Octavio Paz: 16 essential poems

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet and essayist. His poetry invites you to participate in an analytical and symbolic pilgrimage that goes through different forms, perspectives and concerns, to discover the existence of a world that reveals itself only when someone has named. It is not surprising that Octavio Paz has ever written that asking what something is is actually asking for his name. This is the magnificent work of the poet: naming that present reality, but evaporated. To give it a name is to give it body, to give it back its transcendent status, it is to make it exist fully. We present here a selection of some poems by Octavio Paz.

Sonnet III

The poet lets himself be led by the amorous and erotic evocations of an instant in which he pauses in the contemplation of the body of the beloved.

Of the green jubilation of the sky
lights you recover that the moon loses
because the light of itself remember
lightning and autumns in your hair.

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The wind drinks wind in its stir,
move the leaves and their green rain
wet your shoulders, your back bites
and undresses you and burns and returns yelo.

Two ships with unfolded sails
your two breasts. Your back is a torrent.
Your belly is a petrified garden.

It is autumn on your neck: sun and mist.
Under the green adolescent sky
your body gives its love sum.

Little girl

The word reveals itself as a giver of life, renewing the air, when it is placed in the mouth of a being taken for innocent, germinal, loving.

To Laura Elena

Name the tree, girl.
And the tree grows slow
high glare,
until our eyes turn green.
You name the sky, girl.
And the clouds fight the wind
and the space becomes
a transparent battlefield.

Name the water, girl.
And the water gushes, I don't know where,
shines in the leaves, speaks between the stones
and it turns us into humid vapors.

You don't say anything, girl.
And the yellow wave,
the tide of the sun,
on its crest it lifts us up,
in the four horizons it scatters us
and returns to us, intact,
in the middle of the day, to be us.

Epitaph of a poet

In this poem, Octavio Paz reminds us of the character of poetic doing, the dialectic between truth and lies, a paradox on which it is built in artistic discourse.

Wanted to sing, sing
to forget
his true life of lies
and remember
his lying life of truths.

Words

The poet represents words as matter itself, subject to plasticity, incarnation, manipulation and creation. They are work, organism, food, at the mercy of the human being who makes them, transforms them, assimilates them.

Turn them over,
take them by the tail (chillen, whores),
whip them,
give sugar in the mouth to the rejegas,
blow them up, balloons, puncture them,
sip them blood and marrow,
dry them,
cover them,
step on them, gallant rooster,
twist their throats, cook,
collapse them,
gut them, bull,
ox, drag them,
do them, poet,
make them swallow all his words.

The simple life

In this poem, Octavio Paz raises a song to the daily graces, to be in the here and now, the fullness of the human experience. The simple life is the vindication of vigilant attention and experience as a sense in itself, the only possible connection with others and with the universe.

Call the bread and make it appear
on the tablecloth the daily bread;
give sweat its own and give sleep
and to the brief paradise and to hell
and to the body and to the minute what they ask for;
laugh like the sea laughs, the wind laughs,
without the laughter sounding like broken glass;
drink and seize life in drunkenness,
dance the dance without missing a beat,
touch the hand of a stranger
on a day of stone and agony
and may that hand be firm
that he did not have the friend's hand;
taste solitude without the vinegar
make my mouth twist, or repeat
my grimaces the mirror, nor the silence
bristles with gnashing teeth:
these four walls, paper, plaster,
sparse carpet and yellowish spotlight?
they are not yet the promised hell;
that that desire does not hurt me anymore,
frozen by fear, cold sore,
non-kissed lip burn:
clear water never stops
and there are fruits that fall when they are ripe;
know how to break bread and distribute it,
the bread of a truth common to all,
truth of bread that sustains us all,
by whose leaven I am a man,
a fellow among my fellow men;
fight for the lives of the living,
give life to the living, to life,
and bury the dead and forget them
as the earth forgets them: in fruits ...
And that at the time of my death I achieve
die like men and reach me
forgiveness and enduring life
from the dust, from the fruits and from the dust.

The poetry

Poetry reveals itself to the poet as a lover in front of whom his soul is undressed or, why not, as a nurturing mother who sustains the poet. Poetry is a relationship. Let the poet speak.

