As someone who doesn't read poetry frequently, I was thoroughly impressed by Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems. The simple and easy-to-understand yet emotional and powerful words of Pablo Neruda made this a particularly delightful read. Neruda’s use of vivid imagery and metaphors stood out and made the poems even more impactful. He uses images from nature, such as the sea, sky, and forests to express his emotions of love. I particularly appreciated how the poems covered a wide range of feelings associated with love - including its highs and lows, the emotional and physical intimacy, the joys and sorrows of union and separation, and the happiness and despair that can accompany it. In the remainder of this blog post, I will discuss one of my favorite poems from the collection, Ah Vastness of Pines, as well as A Song of Despair, which I also found to be particularly powerful and moving.
I really enjoyed Ah Vastness of Pines for the beautiful usage of metaphors. Neruda artfully uses the imagery of a pine forest to convey the vastness and depth of the speaker's love, effectively demonstrating how it fills and encompasses the speaker's entire being, just as a forest fills a landscape. The line "In you the rivers sing and my soul flees in them as you desire, and you send it where you will" was particularly moving, it made me feel the intensity of the speaker's love.
Besides, A Song of Despair was perhaps the “emotionally” strongest/powerful and most moving poem of this collection. The feelings of heartbreak, hopelessness, rejection, and longing were only made more powerful by the complex use of imagery by Neruda. The description of love as this “great wound” and his heart as a “barren island” was heartbreaking. This whole collection conveys this sense of realization that love while being this magnificent and beautiful force, can be just as draining and painful if left unfulfilled.
Fun fact: since the copy I had included both the Spanish and English versions of the poem- I used the relative simplicity of the poems to brush up on some of my Spanish skills since I took Spanish in high school (although I can barely remember much). It was a fun way to reconnect with the language.
Discussion question: Which poem did you like the most?
Chanya, I'm glad you appreciated Neruda's poems, practicing your Spanish. One of the aspects that most attracts attention about Neruda is his imaginative capacity to create novel combinations of words, although they always seem to us that we have always known them. Did you find a case like this in the original in Spanish?
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ReplyDeleteHi Chanya! Thanks for your post :) I'm jealous of your ability to read the poems in Spanish - my copy also had the Spanish versions of each poem, but alas I cannot speak the language. Did you find the poems varied exponentially or very little between the two languages? In response to your question, my favourite poem was also 'A Song of Despair'. By far the heaviest, but most evocative of the collection in my opinion.
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