Appreciation of Neruda’s poems -1

 

Appreciation of Neruda’s poems -1

Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.

Something with wings of a bird, something of anguish, and oblivion

The way nets can’t hold water.

 

-from the poem ‘I have gone marking…’

 

There is a country stretched across the sky

Strewn with rainbow’s superstitious carpets

and evening’s vegetation:

that way I go – not without fatigue,

treading grave loam, fresh from the spade,

dreaming among these doubtful greens.

 

-from the poem ‘Dream horses’

 

The day of the luckless, the pale day appears

With a cold heart-breaking smell, with its forces in grey,

with no bells on, dripping dawn from everywhere:

it is a shipwreck in a void, surrounded by weeping.

 

-from the poem ‘Weak with the dawn’

 

In the poem ‘I have gone marking…’ the metaphor is a net in the expression ‘The way nets can’t hold water’. It gives the reader the feel of something crucial simply slipping and vanishing. The choice and apt use of a metaphor is an important strength of a poet.

 

The poet visualizes ‘rainbow’s superstitious carpets’ in the poem ‘Dream horses’. A very poetic way of symbolising superstition with a rainbow. Both sun light and rains are needed for the rainbow’s arrival. Superstition too shows up when there is a dilemma with two opposite directions intersecting on the horizon and pushing a person to try even something superstitious. Carpets of rainbow is a whole new imagination.

 

Dawn in our view is a small ray of light slowly thickening and brightening and suddenly spreading all over the sky overwhelmingly. But it is a liquid in the hands of the day which drips it from everywhere in the poem ‘Weak with the dawn’. This expression gives a model to poets that the genre poetry has so much space and scope for creativity.

 

When I appreciate Neruda I find he takes me closer to the genre and its potentials.