The 25 best poems of Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda It is the name by which the great Chilean poet Ricardo Eliezer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto was known, as his father was dissatisfied with his using his family name. Born in 1904 and died in 1973, he also became a diplomat and was a person very influential in Chile and in the Hispanic world during the 20th century.

Things in Chile became tense, as he was the harshest critic of President Gabriel González Videla. The criticisms were direct, and the government requested his arrest. Neruda then went into exile in Buenos Aires, Paris, and then to different countries such as Italy, Romania, India, Mexico or Hungary.

He always had his pen as an ally in all these destinations, and received great recognition, being surely the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 the most notorious.

Top 25 of the best poems by Pablo Neruda

Being one of the most recognized Spanish-language authors of the 20th century, he got to write many poems. His literary quality is that of a true teacher, and it is fortunate that today we can read his legacy.

Here is a selection of 25 of the best poems of Neruda.

1. Sonnet 22

How many times, love, did I love you without seeing you and maybe without a memory,

without recognizing your look, without looking at you, centaury,

in contrary regions, in a burning noon:

You were just the aroma of the cereals that I love.

Maybe I saw you, I guessed you as I passed by raising a glass

in Angola, in the light of the June moon,

or were you the waist of that guitar

that I played in the darkness and it sounded like the excessive sea.

I loved you without my knowing it, and I looked for your memory.

I entered empty houses with a flashlight to steal your portrait.

But I already knew what it was. Suddenly

while you were going with me I touched you and my life stopped:

in front of my eyes you were, reigning, and queens.

Like a bonfire in the woods, fire is your kingdom.

• Unrequited love is a long-suffering experience, and the memory that is born from there can accompany a lifetime. That feeling of love can remain intact in time and be a source of hopelessness as well as a certain nostalgia, because in the past, time was shared with the loved one.

2. Love

Woman, I would have been your son, for drinking you

the milk of the breasts like a spring,

for looking at you and feeling you by my side and having you

in the golden laugh and the crystal voice.

For feeling in my veins like God in the rivers

and adore you in the sad bones of dust and lime,

because your being will pass without pain by my side

and came out in the stanza -clean of all evil-.

How would I know how to love you, woman, how would I know

love you, love you like no one ever knew!

Die and still love you more.

And still love you more and more.

• These verses express a very deep feeling of desire towards an unfinished love. The words are from one tremendous intensity, and the frustration who stars in them is evident by not being able to have the opportunity to express his love for that woman.

3. I'm afraid

I'm afraid. The afternoon is gray and sadness

the sky opens like a dead man's mouth.

My heart has a princess cry

forgotten in the depths of a deserted palace.

I'm afraid. And I feel so tired and small

I reflect the afternoon without meditating on it.

(In my sick head there must not fit a dream

just as a star has not fit in the sky.)

Yet in my eyes a question exists

and there is a scream in my mouth that my mouth does not scream.

There is no ear on earth that hears my sad complaint

abandoned in the middle of the infinite land!

The universe dies, of a calm agony

without the feast of the sun or the green twilight.

Saturn agonizes like a pity of mine,

the earth is a black fruit that the sky bites.

And by the vastness of the void they go blind

the evening clouds, like lost boats

to hide broken stars in their cellars.

And the death of the world falls on my life.

• Fear, grief and agony is what the person behind these verses feels, and they hit him very hard. The feelings are so intense that sanity itself is called into question, giving the narrator a very unbearable perception of the existential experience.

4. One hundred sonnets of love

Naked you are as simple as one of your hands:

smooth, earthy, minimal, round, transparent.

You have moon lines, apple roads.

Naked you are thin as naked wheat.

Naked you are blue like the night in Cuba:

you have vines and stars in your hair.

Naked you are round and yellow

Like summer in a golden church

Naked you are small as one of your nails:

curved, subtle, pink until the day is born

and you get into the underground of the world

as in a long tunnel of suits and work:

your clarity fades, dresses, leaves

and again she is a bare hand again.

