Sunday, April 15, 2012

I absolutely love this poem 

Neruda wrote "Tonight I Can Write..."... this poem stood out to me more then any other poem we've read so far. The style in which he writes, the content in which he writes, even the simplicity of the vocabulary blows me away. Every couplet grabs your attention and captures a different emotion about the same thing... his lost lover. He says, "Tonight I can write the saddest lines./To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her", and this just touches anyone who has had someone or something they love leave them. He speaks of the pain he in enduring and the emptiness that is overcoming him for her absence.He is as lost as she. The misery in which is captured in lines 15 and 16 are incredible.  The suffering is almost reached out to the reader and you feel his pain.

Tonight I Can Write

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and 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 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 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.

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. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, 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.

 

 

 

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