I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Here, as he often does, Neruda treats grief and abandonment as states of excessive, frustrated, or directionless love. "Forgetting" is here addressed not as an absence but as a presence, perhaps more concrete, real, and enduring than love itself. In other words, the state of heartbroken forgetfulness is itself a version or outgrowth of love. Meanwhile, these lines offer a useful glimpse of just how Neruda builds trust and intimacy between his speakers and readers. This speaker, uncertain of his own feelings, addresses and seemingly thinks out loud to the reader as a trusted confidant.
I want
to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees.
This is one of the most quoted lines of Neruda's poetry, and the vividness and intimacy of its figurative language makes the reason for its popularity clear. Throughout "Love Poem XIV," the speaker describes his relationship with the subject in terms of the desire to nurture and understand her at a fundamental or microscopic level: "Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed," he pleads. Thus, the above quote expresses not merely sexual attraction or a desire to inspire growth and feeling in the subject—it expresses a desire to know the subject in an earlier, less realized state and to bear witness to her evolution. This desire to understand the object of love at every point in its chronological existence is visible, too, in Neruda's Canto General. Though that work has few superficial similarities to Neruda's love poems, it revolves around a speaker looking to understand the history of the Americas long prior to the speaker's arrival.
The line breaks in this quote, meanwhile, give a glimpse into the speaker's emotions. He begins with the halting, hesitant, "I want," before breaking down and unleashing a thirteen-syllable confession of his specific wants.
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire
Here, the speaker of "Sonnet XVII" seeks out figurative language to describe the love he feels. He first experiments with the most vivid and dramatic images possible, but soon abandons these. His distaste for such attention-grabbing imagery is unsurprising in the context of Neruda's work. While the poet does tend to opt for drama and sensory vividness, he also describes love as a highly private process. Moreover, in this poem as well as Neruda's other love poems, lovers lose their individual identities and become almost a single unified entity, making showy displays of romance not merely uncomfortable, but also unnecessary.
Cling to my body like magnets.
Hasten to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.
At the close of "The Heights of Macchu Picchu," the poem's speaker—a contemporary visitor to the ancient site—addresses its former inhabitants. He offers up his body and voice to them, insisting on serving as a vessel through which these long-dead individuals can make themselves known. These lines express one of Neruda's conceptions of literature. According to this conception, it is the responsibility of the poet to bear witness to history, or to amplify the experiences of those who cannot speak for themselves. Yet, tellingly, the poem ends with a plea. The speaker desperately wants to perform these tasks of witnessing and amplification, but can only beg to do so: it is impossible, Neruda suggests, to actually know the experiences of the dead or silenced.
Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?
"The Book of Questions" is entirely composed of inquiries from an inquisitive speaker. Though the speaker is asking about the world rather than telling about it, the questions nevertheless reveal unspoken assumptions and worldviews. In this case, the speaker's whimsical, personified vision of the natural world is revealed through his concern for the rose. Meanwhile, the idea that nature and femininity are linked, though far more explicit in Neruda's love poetry, also makes an appearance here.
Though Neruda's first-person speakers tend to display disarming vulnerability and frankness with readers, the questioning structure we see here puts reader and speaker on particularly intimate terms. The speaker not only addresses the reader, but appeals to the reader for help, inviting them into a two-sided conversation. In other poems about love, heartbreak, or political belief, Neruda's speakers expose their inner lives to the reader by sharing intense emotional experiences. Here, the speaker exposes their inner life simply by showing uncertainty and curiosity.