• This poem is dedicated to the intoxicating beauty of a woman. The narrator is overcome by his thoughts towards his body and he delights in imagining this naked woman with great delicacy and love.

5. Don't blame anyone

Never complain about anyone or anything

because fundamentally you have done

what you wanted in your life.

Accept the difficulty of edifying yourself

himself and the courage to start correcting yourself.

The triumph of the true man arises from

the ashes of your mistake.

Never complain about your loneliness or your luck

face it with courage and accept it.

In one way or another it is the result of

your actions and prove that you always

you have to win ...

Do not be bitter about your own failure or

you charge it to another, accept yourself now or

you will continue to justify yourself as a child.

Remember that any moment is

good to start and that neither is

so terrible to give up.

Do not forget that the cause of your present

is your past as well as the cause of your

future will be your present.

Learn from the bold, from the strong,

of those who do not accept situations,

of who will live despite everything,

think less about your problems

and more in your work and your problems

without eliminating them they will die.

Learn to be born from pain and to be

greater than the greatest of obstacles,

look into the mirror of yourself

and you will be free and strong and you will stop being a

puppet of circumstances because you

you are your destiny.

Get up and look at the sun in the morning

And breathe in the light of dawn

You are part of the force of your life,

Now wake up, fight, walk,

make up your mind and you will succeed in life;

never think of luck,

because luck is:

the pretext of the failures ...

• This poem is not about love, but about guilt. Try to convey that it is mediocre to blame other people and that we must work on ourselves and get ahead of what life poses with the best possible attitude.

6. Friend, don't die

Friend, don't die.

Hear me these words that come out on fire,

and that nobody would say if I did not say them.

Friend, don't die.

I am the one who awaits you in the starry night.

Which under the bloody setting sun awaits.

I watch the fruits fall on the dark earth.

I look dance the drops of dew on the grass.

In the night to the thick perfume of roses,

when the round of immense shadows dances.

Under the southern sky, the one that awaits you when

the evening air like a mouth kisses.

Friend, don't die.

I am the one who cut the rebellious garlands

for the jungle bed fragrant with sun and jungle.

The one who carried yellow hyacinths in his arms.

And torn roses. And bloody poppies.

The one who crossed his arms to wait for you, now.

The one who broke his bows. The one who bent his arrows.

I am the one who keeps the flavor of grapes on my lips.

Clusters scrubbed. Vermilion bites.

He who calls you from the plains sprouted.

I am the one who wishes you in the hour of love.

The afternoon air shakes the tall branches.

Drunk, my heart. under God, stagger.

The unleashed river breaks down crying and sometimes

her voice becomes thinner and pure and tremulous.

The blue complaint of the water rumbles in the evening.

Friend, don't die!

I am the one who waits for you in the starry night,

on the golden beaches, on the blonde ages.

The one who cut hyacinths for your bed, and roses.

Lying among the herbs I am the one who awaits you!

• This is an especially sad poem. A friend of the narrator is in great difficulties to survive and this piece describes the agony and the struggle that is fighting. It is impossible that these verses that show great despair do not touch us in the depths of our being.

7. The wind combs my hair

The wind combs my hair

like a maternal hand:

I open the door of memory

and the thought goes away.

They are other voices that I carry,

my singing is from other lips:

to my grotto of memories

has a strange clarity!

Fruits of foreign lands,

blue waves of another sea,

loves of other men, sorrows

that I dare not remember.

And the wind, the wind that combs my hair

like a maternal hand!

My truth is lost in the night:

I have no night or truth!

Lying in the middle of the road

they must step on me to walk.

Their hearts pass through me

drunk with wine and dreaming.

I am a motionless bridge between

your heart and eternity.

If I died suddenly

I would not stop singing!

• This poem is Neruda in its purest form, because in it you can appreciate the greatness of his creative art when making verses full of reflection. The author shows in this poem different inner conflicts what do you feel related with desire.

8. Poem 1

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 its powerful invasion.

To survive I forged you like a weapon

like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.

