20 love poems and a desperate song by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda wrote the book Twenty love poems and a desperate song shortly before turning 20 years old. His fresh youth was not an impediment to achieving a very high literary and communicative level, which has made this book an essential reference in Latin American literature.

Not in vain, the literary critic Harold Bloom has declared in his books that the Chilean Pablo Neruda and the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa are the most important poets of the 20th century. But what is hidden behind this collection of poems from the Chilean Nobel Prize? How to approach it?

Analysis of Twenty love poems and a desperate song

The book Twenty love poems and a desperate song It is made up of 20 numbered love poems; only one of them, "A desperate song", has been titled.

Read as a whole, the book is not about a particular woman, but about a universal archetype, if you will, of the loved subject versus the loving subject, which is the writer.

If we take as a fundamental source the author's own testimony about his creative process, Neruda resorts to the memories of his youthful loves to build this image that will accompany the reader throughout the book.

Book Topics

Love, sensuality and nostalgia

The book Twenty love poems and a desperate song he essentially addresses the theme of love, memory and abandonment.

The poems open by revealing from the outset the eroticism that arises between two young lovers, but at the same time what remains behind oblivion.

Thus, from the beginning, Neruda will give the tone with which he approaches love as a sensory experience, as touch, as temperature.

Woman's body, white hills, white thighs,
you resemble the world in your attitude of surrender.
My body of a wild peasant undermines you
and makes the son jump from the bottom of the earth.
I was just like a tunnel. The birds fled from me
and in me the night entered the powerful invasion of her.

The woman is, from the outset, a body, a region, a land that is traversed and cultivated. She is the perennial source of a thirst that does not end, of the cravings that are not quenched in the loving subject.

Like the earth, the woman's body lies, she gives herself; the body of man works the earth, it undermines it, it is a "peasant's body."

From there, from this confirmation of the necessary body, of the necessary love, the poems that They go through the different aspects of women and love, including the lack of love that is always present from the poem 1.

For this reason, at the same time the poet faces the memory, the nostalgia, the abandonment that he announces at the arrival of the tunnel, of the night that perpetrated his invasion. Thus, love and memory, passion and nostalgia, accompany the reader to the desperate song.

The beloved woman evokes the songs of nature, the celestial movements, the life that vibrates in each element. For the poet, the woman is a vital principle, a memory of fullness, the cause of the effect to which the lover indulges in pleasure.

The place of the word

To this need for the body, for desire, soon comes the need for words, for transference, of this going after the attention of the beloved: not only her body but her hearing, her mind, her imaginary. The words come to the poet as a promise of a new covenant:

Before you they populated the loneliness you occupy,
and they are more used to my sadness than you.
Now I want them to say what I want to tell you
so that you can hear them as I want you to hear me.

The word is seduction for the poet. Only the word relates the loved subject with the lover. The poet speaks, the woman opens her ear. The word founds the relationship, now in another body: that of the verb.

His most famous poem will be the one known as "I like you when you are quiet", but really identified with the number 15. For Quintana Tejera, in fact, poem number 15 is a hymn to realized love, free of calls to eroticism.

In this, the poet goes from expectant observation to the need for relationship. Contemplation is part of the sensory experience of love. Silence allows contemplation, the abstraction of the subject who imagines while detailing, observing, like a worshiper of her fetish, the body of the beloved.

But the lover needs the relationship, he needs the word, the person, the step that turns the object into the subject, the step that turns the inert body into life that flourishes:

I like you when you are silent because you are absent.
Distant and painful as if you had died.
A word then, a smile is enough.
And I'm glad, glad it's not true.

There love appears, no longer as sensuality, no longer as flesh, but as a need for affection. And that relationship is transformed, mutates into another reality.

However, the researcher Bohorques Marchori maintains that, throughout the work, the lyrical subject proves to be someone who:

... he does not know how to get out of himself to meet a You. It opens up to receive, but cannot project itself beyond its own individuality: "Mark my way /" Love me companion / Do not abandon me. "

The memory and the abandonment

In the book, Neruda collects not only the sensuality of the lovers, or the fullness of the personal and personalizing encounter between them. It also runs through the echoes of heartbreak, of loss that digs ditches under the feet of the loving subject.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Soon the moment is prepared in which the only poem titled by the author appears: "The desperate song". If love has no name, if love cannot and should not be captured in a word, instead it must put a limit to the desperate pain, the pain of the one who has seen love become only memory Cinderella:

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like the weather. Everything about you was shipwreck!

