Neruda's Ars Poetica
Surreal Surrender
This piece features twenty lines of postmodern gobbledygook.
“Between shadow and space, between harnesses and virgins”
Beginning with a long rambling six-line description of his state of mind, the speaker places himself out of reality into a surreal space where only fantasy and raving are prominent. He claims he is “between shadow and space, between harnesses and virgins.” He is “endowed with “singular heart and fatal dreams.” Human anatomy universally features only one heart, and many people feel that their unrealized dreams have rendered their longings “fatal,” but this speaker seems to find this lot extraordinary.
But this speaker is also “impetuously pale, withered in the forehead.” His forehead is wrinkled. That he is “impetuously pale” is nonsense. (This problem, however, is caused by the translation—Stephen Kessler The Essential Neruda— which renders the Spanish “precipitadamente” as “impetuously”; a more sensible interpretation might be “suddenly.”)
The speaker then claims that he is “in mourning like an angry widower.” But he is like that “every day of [his] life.” He suddenly exclaims that every time he takes drink of “invisible water,” he swallows “drowsily.” And he hears every gulp he takes while “trembling.”
“I feel the same missing thirst and the same cold fever”
The speaker says he senses “the same missing thirst and the same cold fever.” The reader must assume that the missing thirst and cold fever resemble the way an angry widower feels, but the speaker describes that feeling as “an ear being born, an indirect anguish.” Furthermore, this odd situation is like “thieves [ ] arriving, or ghosts.”
The feeling is also like being “inside a long, deep, hollow shell” and like “a humiliated waiter” and like “a bell gone a bit hoarse.” It may also be described as being “like an old mirror” or “like the smell of an empty house / where the guests come back at night hopelessly drunk.”
“and there’s an odor of clothes thrown on the floor, and an absence of flowers”
The speaker continues to compare his feelings to the empty house to which “hopelessly drunk” guests have returned. Apparently, the smell of the house can be blamed on “clothes thrown on the floor, and an absence of flowers.”
The speaker then throws in a parenthetical expression, “or maybe somehow a little less melancholic,” indicating that perhaps he is not really feeling quite a “melancholic” as his description has led the reader to believe. He then announces that he is going to tell the truth, which might imply that he has hitherto been prevaricating.
“but the truth is”
Here is the truth: “suddenly, the wind lashing my chest, / the infinitely dense night dropped into my bedroom.” Now the reader understands that the speaker in not in fact languishing in this surreal nightmare but has simply had a “dense night dropped into his bedroom.” But there is a bit more to this truth: not only has night befuddled the speaker’s mind, but even during the day, the clatter and din cause him to “burn[ ] with sacrifice.”
Demands are made on him to spout his prophesies, which he no doubt would prefer to keep to himself. But “there’s a banging of objects that call without being answered.” There is also “restless motion, and a muddled name.” If only he could understand clearly the name he hears, he would be able to dispense with both melancholy and confusion.
Magal
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