But the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.

Body of skin, moss, greedy and firm milk.

Ah the vessels of the chest! Ah the eyes of absence!

Ah, the pubic roses! Ah your slow and sad voice!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.

My thirst, my endless craving, my indecisive path!

Dark channels where the eternal thirst follows,

and the fatigue continues and the pain infinite.

• Sonnet 22 is part of "Twenty love poems and a desperate song." In this book Neruda expresses the hard pain suffered for a love that is longed for. Without being able to possess this love, he lives it, and speaks of that woman's body from a physical but also spiritual point of view, experiencing the anguish of not being with her.

9. Sonnet 93

If ever your chest stops

if something stops burning through your veins,

if your voice in your mouth goes without being a word,

if your hands forget to fly and fall asleep,

Matilde, love, leave your lips parted

because that last kiss must last with me,

must remain immobile forever in your mouth

so that he also accompanies me in my death.

I will die kissing your crazy cold mouth,

embracing the lost cluster of your body,

and looking for the light of your closed eyes.

And so when the earth receives our embrace

we will be confused in a single death

to live forever the eternity of a kiss.

• Love and death meet in this poem, exalting the opposition between one and the other. A very heartfelt grieving process is expressed in this piece, where the narrator knows that there is no other remedy than love itself and memory.

10. Sexual water

Rolling in drips alone,

drops like teeth,

to thick drops of jam and blood,

rolling in drips,

the water falls,

like a sword in drops,

like a heartbreaking river of glass,

falls biting,

hitting the axis of symmetry,

sticking in the seams of the soul,

breaking abandoned things,

soaking up the dark

It's just a breath

more humid than tears,

a liquid,

a sweat,

an oil without a name,

a sharp movement,

becoming,

expressing yourself,

the water falls,

in slow drips,

towards its sea,

towards its dry ocean,

towards his wave without water.

I see the long summer,

and a rattle coming out of a barn,

cellars, cicadas,

populations, stimuli,

rooms, girls

sleeping with my hands on my heart,

dreaming of bandits, of fires,

I see boats

I see pith trees

bristling like rabid cats,

I see blood, daggers and women's stockings,

and man hair,

I see beds, I see corridors where a virgin screams,

I see blankets and organs and hotels.

I see the stealthy dreams

I admit the last days,

and also the origins, and also the memories,

like an eyelid atrociously forcibly raised

I am looking.

And then there is this sound:

a red noise of bones,

a stick of meat,

and yellow legs like ears of corn coming together.

I listen between the shot of the kisses,

I listen, shaken between breaths and sobs.

I'm looking, hearing

with half my soul in the sea and half my soul

on earth,

and with the two halves of the soul I look at the world.

And although he closes his eyes and covers my heart entirely,

I see a dull water fall,

to dull drops.

It's like a jelly hurricane

like a cataract of sperm and jellyfish.

I see a cloudy rainbow running.

I see the water passing through the bones.

• Neruda's metaphorical capacity is simply immeasurable. Reading this poem the images that appear in our mind are even succulent and there are those who would censor them. Its ability to recreate atmospheres in the mind of the reader is impressive.

11. Sonnet 83

It's good, love, to feel you close to me at night

invisible in your dream, seriously nocturnal,

while I untangle my worries

as if they were confused networks.

Absent, through dreams your heart sails,

but your body thus abandoned breathes

looking for me without seeing me, completing my dream

like a plant that doubles in the shade.

Erect, you will be another who will live tomorrow,

but from the borders lost in the night,

of this being and not being where we find ourselves

something remains approaching us in the light of life

as if the shadow seal pointed

with fire the secret creatures of him.

• A poem centered on the intimacy of a couple, in which the night takes center stage. Sharing love and life experience with that special person we love makes life live in a much more lucid way.

12. Thirst for you.

Thirst for you haunts me on hungry nights.

Tremulous red hand that even his life rises.

Drunk with thirst, crazy thirst, thirst for the jungle in drought.

Thirst for burning metal, thirst for greedy roots ...