All the memories that add up in the previous twenty poems are now built from a nostalgia that does not understand heartbreak. The body that once belonged to a strong and virile peasant, at the end of the love experience is an abandoned body:

Cold stars rise, black birds migrate.
Abandoned like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Ah beyond all. Ah beyond all.
It's time to go. Oh abandoned.

The style

It is said that aesthetically this collection of poems is still very marked by the influence of modernism, a Spanish-American literary movement whose birth is linked to the publication of the book Blue, by Rubén Darío, in 1888.

Modernism collected and reinterpreted the influences of movements such as romanticism, symbolism and Parnassianism. However, it was fundamentally based on a need for renewal, a consequence of the malaise in the face of the rise of bourgeois culture.

In this sense, modernism wanted to bet on a renewal of poetic structures (verses), the exacerbation of musicality and the senses, and a certain preciousness, among many others features.

Neruda, influenced by these principles, creates a singular work with a character so unique and at the same time so universal that it breaks the rules and becomes a reference of poetry of all time.

Formal features

According to Luis Quintana Tejera in a work titled Infinite oblivion in the Nerudian poetics of love (2014), the versification of the poems that make up this book has a set of characteristics that build a very particular aesthetic.

According to Quintana Tejera, the following formal characteristics can be recognized: preference for Alexandrian quartets, that is, stanzas of four lines, each line of fourteen syllables in length; employment of major art verse (hendecasyllable, dodecasyllable and triscaidecasyllable), when not of the Alexandrian; preference for assonance rhyme and use of esdrújulas and acute at the end of the hemistichs, that is, in the middle of the major art verses.

You can listen here to the poem "I like you when you are quiet" read by Pablo Neruda himself:

The book and criticism

The collection of poems quickly gained the attention of critics, some of whom praised him and some opposed him. One of the most reliable negative criticisms pointed out that the poems collected in the book were intellectual speculations and never the result of a personally lived love experience.

But faced with this type of criticism, Neruda did not delay in defending himself. The researcher Guadalupe Bohorques Marchori, in her thesis on The image of women in Pablo Neruda's love poetry, collected the testimony of the poet in this regard, when he quotes a letter addressed by him to the newspaper The nation:

I have only sung my life and the love of some dear women, as one who begins by shouting loudly to the nearest part of the world. I tried to add more and more the expression of my thought and some victory I achieved: I put myself in everything that came out of me, with sincerity and will.

Who was Pablo Neruda?

The name Pablo Neruda is actually the literary pseudonym of Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, born in Parral, Chile, in 1904.

From a very young age he showed interest and skill in letters, which allowed him to participate and obtain different prizes. At the age of 16, he settled in the city of Santiago, where he enrolled at the University of Chile to study pedagogy in French, a career that he would never pursue. He begins to write for different publications and, by 1921, he definitively adopts the pseudonym Pablo Neruda.

Little by little he gathers some money with his own effort and with the support of his friends to publish what would be his first book: Twilight, in 1923. But it will be the book 20 love poems and a desperate song, published the following year, which will give him the notoriety necessary to become one of the main figures in the literature of the beginning of the century.

However, this book is still highly influenced by modernism born in the nineteenth century, so that from then on Neruda will commit himself to the renewal of his writing.

Her diplomatic and political career will allow her to meet different countries and artists of the stature of Federico García Lorca, whose murder in the context of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 deeply moved him and motivated him to write the famous poem Spain in the heart. From then on, concern for sociopolitical issues was present in her work.

The importance and significance of Neruda's work earned him the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oxford.

Pablo Neruda died in Chile in 1973 as a result of cancer.

More important works

• Twilight. Santiago, Ediciones Claridad, 1923.
• Twenty love poems and a desperate song. Santiago, Editorial Nascimento, 1924.
• Residence on Earth (1925-1931). Madrid, Editions of the Tree, 1935.
• Spain in the heart. Hymn to the glories of the people in war: (1936-1937). Santiago, Ediciones Ercilla, 1937.
• New love song to Stalingrad. Mexico, 1943.
• Third residence (1935-1945). Buenos Aires, Losada, 1947.
• General sing. Mexico, Graphic Workshops of the Nation, 1950.
• Elemental Odes. Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1954.
• One hundred sonnets of love. Santiago, Editorial Universitaria, 1959.
• Song of feat. Havana, National Press of Cuba, 1960.
• Bird art. Santiago, Ediciones Sociedad de Amigos del Arte Contemporáneo, 1966.
• Stockholm speech. Alpignano, Italy, A. Tallone, 1972.
• I confess that I have lived. Memories. Barcelona, ​​Seix Barral, 1974.

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