Gradesaver has published a number of guides on individual poems by Pablo Neruda, including The Book of Questions, Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines), The Dictators, Ode to a Large Tuna in a Market, Love Sonnet XVII (I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,), Ode to My Suit, and Ode to My Socks.
Over the course of his career, Neruda's poetry evolved in its focus: his early works, such as the collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, were largely celebrations of human sexuality and the natural world. Indeed, these two themes were often linked together in a broader exploration of sensory life. The collection's famous opening lines read "Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, / you look like a world, lying in surrender." These lines offer a glimpse at some of the most consistent tendencies in Neruda's early work, and indeed his work as a whole—the vulnerability of the first-person speaker, the links between sexuality and nature, and the use of second-person address. The poems in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair brought Neruda acclaim and fame as well as controversy at an early age, in large part because of their sensual immediacy and bluntness. Moreover, their short, lyrical forms made them ideally suited to widespread anthologizing and casual reading, and these early poems remain some of Neruda's most famous.
Following these early successes, Neruda was appointed to a number of honorary diplomatic posts by the Chilean government. As he traveled during the late 1920s, his work grew more experimental and surreal as well as darker, in part because of the disillusionment he experienced witnessing global inequalities and the consequences of colonialism. The first two volumes of the Residence on Earth series, produced during this period, are focused on themes of despair and decay, rather than on the issues of love, sex, and heartbreak that characterized the poet's earliest work. Yet they contain the same vivid lyricism and sensory urgency. The poem "Dead Gallop," from the first volume of that three-part series, exemplifies the duality of this period in Neruda's work, in which the inertia of existential despair stands in tension with pure lyric momentum. "aw, that thing my white heart cannot enclose, / in great numbers, in tears that barely seep out, / people trying so hard, miseries," the poem reads—simultaneously propulsive and heavy.
A move to Spain during this period intensified the growing surrealist tendency in Neruda's work, perhaps because he fell under the influence of various Spanish poets—most notably Federico García Lorca. Lorca's friendship would prove to be one of the most important personal, political, and artistic relationships in Neruda's life. The Spanish writer was himself heavily influenced by avant-garde movements, especially surrealism. These, in turn, pushed Neruda into more fantastical territory. At the same time, Lorca and Neruda shared leftist political views—for which Lorca was executed in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, in 1936. Neruda's ode to Lorca exemplifies some of the surrealist leanings that the poets shared. It includes images of "rivers thick as bedrooms / of ill soldiers, who suddenly swell / toward death in rivers with marble numbers / and decaying garlands, and funeral oils..." Its expression of personal love and grief collides with a stark political message.
Indeed, the Spanish Civil War unleashed a flood of political poetry and brought about a dramatic shift in Neruda's life and poetry. As Spain fell to fascism, Neruda came to identify as both a communist and an ardent supporter of the Republican cause. He expressed these views with poetic calls to action. The collection Spain in Our Hearts expresses an anguish quite different from that portrayed in Neruda's earlier work. Rather than grappling with romantic heartbreak or existential despair, these works position themselves as records of atrocity as well as pleas to passive outsiders. In "I Explain a Few Things," published within Spain in Our Hearts, Neruda grapples with the tensions between his role as a personal poet and a political or public one, writing, "And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry / speak of dreams and leaves / and the great volcanoes of his native land?" But a stanza later, he answers his own question, arguing that political crisis trumps other artistic priorities with the rallying cry: "Come and see the blood in the streets. / Come and see / the blood in the streets. / Come and see the blood / in the streets!"
And yet, soon after, Neruda would indeed address the "great volcanoes of his native land" in Canto General, a verse epic of the South American continent. However, far from marking a turn away from political poetry, Canto General carries leftist and postcolonial analysis into a uniquely South American context, blending these political and historical themes with Neruda's trademark sensory vividness. Yet despite the accessible immediacy of their style, these works are perhaps Neruda's most ambitious in their scope: they aim to retell the history of the Americas through a Latin American lens. They are also formally complex and ambitious. The most famous poem in Canto General, "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" (first published alone as a book-length poem), is itself comprised of twelve shorter poems. The poem uses the ancient city of Macchu Picchu as a way to slip between deep history and personal meditation as its speaker wanders the site, musing about the pre-Columbian peoples who built it. Discussing one of the city's ancient inhabitants, the speaker wonders, "Tell me if his sleep / was snoring, gaping like a black hole..." With these images of everyday life in Macchu Picchu, Neruda imbues political poetry with sensory directness: the long-gone people of Macchu Picchu are imbued with humanity through the portrayal of their bodily existence.
Neruda wrote odes, such as Ode to my Suit, throughout his career even as his interests and focuses shifted. These odes remain some of Neruda's best-known and most widely read works, perhaps in part because they encapsulate much about his style more broadly. With the odes' affectionate scrutiny of a single object, Neruda expresses an interest in the material world—both as a politically embattled landscape with an unequal distribution of resources, and as a source of connection between human beings across time and space. His odes can be understood not only to span his career-long transitions between love poetry, political poetry, and poetry of witness, but also to veer into other poetic genres; for instance, Neruda's elegiac poem to Lorca is presented in the form of an ode.
As his career drew to a close, Neruda waded back into the love poetry that had defined his early career. In this late period, he produced the widely-read collection 100 Love Sonnets. These works, like his political ones, reflected personal passions—in this case his affair with Matilde Urrutia, who would become his third wife. Though his work did not entirely shift away from political concerns, in a sense he returned to some of the styles that defined his earliest poetry, focusing on the romantic, the sensual, and above all the universal. These late poems often dispense with historical specificities in favor of imagistic ones, portraying archetypal scenes. Nonetheless, in poems like Love Sonnet XVII, Neruda's leftist politics are discernible. The poem's observation "I don’t know any other way to love, / except in this form 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," can be read as a romantic expression of a political belief in fundamental human equality and sameness. Love, in Neruda's poems, has the power to establish a collective with shared needs, interests, and obligations.
