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What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance, someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
-Pablo Neruda
Introduction
You've probably heard the expression "life imitates art," but in Neruda's case, it's the diametric opposite: "art imitates life." The poetry of Neruda serves as a sign of liberation for the people. Despite his banishment from the political center, he becomes a spokesperson for the voiceless in times of need or despair.
His words serve as reassurance or to reject government and military brutality. But even writing is insufficient- you must live it, absorb it and breathe it to understand the craft.
Originally published - 1924
Title - Tonight I can Write the Saddest Lines
Author - Pablo Neruda
Translated by W.S. Merwin.
Published in the collection - Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair
Insight into the Poem
"Tonight I Can Write" is a poem by Pablo Neruda on memories and grief caused by lost love. The speaker recounts throughout the poem the details of a relationship that's now been damaged beyond repair.
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I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
-Pablo Neruda
In the opening line, the notion of distance is highlighted. When the poet tells the reader: "I can write the saddest lines tonight," he hints he could not write it before. Later we realize that he has not written about his romance or its demise amid his great sorrow for a lost lover.
Here, like in the rest of the poem, the Neruda language is basic and to the point, which suggests that the emotions of the speaker are sincere. In the second and third lines, the idea of distance is again addressed as the stars are shivering "in the distance." These lines also feature nature imagery that becomes a key link between his memories and his current state.
He repeatedly juxtaposes pictures of his enthusiasm and passion for the woman he loved with today's emptiness. He is somewhere else today, recognizing that "Tonight I can write the saddest lines," the grief he felt upon losing his lover had before hindered any remembrance or descriptions of it.
While his anguish in the past had limited his creative powers, he now had the opportunity of writing about their love and finding some solace in the passage "that falls on the soul like the dew to the pasture."
In the final lines of the poem, the speaker restates, "I no longer love her, that’s certain," but instantly contradicts, when he acknowledges, "but perhaps I love her." "Love is so short, forgetting is so long" concluded his world-weary tone of despair and resignation. His poem became a painful effort in forgetting.
Theme: Passion, Love, and Heartache
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The speaker emphasizes throughout the poem about his profound love for a woman he was involved in a passionate romance with. He recalls physical details: "her great still eyes," "her voice, her bright body." He also recalls them kissing "under the boundless sky over and again," confessing, "how I loved her."
His love and attachment are still obvious but he says twice that "I no longer love her, that’s certain." The memories of his love are too bitter for him to acknowledge his profound love for her, particularly when he believes, "Another's. She will be another’s.
Critical Appreciation
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I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
-Pablo Neruda
Even though some reviewers were startled by the poems' blatant eroticism and sexuality, the volume, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair became a best-seller and was translated into several other languages. In her essay on Neruda, Marjorie Agosin states, "One of the rationales that Twenty Love Poems engages the reader so profoundly is the sobriety of speech and expression and the precision of the imagery."
In his article on Neruda, René de Costa observes that all of the poems in this book feature “a positively contentious confessional intimacy that indeed challenged and captivated the sensibility of its reader, generating in the meantime a modernist stil Nuovo that continues to echo in the language and spirit of love.”
The poems draw a history of love from the initial enthusiasm to the expression of the release of passion and desire and eventually to separation. The last poem in the poetic collection, "Tonight I Can Write," conveys the grief of the poet after he loses his beloved. The bittersweet mood harkens back to their intense connection and his realization that "loving is so short, forgetting is so long."
The Bottom Line
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these are the last verses that I write for her.
-Pablo Neruda
The Nobel Prize winner Neruda's poetry is rich, muscular with heart, rupturing red in intense passionate blood, round, clear, and loud in his assertions. Yes, it's erotic, but it's done at its best – romantic, beautiful, a spectacle, not tacky or nasty.
Lastly, love is the strongest, grandest, most beautiful, the brightest thing in the world, and this collection reflects it absolutely. In this truly amazing apotheosis of the poetry of romantic passion, it is difficult to find an analogy for the sustained passion and kindness. I'm sure in the future I'll reread the collection.
My ratings for the poem - 5 on 5
Read the poem online - Tonight I can Write the Saddest Lines
Get your copy of poems from Amazon - Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair
Written By - Prakriti Chaudhary
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