Pablo Neruda: Poems Literary Elements

Most of Neruda's poems are from the point of view of an unidentified but highly emotive first-person speaker. Sometimes, that speaker shares certain attributes with Neruda himself, and sometimes the speaker is implied to be male or to exist in the twentieth century. Some poems like "The Heights of Machu Picchu" show the speaker struggling against the confines of his own point of view, seeking identification with people from history. At times, in poems like "The Dictator," Neruda instead employs a distant third-person speaker.

A few poems, like "Don't Go Far Off," are written in an iambic pentameter, but Neruda tends to opt for free verse. However, he often writes in the sonnet form, or in the (less formally restrictive) ode form.

Neruda's work uses a great deal of metaphor and simile. Among the best-known are "I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, / or arrow of carnations that propagate fire," from Love Sonnet XVII, "The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish," from "Every Day You Play," and "I want to eat your skin like a whole almond" from Love Sonnet XI.

Alliteration and assonance are common in Neruda's work, both in Spanish and in translation. "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market" contains some especially notable examples of assonance in lines like "only you / lived through / the sea's truth," which creates an impression of depth and mystery. In "Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines), assonant S sounds like "my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her" create a wistful, elusive mood.

"Love Sonnet XVII" is particularly ironic, exploring the ways in which grand displays of romance can be far less intimate than small gestures. In general, some of Neruda's most ironic works explore the tensions and paradoxes of love . His political and historical poems, however, tend to dwell on the ironies inherent in bearing witness to and speaking for those who have been silenced.

Neruda's poems span lyric love poems to poems of witness to verse epics.

While most of Neruda's work is set in the twenty-first century, particularly in Latin America, some of his most famous works reach back into and take place during the history of South America.

Neruda's tone is often intimate, emotional, and lyrical.

In Neruda's political works, everyday people and workers are protagonists while their political, military, and industrial oppressors are antagonists.

A few major sources of conflict in Neruda's works are imbalances between everyday people and those who have power over them, or tensions between a person in love and the person who rejects or shuns them.

Neruda was a prolific writer of sonnets, and in many of those works, the climax occurs alongside the volta—that is to say, the single abrupt shift in tone or content. In traditional sonnets, the volta tends to fall after the 8th or 12th line, but Neruda often chooses to alter the traditional form and relocate it.

The final lines of "The Dictator" announce the start of a vendetta, foreshadowing a future conflict—though the poem ends before that conflict is revealed, as if on a cliffhanger.

Though Neruda tends not to opt for understatement, "The Dictators" understates the cruelty of a despot by calling him merely "finical." Meanwhile, "Love Sonnet XVII" begins with an understatement, as the speaker claims, or seems to claim, that he does not particularly love the person to whom the poem is addressed.

Many of Neruda's works allude to politics and history in his lifetime and before. Among the best known is "The United Fruit Company," which alludes to American imperialism. "The Heights of Machu Picchu," meanwhile, alludes to the famous ruins in order to explore the life of their onetime builders and residents.

In "Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)," "my soul" serves as synecdoche, standing in for the speaker as a whole. "The Dictators" is especially full of both metonymy and synecdoche. Various individuals are referred to through metonymy as "wineglasses, collars, and piping," while dead people are described through synecdoche as "buried blue mouths."

Neruda's odes personify and address inanimate objects, from a suit to socks to a tomato.

"Ode to a Tuna in the Market" is especially full of hyperbole, as the speaker again and again claims his subject is unique with the phrase "only you. "If You Forget Me" concludes with a stanza full of hyperbole, with lines like "if each day, / each hour, / you feel that you are destined for me...in me all that fire is repeated, / in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten." In general, hyperbole appears in Neruda's works to emphasize the intensity of a relationship, romantic or otherwise.

Neruda makes only occasional use of onomatopoeia, and the device is easy to lose in the course of translation. The line "when the trains are whistling their anguish" in the poem "Don't Go Far Off" contains an onomatopoeia.