PUBLO NERUDA: “TONIGHT I CAN WRITE”

"…nothing but poetry is gifted with intuition and far sight"—Gabriel Garcia Márquez,
"I Sell My Dreams".
Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (1924), translated into English
as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by W. S. Merwin in 1969, is the volume
that instantly catapulted Neruda to fame and is considered the first authentic poetry in
Spanish that unabashedly celebrates erotic love in sensuous, earthly terms. Neruda
himself explained their erotic quality, "Love poems were breaking out all over my body.”
“Tonight I Can Write”, the penultimate poem in the poetic sequence, expresses the
speaker’s pain of losing his beloved.
The main theme of the poem is the emptiness caused by lost love in an
immense universe. The two ideas of love and universe are tied inseparably together in
Neruda’s poem. His poetry "falls" into his soul because of "the immense night, more
immense without her." The night wind revolves and sings and the stars shiver, so that on
this night he can write the saddest poem. Tonight, he can write the saddest lines about
stars and immensity because he feels he has lost her.
The poem is extensively lyrical and the very verbs he uses in the lines, like “The
night is shattered/and the blue stars shiver in the distance”, emphasise the pent-up
passion that inspires his poetry. The significance of the love affair lies in the fact that he
has lost her, for he admits that while: “She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too .”
Neruda’s poems are full of easily understood images which makes them no less
beautiful. As writes Edward Hirsch, “Neruda always linked womanhood to the
regeneration of earth and the cyclical processes of nature”, the poem makes extensive use
of nature imagery. To hear him talk about “verse (that) falls to the soul like dew to the
pasture” makes the whole process of writing poetry quite comprehensive. The poet is a
jealous lover who imagines that “She will be another’s”. The ordinariness of this love
affair that almost anyone can identify with surely reaches a profoundly universal level
when he confesses: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
From the conventional poet that Neruda was in his first two books, Song of the
Fiesta (1921) and Crepuscular (1923), here in Twenty Love Poems he is certainly
breaking away from tradition and attempting to find a new voice. It is on the basis of this
book that Fernando Alegria wrote “Neruda was, above all, a love poet.” In a simple,
evocative and, at times, meditative tone, the poem brings to light the isolation of a man
who is not a hero, nor yet a public figure.