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Poetry Reading: Pablo Neruda's "Tonight I Can Write..."
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Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda
Poetry is difficult for most because many people read a poem once and leave it at that. But the density of language in poems does not allow for them to be read once and left alone; they ask to be read over and over again. The more closely a poem is read, the closer the reader can get to what is at the heart of the poem. Not necessarily that we discover what the poet is "saying," but we come to realize the way in which he or she says it. Style, spacing, word choice, alliteration, and rhyme schemes are all part of how poets go about making the claims they make in their verses.
For a demonstration, let's take a look at "Tonight I Can Write...", a beautiful, free verse poem by, Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. For the full text of the poem, visit this website: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~hsiao/verse/tonight.html
The poem begins with a simple, declarative statement: "Tonight I can write the saddest lines," a line that is repeated throughout the poem. Neruda doesn't tell us why for several lines. But when he does tell us why he can write such sad lines, he tells us in three words that get right to the point: "I loved her." The effect on the reader is powerful and wrenching in one swift moment.
Neruda also writes many sad lines about the sky. These lines are important because the sky is something he associates with his lost love. He used to hold her under the "endless sky."
"To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her." Here, there is power in monosyllables: nothing fancy, no flourish. Neruda discusses what matters most to the speaker in the poem: the loss. And because of this loss, the speaker is prone to writing: "And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture." Writing is the only response to the feeling of loss.
The questions in the poem aren't really questions at all: "What does it matter that my love could not keep her." Again, Neruda is using simple, blunt statements. But don't be confused and think that the speaker is indifferent because he is not: "The night is shattered..." "My soul is not satisfied..."
The sameness of the night troubles the speaker because he and the woman are not the same any longer. He tries to justify the sameness of the night by deciding whether or not he still loves the woman: "but how I loved her," he says, and then later on, "but maybe I love her."
Here is the line that cuts to the very center of the poem: "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." These lines are chilling. Neruda wrote this poem when he was twenty. And I would argue that it takes quite a mature twenty-year-old to come to a conclusion such as this one.
At the end, the speaker decides that this poem is all, the final verse. She will make him suffer no more. But you and I both know that he cannot be right: "forgetting is so long."
For more information: on Pablo Neruda, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda
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