Tonight I can write the saddest lines...

Here is the list of poems that we read yesterday in class:

1. Question- May Swenson

2. Tonight I can write the saddest lines- Pablo Neruda

3. Black Stone on Top of a White Stone- Cesar Vallejo

4. Susie Asado- Gertrude Stein

5. Filling Station -Elizabeth Bishop 

I chose to write about the poem “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” written by a world famous writer Pablo Neruda.

THE AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Pablo Neruda was born on 12 July 1904 in Chile. Her mother Rosa Basoalto was a teacher and his father José del Carmen Reyes Morales a railway employee. Consequently, his mother dies when he was only a baby and his father married to another woman with whom he had a child. Neruda spent his childhood and youth in Temuco. At the age of thirteenth he published his first work, an essay titled “Entusiasmo y perseverancia” (Enthusiasm and Perseverance) in the newspaper, La Mañana. In 1919 he wins the third place for his poem Comunión ideal or Nocturno ideal. His father did not want to have a poet son so he opposed Neruda’s interest in writing and literature. In 1921 he moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile in order to be a teacher, but soon Neruda was devoting himself full time to poetry. In 1923, he publishesh his first volume of verse, Crepusculario ("Book of Twilights") together with Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair"), a collection of love poems. Both works were translated into many languages. 

THE POEM:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered 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 searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

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. Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

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 the last verses that I write for her.

This is the most beautiful love poem that I have ever read. I just love it. The poem is related to the love between two people. I think the reason why Neruda wrote this poem is that he was terribly and deeply in love with a girl. And I guess they broke up therefore he started to write about his feelings. In the poem we see that author tries to convince himself that he did not love her (his girlfriend) we can notice that between them was a powerful love relationship. We also see that through this piece of writing Neruda feels loss, sadness, anger and pain. Moreover, to lose the one you wanted it is hard and really hurts.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long. (that is true :p)