Pablo Neruda's Love Poems

and how shared suffering unites us

I’m a hoe for tragedies. Shakespeare? Sublime. Brontë? More like Bron-slay!! Even their younger offspring, such as John Steinback’s Of Mice and Men and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, oft-overshadowed by their Boomer predecessors, have succeeded in bewitching me, body and soul (yes, I know that line isn’t in the book, which is a crying shame).

It has always been fairly easy to identify a typical Aristotelian Tragedy™ in the flowery, blood-spattered epics of old — they are mapped out to be such. But what about the poets of the modern age who didn’t have time to write 80-minute plays because they also happen to be diplomats and were busy being smuggled from house to house to evade capture?

I’m referring specifically to the icon, the legend, the moment, Pablo Neruda.

Communist, Chilean, and Certified Lyrical Genius, his deft utilisation of natural and religious imagery alchemises with the near-deranged fervour and ardency with which he writes to put him on the same shelf as Romantic kings Keats and Shelley … although I’m not sure Keats would’ve dedicated an entire ode to his socks.

Death, artichokes, the big man Stalin himself — no subject, mundane or extraordinary, escaped Neruda’s determined pen. Inspired by the "eternities at [his] disposal right outside [his] window”, he churned out so many poems there’s no way he didn’t suffer from severe carpal tunnel. But being the staunch anti-rationalist he was, the writings that have perhaps most enraptured the world are his love poems, and rightfully so.

Bursting with woeful lamentations, sparkling imagery, and unbridled honesty, they are the perfect cud for the romantics at heart. But it was only upon my fifth read of his poetry collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair that I realised his sonnets are not just capsules of the potent passion of a disembodied but sympathetic narrator — they contain entire tragedies within them. Kind of like a literary Kinder Surprise.

Not all of them fit perfectly into the parametres of an Aristotelian Tragedy™, but with such depth of storytelling, it’s difficult to ignore the similarities between the sufferings of Neruda’s narrator and that of characters in tragedy behemoths like Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet.

Young, dumb, broke… and a little psychotic?

Tottie had quite strict rules about what constitutes a ‘tragedy’. But we all have a little nonconfirmist in us, and many permutations of the genre have since been birthed. Despite this, the typical plot of a tragedy can be described as a kind of three-step process:

1. There is a tragic hero (who is morally sound but also misguided, either by his own feelings or external factors — his hamartia).

2. Tragic hero goofs up BIG TIME

3. Catastrophe! Chaos ensues, and along with it death and immense, unknowable sadness ):

One interesting way Neruda subverts this convention is by having his poems begin in the aftermath of the tragedy. The opening lines often pick us up from a state of placidity and plonk us right in the midst of chaos. It’s a little confusing and disorienting because we don’t get to see the screw-up happen in real-time, or its preceding events, but that’s the fun of it all.

The poems are often spoken in first-person by a narrator, who, because it’s been strongly suggested that Neruda wrote his sonnets from his own point of view, I’m going to assume is a ‘he’. For the sake of this silly little essay, let’s call him Aiden, which I think suits his broody, tortured character (no, shut up, he’s not some fictional dark-haired love interest I made up in my head so I can romanticise Neruda’s narratives).

In Sonnet XVIII, Aiden compares the loss of his lover to being out at sea or at a port (whether they have been dumped or spurned is left vague):

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Very sad. I imagine having wet soul would be like walking around with wet socks, and that’s just straight up not a good time at all. Anyway, Aiden goes on to say:

I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea with no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.

If you told me Romeo Montague said this in an obscure mid-2000s BBC adaptation, I would’ve believed you without question. I mean, is it not giving very much Romeo’s lament to Benvolio about his unreciprocated love for Rosaline in Act 1 Scene 1?

Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.

Both Aiden and Romeo liken their heartbreak to the sea, overwhelming and all-consuming. They have tied their sense of purpose to the possibility of reciprocation of their love, and are thusly left diminished and lifeless.

Of course, this is a completely stupid and irrational approach to love. But remember — Shakespeare’s Romeo is around 16 years old, while Juliet is 13-going-on-14. Though a bit creepy in this second millennium, their young ages are meant to invoke a heightened sense of adolescent passion, innocence, and folly, and provide us with the necessary context to better understand and empathise with them.

