Neruda’s ‘Tonight I Can Write’ is a poem of conflict between love and despair.
Ans.) Love and despair do not look alike at first. Someone could think that when you are in love you do not feel despair; and when you feel desperation is because you may have lost the one you loved. Although for Pablo Neruda, love and despair go together, love can drive someone madness and despair can strengthen the love you felt. Neruda’s most famous work ' Love Poems and a Song of Despair' (1924) collides two huge feelings that all lovers felt once throughout time. Throughout the twenty poems, it can be seen a changed in theme as it began describing the sensuality and passion towards one of the author’s lovers and towards the last poem it changes to a melancholy tone, feeling regret and loneliness, and to close ‘A Song of Despair’, is bitter and hopeless as the poetic voice has a constant reminder of the loss of his lover. Poem XX, ‘Tonight I Can Write’, joins love and despair as the poetic voice goes through an internal battle about his current feelings towards his lover while he realizes she is gone.
‘Tonight I Can Write’, brings out all the past romantic feelings from previous poems, realizing that the poetic voice is alone with only memories of what his lover once was. The scenario of the poem is a cold and clear night, where the sky is full of stars and nothing can listen but the poetic voice laments, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines, / Write, for example, ‘The night is starry /and the blue stars shiver in the distance’”.(Neruda, Pablo, “Tonight I Can Write”, line 1-3). The first three lines introduces the readers to a melancholy mood, as the poetic voice begins saying “Tonight I can write the saddest lines”, stating that he is no longer with his lover, and that even the night is broken because she has left and the small hope left is starting to dispel as the blue stars in he distance, with this two lines the reader can have a vivid image of the place the speaker is in, realizing everything is arranged for the speaker to have a constant reminder of the love he has lost, as the blue stars brings coldness and sadness to the line and the fact he sees the stars shivering in the distance he may be hallucinating due to the pain he feels.
There is a repetition of the first line, keeping the sorrow the speaker feels as he realizes how lonely his life has become with the absence of his lover. In line six after the repetition, the speaker declares how much he loved the unnamed woman but he still feels heartbroken as he would never know if she loved him back as much as he did. The night described by the poetic voice is later going to be compared by the time the speaker was with his lover, “Through nightslike this one I held her in my arms / I kissed her again and again under the endless sky” (Neruda, Pablo, “Tonight I Can Write”, line 7-8). Now the sky seems as infinity where time does not fly only because he is with his lover, but once she left, the night is a constant reminder of his loneliness and emptiness. From line one to ten, the speaker makes the first comparison between having his lover with him and not being with her, “How could one not have loved her great still eyes” (Neruda, Pablo, “Tonight I Can Write the saddest lines”, line 10), exposing how lonely and bleak he feels without her, and only having his memories to survive. Along these lines, Neruda expose the constant relation of love and despair, as he still loves his beloved which made him be in constant madness knowing she is not coming back. “Neruda”, according to Saunders, “finds his way to express in the most sincere and direct way how his heart cries for his beloved, using unadorned simplicity of expressions, in contrast to poems before, ‘Poem XX’ is meant to be direct and implicit , sending a direct message to the reader of the broken soul of the poetic voice”. (Neruda, Pablo, “Tonight I Can Write the saddest lines”).
“To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her”, again in line eleven, there is a repetition of the opening line, which turns into a plaintive refrain, stating afterward his despair of not being with her, seeing the night immense and the loneliness even more. Line fourteen has a simile, “And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture” (Neruda, Pablo, “Tonight I Can Write”, line 10), comparing the nature to his pain, the speaker enhances his pain and does not let go the departure of his beloved, the speaker uses the verses to express all the love he feels and how each time it increases as he realizes she is not coming back. Along the verses Neruda is going through the process of understanding and accepting slowly that he would never be with his lover again, for this he compares repetitively himself to nature, as “The night is starry and she is not with me” bringing darkness and sorrow and later introducing the emptiness of his soul. Throughout this poem the speaker finds himself tied to his lover as he permanently states he cannot believe she is not there, “My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her”.( “Tonight I can write”, Line 18) Driving himself insane which only intensifies his melancholy and love towards her. Neruda uses nature to compare his pain or passions in his poems, in ‘Poem XX’ nature is constant reminder of darkness and loneliness, as he describes a cold clear night sky where his only companions are the stars that even start to fade off.
The poetic voice goes in circles trying to catch her when he knows she is not there, he is slowly surrendering to the fact he lost her but before he would try to bring her back with all he remembers about her. He tries to keep normality as he compares his memories to the night, seeing everything keeps the same but his soul. Slowly he is letting her go, freeing himself of the pain and letting the pain go, “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her”. (“Tonight I can write”, line 23) So close of letting go the speaker contradicts himself again as saying he still loves her but it would take a lot to forget her.
The speaker would go through a cycle of love, pain, and contradiction to survive the loneliness he lives in. After he has admitted he misses her and nature has heard his sorrows, the only person he cares about and needs to hear him is her beloved that would never know how much he misses her, “My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing”( Neruda’s “Tonight I can write” line 24) . That is his only request and need, that her lover hears him. The last two lines conclude all the pain Neruda has expressed from the first to the last line, he states he would let her go only to free himself of the pain only to know that he would continue suffering every lonely night. Neruda goes through passion and sensuality from the first poems to feeling sorrow and pain for the same lover leaving him behind. ‘Poem XX’ is the goodbye to sadness an attachment as Neruda last wrote: “Though this is the last pain that she makes me suffer / and these the last verses that I write for her”. Neruda’s “Tonight I can write” line 31). He would leave behind his melancholy to free himself of a broken heart. His will was that his lover heard his verses to feel his sadness but instead every reader felt how his loud love drove him insane and how moments of despair remembered him how much he loved her.
Thus, we can say that ‘Tonight I Can Write’ is a constant contradiction of letting go but fearing to forget the true love he once had.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Neruda, Pablo, “Tonight I Can Write the saddest lines”, 1924, www.allpoetry.com
• Firmat, G.P., “Reading for Feeling : Pablo Neruda’s ‘Poema 20’ “, vol. 90, No 1, pp. 32-41, March, 2007, www.jstor.com
• De Costa, Rene, “Pablo Neruda: Overview”, in Reference Guide to World Literature, (ed) Lesley Henderson, St. James Press, 1995
• Neruda, Pablo, “Tonight I Can Write”, (ed) Jim Bencivenga, Vol.45, November, 1993, www.encycloprdia.com
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