Yes, we all know that love is grand, and after reading his 20 love poems it is safe to say that Neruda is a lover. Exhaustively so. So after over-dosing on the beauty of woman and unbridled passion for the last two weeks I was ticked pink to read The Song of Despair, a poem rich with resentment about the end of a love affair.
The relationship is a classic one that we've seen throughout the ages: Boy is an island until he meets girl. Boy and girl engage in a passionate, short-lived affair. Girl distances herself from boy, the relationship dies. Boy is super jaded, and defames girl all over Facebook. This is essentially the plot of the poem, although it is not in chronological order.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
In the beginning of their union, the narrator is enamored with the woman, describing her as fruit that nourished him, a miracle, his own flesh, a possession. He describes his feelings for her with words like hunger, thirst, and the turbulent drunkenness of love, that blazed like a lighthouse.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
But, alas, the passionate was short lived, and the narrator implies that the relationship was tempestuous, to say the least.
How terrible and brief my was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tense and avid.
Here's where the bad feeling start. While the narrator is trying to make it work,
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
it seems that his sweetheart is just not that into him anymore, which results in an barrage of insults. Now his miracle is an open and bitter well, a pit of debris, an empty jar that is shattered by infinite oblivion (burn!). He is furious at her girdled sorrow, which I decipher as her ability to hide her emotions.
The beginning of the poem is actually well after the break-up time-wise, and the narrator uses delicious comparisons to a shipwreck (debris, deserted etc) as he looks back at the relationship.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank.
Ouch. Hell hath no fury like Neruda scorned.
Jen, just quickly... I do like your comments and observations but (but but but) please do read and comment on the poetry in Spanish rather than English. The translations are often unreliable, and especially when it comes to poetry you shouldn't rely on them.
ReplyDeleteCrees que esta hablando con la amada cuando dice estos versos finales que has comentado? Yo creo que esta hablando con su corazon o su vida, que anteriormente en la cancion lo llama una cueva (cave). Que opinas?
ReplyDeleteI like how you managed to relate this poem and its content to something most people can really relate too (facebook). I dont want to go too off topic, but could you imagine a world without the impersonal instant status update or texting? Do you think our day and age would be more sensitive?
ReplyDeleteJon, yes! Absolutely! Sorry...
ReplyDeleteMelosa, funny, we just talked about this today in another class, how texting and Facebook are stuck right in the middle between textos orales y textos escritos, and is taking the worst qualities from each. It's a scary time for language!
I loved your facebook imagery "Boy is super jaded, and defames girl all over Facebook." ... it's something we can all relate to nowadays.
ReplyDeleteI think that after reading all the poems the desperation in this poem is justified. this is a guy that has seriously been hurt by love. he really did sink into depths of his hart
ReplyDelete"Hell hath no fury like Neruda scorned." I love it. SO TRUE. Although, I'm not sure I agree with the notion that La Canción Desesperada was all that different from the other 20 poems. I felt that if I read carefully enough, he was fairly jaded and bitter throughout the majority of these poems. Even in the ones where he praised every inch of the female body there was always an underlying tone of frustration and dissatisfaction. I felt that even when he appeared to be praising her, he was often insulting and/ or marginalizing her.
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