalling the imagery of nature in a more controlled manner. ‘Instead of dwelling existentially on his own fatality and alienation from nature and society,” writes Dawes in his discussion of the poem “Naciendo en los bosques”, “here he rediscovers his astonishment with the natural world and wants to absorb it as part of his poetic corpus…Neruda looks to describe the natural, social and moral phenomenon in more palpable and accurate ways’.

Moreover, in poems such as “Vals” and “Alianza Sonata”, the suffering and alienation that had previously overwhelmed Neruda are increasingly challenged by the poet’s desire to overcome these feelings. Whereas creation had at first subjected the poetic voice with its chaos, the poet of Tercera Residencia begins to subject creation in the name of hope and resistance. In order to illustrate the inner workings of Neruda’s dialectical poetry, Dawes must negotiate the concepts of socialist realism and surrealism. Liberal critics of Neruda, such as Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Enrico Mario Santí and René de Costa, privilege an apolitical avant-garde and attack Neruda for demeaning his art in the name of communism. Dawes counters that Neruda was neither a practitioner of socialist realism nor of surrealism. With regards to socialist realism, Dawes suggests that Neruda’s politically committed poetry was not guided by cookie-cutter blind faith, optimism or misguided idealism. In this, Dawes follows the thinking of George Lukács, as exemplified in the article “Tribune or Bureacrat?” (1940).

Dawes sums the Lukácsian argument as follows: “The artist who is able to overcome spontaneity of thought and to perceive the dialectical complexity of life moves beyond the estrangement and mystery involved in the capitalist system and writes singular, and more complete works of art”. Dawes’s readings of Neruda’s politically committed poetry bear this argument out; Neruda may be faulted by his critics for his ideological affiliation but he was not a bureacratic or ‘official’ poet. In one of the most valuable contributions of the book, Dawes demonstrates the dialectical richness of “Canto a Stalingrado” and “Nuevo Canto a Stalingrado”, framing these poems within the broader problematics of antifascism during World War II and Neruda’s other anti-fascist poetry. The issue of socialist realism, or at least the charge that Neruda compromised aesthetics in his political poetry in the name of political propaganda, also comes into play when Dawes discusses surrealism. Dawes cites Neruda as rejecting both realism and surrealism as poetic schools. Consider, for example, the following quote that Dawes translates from Neruda, “Poets who are only irrational will be understood by themselves and their lovers, and that is pretty sad. Poets who are only rationalist, will be understood even by donkies, and that too is very sad.” (79) Dawes goes on to argue that Neruda was too dynamic and subtle a poet to want to disfigure reality through prescriptive utopianism or mere reflectionism. Yet, the poet was also too committed to reality to negate it through an embrace of surrealism. Instead, Neruda opted for a kind of critical realism, a dialectical understanding of reality that allowed him to represent the real as contradictory, rich and alive. Dawes argues that this “Guided Spontaneity” combined “momentary flashes of imagination” with “the sustained elaboration of ideas based on the dialectical method” (50). Dawes also reminds us that Neruda’s contemporaries, Louis Aragon and Octavio Paz, represented paths that Neruda could have chosen but did not. Aragon became a socialist realist who identified with Andrei Zhdanov’s restrictive definition of that school and Paz rejected Marxism and pursued a poetics that was at least partially inspired by a surrealist aesthetic.

Verses Against the Darkness is a rich, multi-layered book. It contains several, lengthy close readings of seminal poems by Neruda, as well as brief but substantial discussions of historical problems, such as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Mexican Marxism in the 1940’s, the importance of the Battle of Stalingrad (1942) for the anti-fascist cause around the world, etc. Another dimension of the book that makes a powerful contribution is Dawes’s meditation on the meaning and limitations of previous criticism on Neruda. In his effective critique of Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Enrico Mario Santí, Dawes demonstrates that their construction of Neruda is predicated on their readings of and identification with a competing poet. In the case of Rodríguez Monegal, Neruda is read through the prism of Jorge Luis Borges, whereas for Santí it is Octavio Paz that provides the roadmap for misreading Neruda.

It is hardly surprising, then, that both critics are so apt to distort Neruda’s contribution to Latin American literature. Dawes’s critique of René de Costa is also quite powerful, especially when he takes the critic to task for separating form from content, and not asking some of the most fundamental questions about form. In contrast, Dawes self-consciously situates himself in a different critical tradition, and repeatedly acknowledges the work of critics such as Jaime Concha, Alain Sicard and Hernán Loyola. A forceful, English-language, Marxist defense of Neruda’s politically commited poetry has been long overdue. The charge that Neruda was a pamphleteer, an ideologue, a bureaucrat or a propagandist should be challenged, at least on the level of aesthetics. To not do so is to fossilize Neruda in the role of Latin America’s bard of love, or in the milque-toast, loveable persona of Michael Radford’s entertaining film Il Postino. Thanks to the insights and contribution of Verses Against the Darkeness, by Greg Dawes, it will be much more difficult for critics to dismiss the political poetry of Neruda as second class art, and to ignore the fact that Neruda was, for most of his life, a committed and passionate Marxist.