To Luis Cernuda

You arrive, silent, secret,
and awaken the fury, the joys,
and this anguish
that turns on what it touches
and engenders in everything
a dark greed.

The world gives in and collapses
like metal to fire.

Among my ruins I rise,
alone, naked, stripped,
on the immense rock of silence,
like a lone fighter
against invisible hosts.

Burning truth
What are you pushing me to?

I don't want your truth
your foolish question.

Why this sterile struggle?
It is not the creature man capable of containing you,
greed that is satisfied only in thirst,
he calls that all lips consume,
spirit that does not live in any form
but he makes all forms burn.

You rise from the depths of me
from the nameless center of my being,
army, tide.

You grow, your thirst drowns me
expelling, tyrannical,
that which does not yield
to your frenzied sword.

Now only you inhabit me,
you, nameless, furious substance,
underground, delusional greed.

Your ghosts beat my chest,
you wake up to my touch,
you freeze my brow,
you open my eyes.

I perceive the world and I touch you,
untouchable substance,
unity of my soul and my body,
and I contemplate the combat that I fight
and my earth weddings.

Opposing images cloud my eyes,
and to the same images
others, deeper, deny them,
fiery babbling,
waters that flood a more hidden and dense water.

In its damp darkness life and death,
stillness and movement are the same.
Insist, victorious,
because I only exist because you exist,
and my mouth and my tongue were formed
to say only your existence
and your secret syllables, word
impalpable and despotic,
substance of my soul.

You are just a dream
but the world dreams of you
and their muteness speaks with your words.

Rubbing when touching your chest
the electric frontier of life,
the darkness of blood
where the cruel and loving mouth pacts,
still eager to destroy what he loves
and revive what destroys,
with the world, impassive
and always identical to himself,
because it doesn't stop in any way
nor does it linger over what it begets.

Take me lonely
take me between dreams,
take me, my mother,
wake me up completely,
make me dream your dream,
anoint my eyes with oil,
so that when I meet you, I know myself.

Your eyes

In the eyes of the beloved the poet finds the world. He knows himself a prisoner of the seduction that announces an eternity, an immeasurable beauty that subdues the lover.

Your eyes are the homeland of lightning and tears,
speaking silence,
storms without wind, sea without waves,
birds imprisoned, golden beasts asleep,
wicked topaz as the truth,
Autumn in a forest glade where the light sings on the shoulder
of a tree and all the leaves are birds,
beach that the morning finds constellated with eyes,
basket of fire fruits,
lie that feeds,
mirrors of this world, doors of the hereafter,
calm pulsation of the sea at noon,
absolute blinking,
paramo.

Illiterate

For the poet, the sky represents a book full of indecipherable signs. Faced with the immensity, the poet recognizes his finitude.

I raised my face to the sky
immense stone of worn letters:
the stars revealed nothing to me.

See also The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz.

Early morning

The early morning is represented by the poet as the terrible hour when the sleeping wounds that surround his existence awaken.

Quick cold hands
they withdraw one by one
the shadow bandages

I open my eyes
yet
I am alive
in the middle
of a wound still fresh.

Pressure

In this poem, Octavio Paz seems to introduce us to one of the literary topics par excellence: concern for the passage of time.

Runs and lingers on my forehead
slow and falls in my blood
the hour passes without passing
and in me it sculpts and fades

I am the bread for your hunger
I the heart that inhabits
the hour passes without passing
and what I write undoes it

Love that passes and fixed sorrow
in me combat lies in me
the hour passes without passing
body of quicksilver and ash

Dig my chest and don't touch me
perpetual stone that does not weigh
the hour passes without passing
and it is a wound that festers

The day is short, the immense hour
time without me me with your grief
the hour passes without passing
and in me it escapes and is chained

Scribble

Eroticism is once again present in Octavio Paz. This time, his approach is sensory rather than contemplative. An action turned into a metaphor reviews the texture of the body and passion.