Similarly, at the time of writing Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Neruda was also about 18, just two years older than Romeo. I’m sure we remember how we were like at that age when it came to love. Regardless, most of us were well-meaning (though our then-partners might disagree), and I think it’s fair to extend that benefit of doubt to Neruda as well.

So, while we don’t get any backstory to inform us of Aiden’s moral compass, we can establish, through the bleak, melancholic imagery, that he is a lonely, self-reflective fella sufficiently capable of tenderness and devotion; the candor with which he expresses his sorrow calls for our pity.

I can fix him, guys! 🥺

Tortured men can be responsible too

Most of the self-contained sonnets imply that Aiden is often the one being left — rarely is he the one who’d done the breaking-up. The poem in which this is the most blatant is Sonnet XX, also known around the Interwebs as ‘Tonight I can write’.

It starts off with him rambling about cold blue stars and kissing her under the “endless sky”, but the important bit starts from line 11:

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.

He says explicitly that ‘he has lost her’ — not that she has been lost or lost to him. The entirety of the blame is placed on himself (“my love could not keep her”). I mean, at least he isn’t trying to gaslight anybody else? We stan a man who takes accountability. 😌✨

In fact, he goes one step further and attempts to repair the damage or salvage the situation, but fails:

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

Then, like most men, he tries to convince himself otherwise, for the sake of what remaining dignity he has left, and fails at that too:

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tries to find the wind to touch her hearing.

This one simple line: “but how I loved her”, also provokes wonder about what might have happened before to have caused this obscene breaking up. It expands the story beyond what we are presented, hinting at a hot, passionate romance that was likely mutual, which only compounds Aiden’s emo wretchedness.

It reminds me of Werther’s lamentation in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (which is OTT, utterly ridiculous, and a bangin’ read). In pursuit of Charlotte, the girl he adores, silly young Werther gets up to a whole bunch of weird ‘dude, back the hell up’ shenanigans. When it all inevitably backfires and he finds out that Charlotte is engaged to another man, Werther figuratively goes into a corner to die:

“And this heart is now dead, no sentiment can revive it; my eyes are dry; and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life: that active, sacred power which created worlds around me,—it is no more.”

…

“I alone am the cause of my own woe, am I not?”

Which, yes, okay. His interminable endeavour for Charlotte is on some occasions unwarranted and annoying. But like Werther, Neruda’s narrator acknowledges the fault of his ways and consciously attributes the consequences to his own error and nobody else’s, which, IMO, makes him a pretty stand-up guy.

Anyway, the point here isn’t about the mistake that has been committed. It is that the mistake has brought our tragic hero to his knees. The Sorrows of Young Werther and Tonight I can write aren’t just about heartbreak, they are also about the loss that tailgates it, and the heaviness of guilt laid upon the bereaved’s heart.

If he doesn’t spiritualise you, does he even love you?

Perhaps the biggest of Neruda’s mini tragedies is The Song of Despair. In it, there is all the beauty, mistakes, death, and self-loathing that make tragedies so deliciously addictive.

Right from its opening lines, Neruda sets the scene with Aiden in a kind of stormy, dismal mental wasteland (POV: Stitch crying in the rain after Lilo kicks him out):

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

Neruda was quite obsessed with seas and ships, but I must say the naval imagery really popped off in this one. Apparently, this is because he wrote The Song of Despair in a lifeboat leftover from a shipwreck. The more you know.

As the poem goes on, we are treated to nuggets of information that hint at how much the woman might have been in love with Aiden:

There was the black solitude of the islands
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.

And then how his implied hubris broke her heart:

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

…

This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!

Like the other sonnets, we aren’t privy to Aiden’s exact offense, but his whining tells us all we need to know — it was probably his fault.

Neruda’s use of a religious metaphor (“cross of your arms”) hearkens back to the tragedies of the Renaissance and Middle Ages, and even its birthplace of ancient Greece, during which times the fear of God/gods and divine justice prevailed.

Aiden at once elevates his lover to a compassionate Christian figure while remaining fearful and reverential. There is an implied uncrossable space between them — she is up there while he is down here. In Hell. Burning for his sins. I mean, Aiden is going THROUGH it. On the other hand, I must mention the paradox where he describes her as a “pit of debris”, suggesting her to be some sort of angry chthonic deity. Like, dude, pick an aesthetic and stick with it.

