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Pablo Neruda
Ø the Symbolist movement,
Ø the Romanticist Movement,
Ø the Surrealist Movement,
Ø the Hispanic Modernismo Movement.
The zeit geist was very pronounced at this point in time, from the early 1900’s to the 1940’s. Great minds came crashing down into this time period with ambitions to change the world or culture through the arts. Literature and Art was a major way as social commentary towards the governments they wanted to oppose. Social commentary in their art was very common especially for the likes of Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and many other cultural artists. While these artists were engrossed in their own works, the world was crumbling to shambles with World War I and II, the Spanish Civil War, Communism, The Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin, and corruption from their own countries.
Neruda himself had very many influences and has been very influential to many people. When Neruda started his career at a very young age his family tried to discourage him and tell him that his poetic efforts would not lead to anything. He was started to get discouraged and decided to become a French teacher but at age 12 he met the Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral who told him not to give up and pursue his poetry. Of course there were many poets he was influenced by, from Ruben Dario to Arthur Rimbaud. Although no on had such a heavy influence on Neruda than Walt Whitman. In a speech given by Neruda in 1972 he says “I, a poet who writes in Spanish, learned more from Walt Whitman than from Cervantes.”
In his 1930’s Neruda traveled to Spain and he found himself amongst many poets who eventually became his friends. They admired his work and they all inspired each other. Among the pack was “Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, and Miguel Hernandez.” However, tragedy stuck in 1936 when civil war broke out in Spain and his close poetic comrade Garcia Lorca was killed by The Nationalists. The sudden death of Garcia Lorca and his devotion to serving the Communist Party with Alberti and Hernandez heavily influenced him and pushed him to write “Heart of Spain”, another book of poets.
The many women in his life were always an inspiration for him as he has written book after book of love poems such as: “Twenty Love Poems and a Song Despair” and “One-Hundred Love Poems”. His journey in Peru to see Macchu Picchu (the home of the ruined Incan Empire) also sparked another innovative book of poems having to do with this journey as he contemplates what he observed. He called this book “General Songs”. Neruda has often been compared to the painter, Picasso because “he tended to present distorted images, giving a grotesque yet powerful effect to this collection.” He has been enamored, loved and taken in by so many of his fellow poets and people around the world for his heartfelt, love, and feeling in his poetry. His efforts finally proved successful in 1971 when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature. Neruda’s love poems are internationally known because of the most heartfelt passion experienced when one read his love poems. One of his love poems is called Sonnet XII:
Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses? Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey. Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight runs through the narrow pathways of the blood
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.
The feeling is so great in this poem that while reading through it the heart starts to beat madly as if one was in love. This is the closest description we will ever get to being in love. In this poem he is conveying that this goddess of a woman he gets to have and educating the audience on the mysteries of how to love someone works. He uses a lot of light and dark imagery as emotions and feelings. In the second stanza “loving is a journey with water and with stars, with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour: loving is a clash of lightning-bolts and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey” he uses the natural environment around us to symbolize how love is brought into play by two people. Love is a dark harsh thing a first but submit to their feelings from “onesingle drop of honey”. This poem not only shows his excellent use of imagery as well as his use of nature as emotions. This is a wonderful love poem the captures the height of feelings and emotions while comparing it to the world.
In contrast to his love poems, “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” has a death feel of ill destruction and sorrow. These two poems have one thing in common that they both exude several feelings. These two poems are very different in the overall message but this shows the great versatility Neruda shows through his poems.
The Heights of Macchu Picchu:
Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.
I come to speak for your dead mouths.
Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.
Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.
Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.
Neruda’s use of imagery and symbolism is very evident throughout this poem. To give the reader a destructive feeling about what had taken place on this sacred land, Neruda uses horrifying words and phrases such as: “here I was scourged” and “the light axes gleaming with your blood”. He wants the reader to sympathize, feel contempt, cry, and mourn for the loss of this beautiful nation. In this poem the speaker, sees himself through his ancestors of the Incan empire. He is asking the Incas to look at him from the grounds they were buried in to give him a glimmer of hope that they can once again be revived through their descendants, like the speaker. He tries to find some reason these people were murdered. In the line “here I was scourged because the earth failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone. Point out the rock you stumbled, the wood the used to crucify your body”, he finally finds a little bit of clarity as to what happened. He now understands that they were completely obliterated because of the gold, jewels, and fertile lands they possessed. While he realizes the reason of their untimely fall he also empathizes with the lost souls that were brutally murdered. He wants to care for this generation of greatness that was once so viciously destroyed. He is there to tell them that he feels their pain and that he was with them when they were obliterated. He wants to make the Inca proud as well as his ancestors by being himself.
Neruda is an international known poet for his use of words that exude so much feeling and emotion, which is not the typical style of writing poetry. Neruda learns from other poets and movements and takes some influences from that and different and incorporates them into his own works of art. He is anything but the typical poet and even though he is no longer with us today he continues to stir the hearts of millions of people who are blessed with the gift of reading his works.
Works Cited
Duran, Manuel E. “Pablo Neruda.” Encyclopedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-5187.
Goforth, Ray. “The Heights of Macchu Picchu”. 10 April 2006 http://www.mindspring.com/`altafb/pablo.txt.
Mitchell, Steven. “Sonnet XII”. 1 May 2006 <http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfa/poemquot/neruda12.html>. “
Pablo Neruda.” Books and Writers. 1 May 2006. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/neruda.htm.
“Pablo Neruda.” Wikipedia. 1 May 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda.
Schade, George D. “Pablo Neruda.” Latin American Writers 1969: 1001-1018. 2 May 2006 http://galenet.galegroup.com.
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