Appreciation of Neruda’s poems – 4

 

Appreciation of Neruda’s poems – 4

 

Only in fiction the preliminary chapters would be carefully scripted by the writer to acquaint the reader with his narrative style and also to prepare him for the fiction’s pace and pauses. Neruda uses this method in the opening stanza and the next of the long poem ‘Oceanic South’:

 

“The roses of this ocean are only made

of impoverished salt, a throat at risk,”

 

“The wind grows in silence

with one leaf and his battered flower,

with the sand which owns only touch and silence-

it’s nothing, it is a shade,

the track of an imagined horse,

it is nothing unless it be wave time has received

since all waves go towards the cold eyes

of time glaring under the ocean”

 

There are so many versions of the eternal knocks of waves on the shores. Neruda finds them going to the cold eyes of time glaring under the ocean. Now with the figurative expression on time we understand the ocean is the expanse of human life and the collective quests and despairs of humans. Individual dreams are distinct and often contrary to the collective quests of humanity. Neruda figuratively depicts a world where there is none and the past is like the tracks of the horses and the future like the rain hovering over the sea:

 

“It is a lonely region, I have already spoken

of the region so desolate

where the earth is brim-full of ocean

and there is no one – only the tracks of horses,

no one save the wind, no one

only the rain adding to the sea’s waters,

no one , only the rain growing over the sea.”

 

The metaphor for human resource is a root in the poem ‘Walking around’:

 

“I do not want to go on being a root in the dark,

Hesitating, stretched out, shivering with dreams,

Downwards, in the wet tripe of the earth,

Soaking it up and thinking eating every day.

 

For this reason Monday burns like oil

At the sight of me arriving with my jail-face,

And it howls in passing like a wounded wheel,

And its footsteps towards nightfall are filled with hot blood.”

 

The poem opens new doors on the hypes about HR by any employer.

 

To be continued…..  

# Appreciation of Neruda’s poems