Again, it has some reverberations from Sorrows of Werther. Werther constantly sanctifies Charlotte as a celestial creature, but describes his heartbreak as “withering” and consuming, sapping all his life force until he is left with “nothing”.

“I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.”

“Beautiful lips, which the angels guard, never will I seek to profane your purity with a kiss.”

“I refresh thee with heavenly dews; but the time of my decay is approaching, the storm is nigh that shall wither my leaves.”

Is Werther super unhinged? A little. Does it make his plight any less heartwrenching? Absolutely not!! Because Werther, as we read, is a pretty solid guy all around. He is kind, sensitive, incredibly generous, and aware of his privilege towards the peasants of the village he stayed at.

Naturally, we feel a sense of injustice, as we do with Aiden, and Romeo and Juliet, and all the other tragic heroes throughout the ages. Their perceived goodness makes us root for them, but of course, it is often in vain.

The After Feeling

But what even is the point of a tragedy? The act of watching or reading the consequences of other people’s completely avoidable trainwreck of mistakes seems a little sadistic.

Well, why do we go to the gym when we’re feeling angry or stressed, listen to sad songs when we’re down, or send 10-page texts to our best friend after we’ve had our hearts broken?

I reckon it’s the feeling we get when we come out the other side, when the ‘pain and suffering’ is over. There is a sense of relief, that we’d been put through the wringer and made it out alive and unharmed; and accomplishment that we’ve been forged through fire and are now stronger and wiser, and therefore more at peace with ourselves and the world.

There is a kind of kinship and validation in knowing someone has gone through the same shit you have. We achieve some semblance of peace with ourselves and the world — even if temporary — which endows us with renewed strength to carry on for a little longer.

This phenomenon, our boy Tottie suggests, is a form of catharsis. By witnessing proof that suffering is terminable by whatever means, there is a purging of negative emotions experienced by both the characters and us.

In Sorrows of Young Werther, Werther decides that the only way to escape the love triangle is if one of them dies. Unable and unwilling to kill a person, he chooses to kill himself.

Logically, this doesn’t solve anything. Albert is left traumatised, Charlotte with PTSD, and Werther is, well, dead. But Goethe has cultivated Werther’s tortured narrative in such a manner that we feel immense relief for him upon his suicide. Through death, he has been absolved of his pain and torture, and so are we as the reader. He is at peace, and so are we.

Conversely, in Romeo and Juliet, things are somewhat solved with the couple’s death. The Montagues and Capulets stop feuding, and peace returns to the streets of Verona. And though two kids are literally dead, there is an icky comfort in knowing they can finally be ‘together’ without causing trouble and inconvenience.

The after feeling.

Likewise, Neruda’s love poems, whether read individually or as a collection, are purgative for both himself and the readers. They are written retrospectively as he examines how his behaviour vs factors beyond his control (i.e. Fate and Destiny) have caused suffering for him and his lover.

But in a world full of pain and sorrow, Neruda demonstrates how one person’s suffering can manifest into vivid, magnificent portraits of earth, sky, and sea, to become an artefact of hope. We come away from his sonnets with a greater understanding of love, loss, and their consequential loneliness — emotions that we often cannot articulate or put into words. And maybe, we might even recognise similar possibilities of error in our lesser, more fallible selves.

Mistakes of all kinds permeate our everyday lives; bad things happen to good people every day: hit-and-runs, murder, war. Almost any event in which we, by our own hand, cause suffering to others, is a tragedy, and we feel acutely a collective sense of anger and sorrow towards it. Pain unites us.

In that sense, tragedies are not embalmed in history like other forms of fiction or art. Though most of society has, since the time of Sophocles and Shakespeare, transformed socially, culturally, and technologically, the one thing that has remained constant is our ability to feel and process emotions — the very essence of our humanity. This is something Neruda, known for his frankness and uncensored wordsmithing, sought to bring forth in all his poems, and is a big reason why both classical and contemporary tragedies can co-exist today, and are equally as popular.

His poems are vessels that carry important lessons, but should be seen less as cautionary tales about youthful hubris or the importance of being rational, and more about the beauty of nature, process, and learning.

They were created and exist to remind us that even in suffering, there is hope and growth — and most importantly, that we are not alone.