Classic Love Poems
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Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean politician, writer, and poet. He was accomplished in a variety of styles ranging from erotic love poems like his collection, Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a controversial award because of his political activism. His works have been translated into many languages, and he is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century.
“Pot Pourri”
by Herbert James Draper, 1897
Neruda and his 3rdwife,
Matilde Urrutia
to whom he dedicated his book 100 Sonnets of Love and memorialized as “Rosario” and the woman with Medusa-like hair
Love Sonnet LXXIX
By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness
like a double drum in the forest, pounding
against the thick wall of wet leaves.
Night travel: black flame of sleep
that snips the threads of the earth’s grapes,
punctual as a headlong train that would haul
shadows and cold rocks, endlessly.
Because of this, Love, tie me to a purer motion,
to the constancy that beats in your chest
with the wings of a swan underwater,
so that our sleep might answer all the sky’s
starry questions with a single key,
with a single door the shadows had closed.
Love Sonnet XLV
Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because—
because—I don’t know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart. Oh,
may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you’ll have gone so far
I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here,
dying?
Love Sonnet XVII
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
on “Neruda, Pablo”
