Summary
The speaker wonders if it even matters that his love wasn't enough to keep his lover around. After all, there's a starry night, and the speaker is alone without his lover. He hears someone singing in the distance, and he feels dissatisfied or unconvinced that he has truly lost her. His heart and his sight seek her out without success. The night is the same as it used to be, and it makes the trees—which are also the same—look whitened. Yet the speaker and the lover have changed. Though he doesn't love her now, he used to, and would try to make his voice join up with the sound of the wind so she would hear him. He considers the fact that she will probably one day be loved by a different person, who will have access to her voice and her eyes, which the speaker particularly loves. He doesn't love her anymore, he says, but then backtracks, saying that maybe he does. Forgetting, he says, takes longer than love. Since he used to hold her on nights just like this one, he can't comprehend that he's lost his lover. Still, he says, the pain he feels now is the last pain he'll ever feel for her, and the poem he's writing is the last he'll write for her.
Analysis
We discussed before how, for the speaker, the unchanging sky serves as a kind of measuring tool. The speaker is operating in a state of disbelief, unable to truly grasp the fact that his lover has left him. One of the ways in which he tries to make himself understand is by comparing two vast, windy, starry nights—one in the past, which he spent with his lover, and one in the present, which he spends alone. Nature, in other words, is constant and unchanging. It's also entirely insensitive to the feelings of human beings. The speaker hopes to make use of nature: since the wind is already blowing, it seems, he tries to make his voice and the wind work together so that his lover will hear him. But nature can't be hijacked in this way, it seems. Instead, the wind becomes one more thing dividing the speaker and the lover.
Furthermore, there are multiple layers present in terms of the speaker's changing relationship. We know that the romance is over in the sense that the lover has rejected the speaker and they're no longer physically together. And, of course, we know that the natural world hasn't changed. But there's a middle layer, where it's actually not clear just how much has changed between past and present: the speaker's emotional state. In one stanza, he claims to no longer love her, but contrasts that to his former feelings of love for her. A few stanzas later, though, he reiterates that he no longer loves her—before backtracking and conceding that, maybe, he does. In other words, the speaker is unsure of his own feelings. They might have changed dramatically, or they might not have changed at all. Thus, in this poem, Neruda assembles a complex landscape of moving parts: the lovers are together and then apart, the natural surroundings remain constant throughout, and the speaker's feelings, just to make things more complicated, are pretty unclear.
While it's not entirely clear whether the speaker still loves the "her," one aspect of his emotions is straightforward: he's very, very sad. One explanation for this is that he's still in love with her, in which case his sadness makes sense. But, of course, he's not sure whether he's still in love—and if he's not, then his sadness is a bit more mysterious. The enigmatic line "Love is so short, forgetting is so long," offers something of an explanation, though. In this line, "forgetting" isn't just an absence of feeling or the process by which a memory becomes absent. It's an active, deeply felt presence, like love itself. The long experience of forgetting is therefore, in a sense, an extension of love, or a proof that love once existed. This is what makes the poem's final lines sad ones. The speaker promises that he'll no longer feel any pain or write any poetry about his lover, implying that soon, the process of forgetting her will have ended entirely—and as that process ends, the last proof of their love will disappear too.
