Appreciation of Neruda’s poems – 3

 

Appreciation of Neruda’s poems – 3

The following are the last few lines the long poem ‘Lone gentleman’. The poem is very satiric and portrays how far a person’s heart is dried up, judgmental and cynical in its outlook towards gay love or love between a man and woman. There could be genuine love outside the institution of marriage but might require a bed as high as a sea-going ship. The inhuman world is no more a human habitat and it’s like forest. The figurative visualization that the forest breaths through the flowers which are like mouths in shapes of hoofs and shoes chocking full of teeth. These depictions stun the reader. Hoofs and shoes here symbolize the speed and desperation of the materialistic mind and stresses it undergo ever.

“and, later on, the adulterers who love each other with real love,

On beds as high and spacious as sea-going ships-

so far sure and for ever this great forest surrounds me,

breathing through the flowers large as mouths chock full of teeth,

black-rooted in the shapes of hoofs and shoes”

 

Use of ‘Iron age’ denotes a specific era, about 6 centuries prior to 600 B.C, but Neruda uses it in a different meaning, different context and for the contemporary life in which there is no human values in his view. In the poem ‘Signifying shadows’ the last but one stanza reads:

 

“Oh that identity that I might go on living and ceasing to live,

and that I might so acquiesce in this iron age

that the shocks of deaths and births might not disturb

the deep, deep heartland I reserve for myself for ever!”

 

In his figurative depiction of death with metaphors and wonderful poetic visualization, Neruda stands out and any poet reading these lines from the poem ‘Death alone’, draws tremendous inspiration:

 

“Death is drawn to sound

like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer,

comes to know with a ring, stoneless and fingerless,

comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat.

Nevertheless its footsteps sound and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree.

 

“Death lies in our cots:

in the lazy mattresses, the black blankets,

lives at full stretch and then suddenly blows,

blows sound unknown filling out the sheets

and there are beds sailing into a harbour

where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral.”

 

 

# appreciation of Neruda’s poems