With a lump of coal
with my broken chalk and my red pencil
draw your name
the name of your mouth
the sign of your legs
on nobody's wall

At the forbidden door
engrave the name of your body
until my razor blade
blood
and the stone scream
and the wall breathes like a chest

Be quiet

The image that Octavio Paz presents to us about silence overwhelms us: when thought makes its way into silence, and illusions, guilt or sorrow that oppress our chest pounce.

As well as the background of the music
a note sprouts
that while it vibrates it grows and thins
until in other music it becomes mute,
springs from the bottom of silence
another silence, sharp tower, sword,
and rises and grows and suspends us
and while it rises they fall
memories, hopes,
the little lies and the big ones,
and we want to scream and in the throat
the cry fades:
we flow into silence
where the silences are muted.

The fire of every day

Paz returns once again to aesthetic self-reflexivity, to the question of poetic making and the matter of his creation: language, this time an image of sound, of vibrant air. Language is represented as living nature. And so the poem was born, continuation of the universe.

To Juan García Ponce

Like the air
makes and undoes
on the pages of geology,
on the planetary tables,
its invisible buildings:
the man.

His language is just a grain,
but burning,
in the palm of space.

Syllables are incandescences.

They are also plants:
its roots
they fracture the silence,
its branches
they build houses of sounds.

Syllables:
they link and unlink,
they play
to the similarities and dissimilarities.

Syllables:
they ripen on the fronts,
they bloom in the mouths.

Its roots
they drink at night, they eat light.

Idioms:
glowing trees
of rainy foliage.

Lightning vegetations,
echo geometries:
on the sheet of paper
the poem is done
like the day
on the palm of space.

To say to do

Once again, poetic doing becomes the subject of Octavio Paz's poetry. this time, he has dedicated the poem to Roman Jakobson, a linguist and literary critic, widely known for his study of the functions of language. One of them is precisely the poetic function. But who can really know what poetry is?

To Roman Jakobson

Between what I see and what I say,
Between what I say and keep quiet,
Between what I keep quiet and dream,
Between what I dream and forget

The poetry.

It slides between yes and no:
He says
what I keep quiet,
shut up
what I say,
it sounds
what I forget.

It is not a saying:
it is a doing.

Is a do
which is a saying.

The poetry
it is said and heard:
it is real.

And i barely say
it is real,
dissipates.

Is this more real?
Palpable idea,
word
impalpable:
the poetry
goes and comes
between what is
and what is not.

Weaves reflections
and unweave them.

The poetry
sow eyes on the pages
sow words in the eyes.

Eyes speak
the words look,
the looks think.

Hear
the thoughts,
watch
what we say
play
the body
of the idea.

The eyes
they close

The words open.

Between going and staying

The poet sings to him at the everyday instant, the one in which the day is trapped thinking of turning into night, that magical moment in which the human being who contemplates it, the poet in this case, becomes a pause that he contemplates. What thoughts awakens that prostration!

Between leaving and staying doubt the day,
in love with its transparency.
The circular afternoon is already bay:
in its still movement the world rocks.
Everything is visible and everything is elusive,
everything is close and everything is untouchable.
The papers, the book, the glass, the pencil
they rest in the shadow of their names.
Beat of time that repeats in my temple
the same stubborn syllable of blood.
The light makes the wall indifferent
a spectral theater of reflections.
In the center of an eye I discover myself;
He doesn't look at me, I look at him in his eyes.
The instant dissipates. Without moving,
I stay and I go: I am a pause

The bird

Death does not abandon the concerns of the poet. That inexorable fate that we face in a recurring motif in literature. The verse may survive, but not the man who has. Words prevail over being. Death in this poem is depicted threatening, like a sniper on the prowl. Death has neither a face nor a motive, it does not know justice. It just comes.

A silence of air, light and sky.
In the transparent silence
the day rested:
the transparency of the space
it was the transparency of silence.
The still light of the sky calmed
the growth of herbs.
The bugs of the earth, among the stones,
in the identical light, they were stones.
The time in the minute was satiated.
In the absorbed stillness
it was consummated at noon.

And a bird sang, thin arrow.
Wounded silver chest vibrated the sky,
the leaves moved,
the herbs woke up ...
And I felt that death was an arrow
it is not known who shoots
and in the blink of an eye we die.

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