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Love, a question
has destroyed you.

Love, Desire, Furies, � it is in these elemental emotions Pablo Neruda has cast in verse his and the life of his beloved. They met at the beginning of Time when Big Bang was taking shape in their souls and when those various elements came together, guided by violent forces, in a restive arrangement to from their bodies out which arose a desire of self-preservation in perpetual conflict with the vein of self-abnegation. In a way these poems represent the struggle of emotions - emotions that are not conflicting but complementing, but when they overstep their sphere of influence, they disturb that of others. A veritable struggle then ensues in the cosmos of heart. Imagine, what it would feel like if love took on the destructive force of fury? Or if love turned out to be no more than the nom de guerre of a transient desire? Neruda will let you find the answer for yourself.

Neruda had written these poems for his wife Matilde Urrutia at a time when sublime love was feeling the first pains of domestic disquiet. He published the collection anonymously and did not take ownership for over a decade, perhaps because he considered them confessional poems. He wrote: “To reveal its source was to strip bare the intimacy of its birth.� But his close friends, seeing the success of the poems, persuaded him to let the personal become the public � and universal. This is what good art is: it is personal at heart but in its scope it is universal, so that it becomes intimately personal to whoever lays eyes on it.

I have read this collection twice and on both occasions I could not detect anything that makes these poems confessional. Allusions to people and events are completely missing, if that was the fear. There is also no trace of Neruda the man distinguishable from Neruda the poet whom we do not already know from his other collections, in style and form, and in the use of language and metaphor. One may see this collection as an afterword of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. My suspicion is that since, unlike the rest of his poetry, these express his difficulties with love and loving, leading on to a visible conflict that may be seen as an unsuitable topic for love poetry, Neruda did not like what he was writing and hid himself.

Be that as it may, amid the pleasures and bounties of boundless love expressed in a colossal voice of nature, of which I will write further down, here Neruda writes freely of the nooks of shadow darkening the path which he wants as straight as road or a sword; his imagination struggles with each wound that has the shape of your mouth, which has injured him in his slumber of love; he complains openly, You have not made me suffer / merely wait and I vainly sought you in the depths of my arms; but he’s also repentant for his own part, Shake off my word that came to wound you / and let it fly through the open window / It will return to wound me / without your guiding it. In the end he affirms, It is not only the fire that burns between us / but all of life; Then comes the final warning, when love is pushed against the wall, it resorts to masculine violence:

"I shall end up by attacking
those who between my breast and your fragrance
try to interpose their dark foot."

Because

"Ah let them tell me how
I could abolish you
and let my hands without your form
tear the fire from my words."

This is then love at a loss, passion circumventing the trappings of stillness, vow fighting the pangs of doubt, affection scratching off the rust of weariness; this is, to use Milan Kundera’s phrase, Neruda’s attempt to understand the unbearable lightness of love. He does this in a manner which is his forte: by transforming his beloved into Nature pure and unsullied, made up of earth, water, fire and wind, mountains, rivers, seas and skies, and all that emerges from those. In short, he traverses every corner of the body of earth to sow it and cultivate it, to sow and cultivate again and again, to save it from the barrenness that threatens its primordial fecundity. Neruda, as he does elsewhere, employs a stunning and all-encompassing telluric metaphor to the soul and body of his beloved. Take a look at this:

In You the Earth

Little
rose,
roselet,
at times,
tiny and naked,
it seems
as though you would fit
in one of my hands,
as though I’ll clasp you like this
and carry you to my mouth,
but
suddenly
my feet touch your feet and my mouth your lips:
you have grown,
your shoulders rise like two hills,
your breasts wander over my breast,
my arm scarcely manages to encircle the thin
new-moon line of your waist:
in love you have loosened yourself like sea water:
I can scarcely measure the sky’s most spacious eyes
and I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth.

A beautiful, delightful poem loaded with creative eros whose most pleasing aspect is the shift of perspective that gradually expands from a 'rose, roselet� to ‘loosened sea water� and ‘spacious sky.�

One may object to his unabashed masculinity, the latent violence of his possessive charms, the overpowering candour of his physical superiority, the machismo he infuses his confessions of love with � his manliness tightens, without a qualm, its insistent arms against the tender flesh of the lover’s body lying in surrender. His poems are written for the elemental female form, testing her patience with the flood and volcano of emotions that he pours into it. But he is not unaware of this. He understands it thus:

From Absence

"I have scarcely left you
when you go in me, crystalline
or trembling,
or uneasy, wounded by me
or overwhelmed with love, as when your eyes
close upon the gift of life
that without cease I give you.

Yet, he pays homage to the female form of his lover with a lightness of expression that dilutes his aggressive beginnings. Take a look at this one by way of example. Here, again, the perspective transform the lover from the 'little one' to 'the earth at vintage time', vast and pristine, naked and without limits.

The Infinite One

“Do you see these hands? They have measured
the earth, they have separated
minerals and cereals,
they have made peace and war,
they have demolished the distances
of all the seas and rivers,
and yet,
when they move over you,
little one,
grain of wheat, swallow,
they cannot encompass you,
they are weary seeking
the twin doves
that rest or fly in your breast,
they travel the distance of your legs,
they coil in the light of your waist.
For me you are a treasure more laden
with immensity than the sea and its branches
and you are white and blue and spacious like
the earth at vintage time.
In that territory,
from your feet to your brow,
walking, walking, walking,
I shall spend my life."

Pablo writes, Jibran rates, but how come a star goes missing? As noted, Neruda had written these poems as anonymous specimens soon to be forgotten for good. In that some poems are doubtless written in haste. In some lines poetry is difficult to detect; in others there is repetitive enumeration of emotions and elements that smacks of poetic juvenilia. I can easily overlook it for the journey has been full of brilliant scenery, fresh metaphor and uninhibited expression of love and fidelity that ends in these words:

"And so this letter ends
with no sadness
my feet are firm upon the earth,
my hand writes this letter on the road,
and in the midst of life I shall be
always
beside the friend, facing the enemy,
with your name on my mouth
and a kiss that never
broke away from yours."