That is why you are the thirst and what has to quench it.

How can I not love you if I have to love you for that.

If that is the tie, how can we cut it, how?

As if even my bones thirst for your bones.

Thirst for you, atrocious and sweet garland.

Thirst for you that at night bites me like a dog.

The eyes are thirsty, what are your eyes for.

The mouth is thirsty, what are your kisses for.

The soul is on fire from these embers that love you.

The body burns alive that has to burn your body.

From thirst. Infinite thirst. Thirst that seeks your thirst.

And in it it is annihilated like water in fire.

• The wish and the passion they are protagonists in this poem by Neruda. These are expressed both physically and spiritually, and describes a need that leads to despair and pain.

13. Poem 7

Your chest is enough for my heart,

For your freedom my wings are enough.

From my mouth it will reach the sky

what was asleep on your soul.

It is in you the illusion of each day.

You arrive like dew to the corollas.

You undermine the horizon with your absence.

Eternally on the run like a wave.

I said you sang in the wind

like pines and like masts.

• The book "20 love poems and a desperate song" contains poems as heartfelt as this. The lively text speaks of how someone who has left leaves a deep memory. That someone thinks of this person with mixed joy and sadness.

14. The sea

I need the sea because it teaches me:

I don't know if I learn music or consciousness:

I do not know if it is wave alone or being deep

or just hoarse or dazzling voice

assumption of fish and vessels.

The fact is that even when I'm asleep

somehow magnetic circle

in the university of the swell.

It's not just the crushed shells

as if some trembling planet

gradual death will participate,

no, from the fragment I reconstruct the day,

stalactite from a streak of salt

and of a spoonful the immense god.

What once taught me I keep it! It's air

incessant wind, water and sand.

It seems little to the young man

that here came to live with its fires,

and yet the pulse that rose

and went down to her abyss,

the cold of the blue that crackled,

the crumbling of the star,

the tender unfold of the wave

squandering snow with the foam,

the power still, there, determined

like a stone throne in the deep,

replaced the enclosure in which they grew

stubborn sadness, piling up forgetfulness,

and my existence changed abruptly:

I gave my adherence to the pure movement.

• The sea of ​​Valparaíso was always part of Neruda's life, and many of his poems are fed by the inspiration that the Chilean coast had on him. This is a poem dedicated to everything that the senses can capture in front of the sea; the sound of the waves, the smell of the sea, the color blue, please our soul.

15. I can write the saddest verses tonight…

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

Write, for example: «The night is starry,

and the blue stars shiver in the distance ».

The night wind turns in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this I held her in my arms.

I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I also loved her.

How could he not have loved her big staring eyes.

• The Will, the wish, the Sound and the wake up are the central axis of this love poem, which shows a great sadness to see that you cannot be with the person you love. The dream that is narrated is so present that it occupies all the thought of who she loves.

16. Turn around

Today Paolo's passion dances in my body

and drunk with a happy dream my heart flutters:

today I know the joy of being free and being alone

like the pistil of an infinite daisy:

oh woman -meat and dream- come enchant me a little,

come empty your glasses of sun on my way:

let your crazy breasts tremble in my yellow boat

and drunk with youth, which is the most beautiful wine.

It is beautiful because we drink it

in these trembling vessels of our being

that deny us enjoyment so that we may enjoy it.

Let's drink. Let's never stop drinking.

Never, woman, ray of light, white poma pulp,

soften the footprint that will not make you suffer.

Let's sow the plain before we plow the hill.

Living will be first, then it will be dying.

And after our tracks go off on the road

and in the blue let us stop our white scales

-Golden arrows that stop the stars in vain-,

oh Francesca, where will my wings take you!

• The sea and a woman they are protagonists in this poem by Neruda as in many others that the author has written. The deep love transmitted by this woman gives a series of very kindled feelings that lead the narrator to live them very intensely.

17. If you forget me

I want you to know one thing.

