Poetry Review “Tonight I Can Write” by Pablo Neruda- A Lyrical Beauty

  

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Introduction

Pablo Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write” is an emotional poem that belongs to Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. This Chilean poet won millions of hearts with his poetry and passion. He is the Chilean Nobel Prize Winner. Gabriel Garcia Marquez lauded him as “ the greatest poet of the 20th century”.  

Tonight I can Write (the saddest lines) is a heart-breaking Spanish love poem expressing the pain of lost love written in 1924. The speaker with one eye on the past, another on the present is trying his best to make sense of a relationship. This relationship filled with endless love and affection has somehow ended.

Summary

The poem starts with the line “Tonight I can write the saddest lines”. The line is repeated thrice in the poem to remind the readers that he is writing the saddest poem. The speaker is sharing his grief with the readers as the nights which were once full of warmth are now full of coldness. The night is even traumatized as she is not with him. 

The night devoid of life represents his life without his love creating imagery in the readers' minds through “The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance”. Pablo personifies the night wind which revolves in the sky and sings evoking the speaker's conflicting thoughts as well as confusion.

In the next lines, the speaker conveys the romantic feelings of lost love through nights like this one I held her in my arms. His emotions and love intensified with the immense night. It makes the night much more massive without her. Where he kissed her again and again under the endless sky, now he is standing under the same sky alone and deeply sad with nowhere to go. 

The shivering stars represent his emotional distance from his lover. But he knows that his poetic lines can help him move in the right direction in the same way the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. Even though his former love is not with him on a starry night he will move ahead in his life with this poem. The word “night” is repeated nine times in the poem. Each time acts as a trigger to the speaker’s relationship and his loneliness in life.

The speaker uses nature to compare his relationship showing that they both have changed and are not together but nature remains the same. Even though he loved her and he is not sure whether she loved him, he is full of sadness that his love could not keep her. He juxtapositions his emotion with nature since his soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. 

He is searching for the love that does not belong to him, a happiness of the past that is long gone as they are no longer the same. When the speaker thinks that his love might be with someone else he gets jealous. Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes. Show the intensity of his jealousy as he believes that all her attributes will be another's. 

Even though the speaker believes that I no longer love her he contradicts himself but maybe I love her. He finds it hard to forget his long-lost love even when he is sure she has moved on from him. He wants to forget her and make her a thing of the past so that he can move forward in his life. 

We find the themes of love, solitude, heartbreak, memory, passion, loneliness, and sorrow. These along with the lover’s passion for writing gives this poem a lyrical beauty. While some readers can agree that it is easier to love than to forget, others might not. They understand the dilemma in I no longer love her that’s certain, but maybe I love her. This makes the reader question what is love? Is it easier to love than forget?

Then and Now Comparison

The poem’s two-line stanzas create distance as he feels the separation from his love. The memories of his love make it harder to live his life. A life that was once filled with warmth, joy, and happiness is now unexpectedly dark, cold, and empty. Nature hasn’t changed but the speaker’s world has shattered making the world melancholy. 

It seems the speaker is unable to stop comparing the two times in his life, then and now. He struggles between feeling in love with her and loving her. “Love is so short, forgetting is so long” portrays Neruda’s maturity and insight as a poet. He finds it impossible to understand how two people so in love could ever stop loving each other. But in his loss, there is potential for greater gain.

The Bottom Line

Tonight I can Write tragically reveals the pain of heartbreak. With vivid imagery, personifications, alliteration, juxtapositions, and other descriptions the readers feel the speaker's pain and emptiness.

They see that his beautiful lover isn’t with him anymore. They can hear the singing and his longing for his beloved. This forces the readers to imagine similar nights with their lovers. It ends with a lot of questions the readers have to face in real life.

This beautiful poem is one of the best-translated poems which has a great lyrical meaning. Agosin describes Neruda as “the one who fuses the images of nature with the unforgettable sentiment of first love and so creates a moving, lyrical evocation of its passion and agony.”

Written by Garima Jain