Pablo Neruda burst into my life with the force and manic persuasion of his passionate writing. Like many others, I started with the classic Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair. This work, published when the poet was just nineteen, is a timeless wonder.
Neruda’s work is filled with unabashed longing and love. “I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees,” he says. An image of a delicate cherry blossom, in full bloom, and blushing, immediately comes to mind. A quickening of senses and openness to possibilities— these are imperative in the reading of Neruda.
Most of Neruda’s love poetry—One Hundred Love Sonnets and The Captain’s Verses is dedicated to his wife and muse of twenty-two years, Matilde Urrutia. For her he wrote, “Now that I have declared the foundations of my love/I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.”
His love poems aren’t typical. But then nothing he writes is. Even when he’s “marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire” or when he “will persist in your grace.”
What is it about Neruda that appeals to such a wide section of society? For me, it’s the simple honesty of emotion and the fact that he celebrates his feelings, desires and his all-encompassing love with such exuberance. So few people wear their hearts on their sleeves anyway; it’s wonderful to be reassured by Neruda that it can be done and done well. He says, “... I wait for you like a lonely house/ till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.”
Hard to resist such ardent pleas, wouldn’t you say?
Each poem blooms in your senses. You experience the raw earthiness of the mud, the gentle beauty of the dawn and the stars, the clear awareness that attraction creates in the heart and the head. This is a poet in complete control of his craft and in complete awareness of its devastating effects.
The problem with Neruda is only this— when you’re in love and read his poetry, the world is a magical, mystical place where everyone, either tacitly or overtly encourages your emotions. When you’re no longer in love and in a place of hurt, Neruda’s poems are almost too much to bear, like a deep wound made even more intolerable. But this swing in emotions is the essential nature of the lover. And the poet.
Neruda’s poems are often categorised as erotic, which they are. But they are also strange, almost dream-like, historical, political and always relevant. Neruda, a Nobel prize winner for literature in 1971, packed his poetry with the frankness that his diplomat day job did not permit. What we have, as a result, is a celebration of life and love.
Neruda says, “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved/in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” For many of us, a devotion to Neruda’s work is worn not in secret or in shadow, but like a badge of honour, blazingly bright, lighting the path to a more aware, more connected life.
(September 23 was the 41 st death anniversary of Pablo Neruda.)
Dr Srividya is a poet and teacher. Read her work at >www.vodkawaltz.blogspot.in
