Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973)

He was twenty when he wrote this poem. It was published in the year 1924. Clearly this is a poem about grief associated afer the breakup of a love affair very early in life. And early stages too in the grief process emphasised by the statement my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. To not have the physical intimacy of the relationship in the first days of the breakup is shattered at night time. The night the time the loss is magnified – to hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

The intense pain of not having physical connection is overwhelming and this dominates the poem. I like the single line stanzas that allow the reader to spend time deliberating on the sad state of affairs. The monologue and the repetition give emphasis to his sad emotional state.

But there appears to me a searching question on what is love. Apart from the physical aspects on knowing her body and the sexual union in lines such as –

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.

Maybe he is looking at other aspects of her that connect with deeper meaning. Attributes such as integrity, compassion, personal goals, philosophy … aspects that could form a common bond beyond the physical.

This is the probably a sad reflection on a first love. At least the first more meaningful love relationship for he authored the poem at the age of twenty, so hopefully over time he had more success. His ‘Memoirs’ detail his relationships with many women. Although he extolled the beauty of woman in his love poetry his treatment of women was sadly lacking. But of course the product of the time he lived. His love sonnets were very much a tribute to his third wife Matilde Urrudia.