You know how is this:

if I look at the crystal moon, the red branch

of the slow autumn at my window,

if I touch the impalpable ash by the fire

or the wrinkled body of firewood,

everything leads me to you, as if everything that exists,

aromas, light, metals, they were small ships that sail

towards the islands of yours that await me.

Now if little by little you stop loving me

I will stop loving you little by little.

If you suddenly forget me, don't look for me

that I will have already forgotten you.

If you consider long and crazy

the wind of flags that passes through my life

and you decide to leave me on the shore

of the heart in which I have roots,

think that on that day,

at that time I will raise my arms

and my roots will go out to look for another land.

But if every day

every hour you feel that you are destined for me

with implacable sweetness.

If every day rises

a flower to your lips to look for me,

oh my love, oh my,

in me all that fire is repeated,

nothing in me is turned off or forgotten,

my love feeds on your love, beloved,

and while you live it will be in your arms

without leaving mine.

• A person's life changes when she meets the one who really makes her heart beat. A whole series of emotions are manifested and the person in love feels and behaves like crazy, as if he had some kind of disorder that prevents him from reasoning clearly.

18. Poem 12

Your chest is enough for my heart,

For your freedom my wings are enough.

From my mouth it will reach the sky

what was asleep on your soul.

It is in you the illusion of each day.

You arrive like dew to the corollas.

You undermine the horizon with your absence.

Eternally on the run like a wave.

I said you sang in the wind

like pines and like masts.

Like them you are tall and taciturn.

And you suddenly get sad like a journey.

Welcoming as an old road.

You're full of echoes and nostalgic voices.

I woke up and sometimes they emigrate

and birds that slept in your soul flee.

• Neruda spent his life near the Chilean sea, so he knew closely the life of the navigator. This love poem is located in this man's relationship with the sea, where the absence of the human being shows off. This literary piece is within "Twenty love poems and a desperate song."

19. Woman, you have given me nothing

You have given me nothing and my life for you

she strips her rosebush of despair,

because you see these things that I look at,

the same lands and the same skies,

because the network of nerves and veins

that sustains your being and your beauty

you must shudder at the pure kiss

of the sun, of the same sun that kisses me.

Woman, you have given me nothing and yet

through your being I feel things:

I am happy to look at the earth

in which your heart trembles and rests.

My senses limit me in vain

-sweet flowers that open in the wind-

because I guess the bird that passes

and that dipped your feeling blue.

And yet you haven't given me anything

your years do not bloom for me,

the copper waterfall of your laughter

he will not quench the thirst of my flocks.

Host that did not taste your fine mouth,

lover of the beloved who calls you,

I'll go out on the road with my love on my arm

like a glass of honey for the one you love.

You see, starry night, song and drink

in which you drink the water that I drink,

I live in your life, you live in my life

You have given me nothing and I owe everything to you.

• Sometimes the attraction that someone can feel towards another person it is not reciprocated, but this does not prevent keep thinking about her. That type of desire is the one that is collected in this poem sense.

20. Poem 4

It is the morning full of tempest

in the heart of summer.

Like goodbye white handkerchiefs the clouds travel,

the wind shakes them with its traveling hands.

Countless heart of the wind

beating over our silence in love.

Buzzing through the trees, orchestral and divine,

like a language full of wars and songs.

Wind that carries the litter in rapid robbery

and deflects the beating arrows of the birds.

Wind that knocks her down in a wave without foam

and weightless substance, and inclined fires.

It breaks and its volume of kisses submerges

fought at the gate of the summer wind.

• The wind and the storm on the high seas acquire a great protagonism in this poem in the form of a metaphor, and it is that the Desire towards someone is setting fire to the soul of those who suffer it.

21. Don't be far from me

Don't be away from me for a single day, because how,

because, I don't know how to tell you, the day is long,

and I'll be waiting for you like in the seasons

when somewhere the trains fell asleep.

Don't go away for an hour because then

in that hour the drops of wakefulness gather

and maybe all the smoke that is looking for a house

come still kill my lost heart.

