Summary
The speaker says that he can write the saddest lines tonight before launching into one such line: a description of a chilly, desolate night with a vast starry sky. Tonight, he says, the wind whistles and circles in the sky. Repeating that he can write the saddest lines, he says that he loved "her" (his unnamed lover), and she, in turn, loved him, at least sometimes. On nights like this one, he held her and kissed her under the vast sky. She loved him, and he loved her back—at least sometimes. After all, who could have resisted loving her big, lovely eyes? Tonight, he reiterates, he can write the saddest lines. He laments, or tries to process, that he has lost his lover. The night feels even larger and more desolate without her, and poetry falls on the speaker the way dew falls on a pasture.
Analysis
This poem begins with an ambitious claim: the speaker doesn't merely say that he can write sad poetry, but insists that he can write the very saddest lines of poetry. After such a promise, readers might reasonably expect some extremely, even ostentatiously sad lines. But that isn't what we get. Instead, the speaker offers a mildly lonely couplet about the quiet chilliness of the night, but then seems unable to go further and write these truly sad lines. He repeats that he can write sad lines, but instead writes himself into a circle, repeating quietly moody descriptions of a desolate sky or simply trying, through repetition, to understand just how and why his lover has abandoned him.
Though this poem is a sincere account of heartbreak, it also lightly pokes fun at the speaker, and at the condition of heartbreak generally. Even as he reflects on his own dramatic emotions, the speaker is simply too sad to actually express himself. He doesn't have the willpower or energy—and, Neruda suggests, his disbelief about his situation makes it hard for him to say much about it. The poem's extremely short stanzas of one or two lines give it an uncertain, halting effect, as if the speaker is repeatedly attempting to express himself before giving up or running up against his own exhaustion. As a matter of fact, it's hard to even tell how much of the poem is supposed to be an example of the "saddest lines." Do these sad lines only include "The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance," which is set aside in quotation marks? Is the entire poem an attempt to write the saddest lines? The lack of clarity suggests that the speaker doesn't know, either—he can't extricate his feelings and his poetry, which is actually a disadvantage. He's so wrapped up in his feelings, and has so little distance from his emotions, that he isn't even able to name them. Paradoxically, sadness actually keeps him from writing sad poems.
Meanwhile, this poem is interested in exploring the way that mood and emotion can affect an individual's perception of the outside world. The night sky, in particular, is a marker of the speaker's subjectivity. When he is with his lover, the sky's vastness seems intriguing, romantic, and exciting. After his lover leaves him, though, the night sky feels desolate and lonely. Moreover, the fact that it is the same sky, far from being a source of comfort, only distresses the speaker more. The sky, and the speaker's experience of it, merely becomes a record of just how much his life has changed.
