Essay Questions

How do the conventions of the sonnet form of poetry serve to make the title of this poem ambiguous if not downright confusing?

This is a poem known as a sonnet. A sonnet has certain very strict rules (fourteen lines) and certain less strict rules (the second half responds to the first) and certain informal guidelines (it should be a love poem). The sonnet also has one convention that is usually observed, but does not lose its status if it is not observed. The official title of most examples of the form is the word Sonnet followed by a number. This convention stems from the fact that many individual poems of this kind are actually part of a collection known as a “sonnet cycle.” Thus, this poem is actually titled “Sonnet 89” because it appears in that numerical position in the ordering of sonnets in the poet’s sonnet cycle.

This tradition has created an offshoot convention in which the first line serves to become the unofficial title by which the most famous of a poet’s sonnets become known. For instance, one of the most famous poems in history has come to be known as “How do I Love Thee?” because it is the first line in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43.” Fortunately, in that case, the title makes instant sense and one need not even read the rest to arrive at a pretty good guess of the content. Neruda’s “Sonnet 89” is not nearly as fortunate, however. There is no inherently obvious meaning as with Browning’s, but that ambiguity will be cleared up by the end of the poem.

What might the speaker mean with the odd imagery in the poem’s second line?

The ambiguity of the meaning of the first line becomes clear by the conclusion of the poem, true, but any confusion is certainly not clarified by the imagery in the poem’s second line. In fact, many a reader has suspected that perhaps the use of the word “wheat” in this line is the result of a translation error. In fact, the original Spanish version composed by the author includes the phrase “y el trigo” which is unambiguously translated into “and the wheat.” Clearly, then, Neruda meant to write “I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands” which, alas, means the reader must try to interpret its meaning rather than passing their confusion off onto the translator.

The meaning is perhaps purposefully abstruse as Neruda’s way of enticing the reader to examine the text more closely. Or, perhaps it is distinctly literal: it could be a recollection of sense memories associated with baking bread, for instance. Because Neruda is a poet with a firmly established record of engaging nature metaphor, on the other hand, the reference to wheat as a connection to light could be entirely symbolic, with “wheat” not really being a reference to wheat, but something much more metaphorical. That it is not immediately clear—or even particularly obvious upon multiple readings—is by no means a weakness of the poem. In fact, the lack of clarity may actually be one of its greatest strengths.

What literary device is used in the final stanza of the poem?

Generally speaking, the final stanza of the poem engages parallelism which is basically described as the repetition of certain words or phrases. Although not carved in stone, the most common form of parallel construction includes three repetitions of the same words or phrases. The final stanza makes it very clear that the use of parallelism should be noted as significant since it is comprised of just three lines. Since these three lines engage parallelism by repeating the same two words (each followed by a different pronoun), this is specifically an example of anaphora. Anaphora distinguishes itself from mere parallelism by virtue of the repetition taking place at the beginning of lines. Repeating the same words within the same context brings attention to the use of anaphora and forces the reader to pay closer attention to how the meaning is expressed through the connection of the three lines rather than focusing on the lines individually. That this use of repetition occurs as the poem is drawing to a close also serves to increase its meaning within the overall construction of the composition.