Pablo Neruda: Poems Essay Questions

Discuss the darker or more sinister themes present in Pablo Neruda's love poetry.

In many ways, Neruda's love poems tread familiar ground: their speakers almost uniformly describe the physical beauty of their lovers and the bliss they feel when together. At the same time, they are consistently interested in love as a destructive force, in which each lover's individuality and personal identity is eroded. In "Love Sonnet XVII," love abolishes both emotional and physical boundaries: the speaker describes his love as one "in which I am not nor are you, /so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, / so close that your eyes close with my dreams." Poems of heartbreak, such as "Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines," explore what happens when this process goes awry, leaving an individual with neither a lover nor a strong sense of self. Its speaker describes a feeling of internal fracturing and loss of bodily awareness, lamenting that "Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms / my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her."

How does Neruda's work make use of line and stanza length?

Neruda's choices regarding line length tend to be weighted with metaphorical meaning and visual symbolism. For example, the exaggeratedly short lines of "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market" lengthen the poem over the page, turning it into a ribbon-like shape that mimics the movement of a fish in the sea. Meanwhile, in "A Song of Despair," stanza length instead functions as a code of sorts. There, the switch from couplets to a one-line concluding stanza imitates the speaker's transition from happy romance to loneliness. And, often, Neruda emphasizes enjambed lines in order to convey that his speakers are overwhelmed or struggling for words. The final lines of "I Explain a Few Things" display a single phrase, repeated and broken over several lines, as if the speaker is unable to find a satisfying way to express himself. Similarly, in the final lines of "Every Day You Play," a sentence is broken unexpectedly to create one notably short line and one quite long one—as if the speaker, giving up on self-restraint, is enthusiastically stumbling over his own words.