Oh that your silhouette is not broken in the sand,

ay that your eyelids do not fly in the absence:

don't go away for a minute, beloved,

because in that minute you will have gone so far

that I will cross the whole earth asking

if you will come back or if you will leave me dying.

• The love that is felt in a very intense way capitalizes on the content of this poem, in which the deep feeling of possessing the loved one they urge the narrator to have to express himself in this vigorous way.

22. My heart was a living and cloudy wing ...

My heart was a living and cloudy wing ...

a terrifying wing full of light and longing.

It was spring over the green fields.

Blue was the height and the ground was emerald.

She - the one who loved me - died in the spring.

I still remember his watchful dove eyes.

She -the one who loved me- closed her eyes... late.

Country afternoon, blue. Afternoon of wings and flights.

She - the one who loved me - died in the spring ...

and she took the spring to heaven.

• The most special person in a person's life is the protagonist in this poem. There is talk of I remember the love of a life, a love so strong that it invaded all human sense when it lived and equally persistent once death seized that love.

23. Yesterday

All the lofty poets laughed at my writing because of the punctuation,

while I beat my chest confessing semicolons,

exclamations and colon i.e. incest and crimes

that buried my words in a special Middle Ages

of provincial cathedrals.

All the nerd began to take advantage

and before the rooster that crowed they went with Perse and with Eliot

and they died in their pool.

Meanwhile I was entangled with my ancestral calendar

more old-fashioned every day without discovering but a flower

discovered all over the world, inventing but a star

surely already off, while I soaked in the brightness of it,

drunk with shadow and phosphorus, he followed the stunned sky.

Next time I go back with my horse for time

I'm going to prepare to hunt properly crouched

everything that runs or flies: to inspect it previously

if it is Invented or not invented, discovered

or undiscovered: no future planet will escape from my network.

• The most autobiographical Neruda emerges in verse form through exceptional beauty. Neruda speaks of yesterday, today and tomorrow in a way available to very few because of his literary art and because of his wisdom.

24. I love you here ...

I love you here.

In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.

The moon burns over the wandering waters.

They go the same days chasing each other.

Fog unfurls in dancing figures.

A silver gull slips down from the sunset.

Sometimes a candle. High, high stars.

Or the black cross of a ship.

Only.

Sometimes up early and even my soul is wet.

The distant sea resounds.

This is a port.

I love you here.

Here I love you and in vain hides the horizon from you.

I am loving you still amidst these cold things.

Sometimes my kisses go on those serious boats,

that run through the sea where they do not reach.

I already look forgotten like these old anchors.

The docks are sadder when the afternoon docks.

My uselessly hungry life is fatigued.

I love what I do not have. You are so distant.

My boredom struggles with the slow twilights.

But the night comes and begins to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.

They look at me with your eyes the biggest stars.

And how I love you, the pines in the wind,

they want to sing your name with their sheets of wire.

• This poem has a broken soul as the protagonist, well I know remember the love of a life. Love being an experience of enormous beauty, when it leaves us, emotions follow one another, leaving us breathless as we remember the person he left us.

25. Now it's cuba

And then it was the blood and the ash.

Then the palm trees were left alone.

Cuba, my love, they tied you to the rack,

they cut off your face,

they took your pale gold legs apart,

they broke your sex in Granada,

they pierced you with knives,

They divided you, they burned you

Through the valleys of sweetness

the exterminators came down,

and in the high mogotes the crest

of your children was lost in the mist,

but there they were reached

one by one until we die,

torn to pieces in torment

without its warm land of flowers

that fled under its plants.

Cuba, my love, what a chill

the foam shook you with foam,

until you became purity,

loneliness, silence, thicket,

and the bones of your children

crabs were disputed.

• The Neruda's relationship with Cuba is present throughout his life, and although he alludes to the island in some of his works, this poem is directly dedicated to this country. From his childhood he already had an interest in Cuba, and already as a writer he had a lot of relationship with writers and the Cuban intelligentsia, although there were also disagreements.