"When I Die I Want Your Hands On My Eyes" is a poem by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. It is technically titled ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX’’ and originally appeared in the poet's 1959 collection, One Hundred Love Sonnets. As the title of that collection suggests, this sonnet is a love poem and it is directed toward Neruda's wife, Matilde Urrutia. The poem is considered an instructional manual of sorts from the poet to his beloved, informing her of his wishes for how to be treated after his death.
Neruda was already in his mid-fifties when he composed this sonnet. He would not actually pass away until 1973 when he was sixty-nine years old. Neruda had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature just two years earlier. One Hundred Love Sonnets is a collection divided into four parts. "Sonnet LXXXIX (When I Die I Want Your Hands on My Eyes)" appears in the final section of the collection, "Night." As might be expected, the preceding sections are "Morning," "Afternoon," and "Evening" with the last section focusing on topics like death and separation from loved ones.
Matilde Urrutia was actually Neruda's third wife. She was also the last woman he married, and the couple remained together for the quarter-century before Neruda's death. The romantic link between the speaker of the poem and his wife is clear and perhaps hints that this relationship actually began as a secretive affair while Neruda was still married to his second wife. The poem's context and subtext work together to provoke the intense feeling that it is a about a couple who have found their soulmate. This intensity of emotion succeeds both in conveying the passion of true love and the comfort it brings as well.
Its inclusion in the "Night" section of the collection serves to promote the poem as a celebration of love that exists beyond the flesh and mortal plane. This section is highly focused on themes related to ending of life and relationships, but this particular poem strongly suggests that even death cannot separate two people who love each other so passionately. Somewhat ironically in light of the poem instructing his wife on dealing with his eventual death, it would not be until after Neruda's actual death that he became as well-known in America as he had been in much of the rest of the world. Even after having won the Nobel Prize, Neruda remained almost a complete non-entity in the United States. This would slowly change, and it would not be until the Oscar-nominated 1994 Italian film Il Postino that Neruda would finally gain fame in America. That movie featured Neruda as a character and was a celebration of his love poetry.
