Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems”: A Deep Dive into Passion
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Thematic Unity and Erotic Themes
There is a certain thematic unity between “Twenty Love Poems” and “Crepusculario.” They brought the erotic theme, speaking of a unique passion for the woman. They speak of jealousy, the wait, and complete love.
Passionate love of past or future. The poet confesses as a sad man, but the reason is not explained. All poems are written in an elegiac, nostalgic, and sad tone. He uses comparisons with natural elements (pine-mast).
In general, comparisons abound, especially natural ones.
Sometimes, a man is shown as completely hopeless, mixing sadness and love, erotic pleasure, and the cold of absence. This is what gives body to the work.
The verses are eight-syllable, especially Alexandrian.
Neruda’s Early Style and Personal Tone
Neruda published this book in 1924, when he was barely twenty years old. It is considered the first work in which Neruda abandons his primary Modernism and enters a very personal and intimate tone.
In the twenty poems, the Chilean poet seeks loving communication to reach an illustration. It leads to the traditional meeting between the poet and his knots, with whom he wants to establish an enduring relationship. In all the verses overflowing with sensuality, the woman fully redeems, even ideally, the loneliness of the poet.
The Dramatic Contrast Between Man and Woman
From the first poem, he exposes the dramatic contrast between the anxious man and the woman in her exuberance:
Body of woman, white hills, white thighs,
I look at the world in your attitude of surrender.
My savage peasant body undermines you
and blows the bottom of the earth.
I was just like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and my night went his powerful invasion.
To survive, you forged as a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, like a stone
in my grave.
While, therefore, the poet draws the solitude and draws the woman who can mitigate their sufferings. With the exception of four of the twenty poems, the poet is in incessant contact with the woman he passionately loves. In the fourth poem, he wanted to stop in a landscape that evokes both passion and abandonment:
It is the morning full of storm
in the heart of summer…Innumerable heart of the wind
beating on our silent love.Whizzing through the trees, orchestral and divine,
as a language full of wars and songs.
Abandonment, Romanticism, and the Sea
The intensity of abandonment increases, an abandonment that precedes any possible enjoyment and also follows any that has already been obtained. In poem seven, he says:
He stretches and burns in the highest fire
my solitude that gives your arms like a castaway.
The romanticism of “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” recovers as a preferred landscape the vastness of the sea, as if the capacitor of freedom, fullness, and at the same time, a shipwreck lost, tied to arrive at port in the mainland. Day and night appear and disappear in a counterpoint of light and darkness, brilliance and darkness. The point at which the poet stops with more emphasis is on him that day and night are confused, twilight announcing the stars and setting fire to date: “Toward dusk runs where drunk statues.”
Despair and Symbolism
Little by little, as we approach the song, the poet will be leaning towards the atmosphere of the night, as poem eighteen states:
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to tell.
When you reach the “Song of Despair,” Neruda has exposed the tribulations of a being doomed to neglect, to confinement, to places as bleak as tunnels, caves, and dens. He is a man who has been looking for a woman, like looking for a reassuring lighthouse. The being that crosses the poems is an unstable man, clueless, who seeks support for marine and coastal locations:
Dropped as the docks at dawn.
It’s time to leave. Oh abandoned!
Cold rain in my heart blossoms
Oh bilge debris, fierce cave
Shipwrecked!
Conclusion
Poetry fraught with symbolism, images that have delighted several generations. It contains the warm breath of a very personal emotion, sincere, and the harbinger of simple poetry Neruda would write in more mature stages.