WORLD CHANGER #3 Pablo Neruda

GREAT LOVER AND GREAT FIGHTER

Perhaps like many English readers I came to  know Neruda's work through his amazing love  poems.

THIS IS ONE OF HIS GREATEST  LOVE POEMS.

WHY ? Because it captures the repetitive even obsessional nature of a lover longing for a lost love.

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 voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite 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. 

Pablo Neruda

Here are some biographical facts--

Pablo Neruda was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in southern Chile in 1904. He moved to Santiago at age 17 and at age 23 was sent as a consul to Rangoon and then Burma.³ In 1934, he moved to Madrid and encountered the “Generation of ’27,” the politicized avant-garde poets who defended the Republican cause against fascism in the tense times before and during the Spanish Civil War.⁴ It was there that Neruda emerged politically, on the side of the Republicans. Deeply affected by the 1936 murder of his friend, Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, his political engagement increased dramatically—though it was not until over ten years later that he officially joined the Communist party.

In a speech about Lorca on January 21, 1937, Neruda foreshadows the politicization of his later work: “I am not a political man, nor have I ever taken part in political contention, but my words, which many have wished to be neutral, have been colored by passion.”⁵ Neruda’s leftist politics would highly influence his perception of his own poetic calling, and the nature of that “coloring by passion.”

 His theory of “poetry like bread” is as far from the idea of art pour l’art as possible. Art for art’s sake alone, in Neruda’s worldview, is a bourgeois waste of time. Art should be functional, wholesome, nourishing, accessible to the masses, and, for Neruda mid-career, political, too.

The POET  GARCIA LORCA'S MURDER BY  FASCISTS  FORCED A TURNING POINT 

 He attributes it to the abuses he has seen around him, yet still seems to waver (“only the struggle and the daring heart are capable") and doubt poetry’s political utility in the context of such a situation. Even so, he feels his work must change, and he will never write anything like the surrealist lines of Residencia en la Tierra again.

He ends  his poem  "Let me explain a few things "  with an invitation that is more like a command:--

and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets! 

The streets are covered by blood and  Neruda’s poetry begins to shift around the axis of that passionate image.

Neruda  officially politicized his life, and he made it clear that he would politicize and “proletarianize” his art as well. During this era, the same Neruda who previously disdained politicizing art now stood for the very opposite viewpoint:

Magic and craft are the two permanent wings of art, but I believe that it is those who distance themselves from the bonfire on which culture is burning, instead of rescuing it (even if it means burning one’s own hands), who are traitors to poetry.

WHAT A POWERFUL ENDORSEMENT OF THE  CRUCIAL WITNESS -BEARING  ROLE OF POETRY.