It is hard to deny just how much poetry has evolved through history. From the precisely rhymed and arranged stanzas of the 1800s to the free-falling, abstract, and unpunctuated words of today, poetry is constantly shifting, difficult to keep contained within a single definition. And perhaps this is natural; poetry expresses one of the deepest and most confusing aspects of the human mind.
I wouldn’t describe myself as an avid reader of poetry. I have read collections of poems, but it was either because I simply liked the writer’s other works, or because I was supposed to read them for English class. In both cases, though, I’ve had these moments: a single word, or a phrase, within a poem, would stun me with how poignant and beautifully expressed it was.
Many such moments occurred during Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda. It was one of the books I was assigned to read over the summer for English class—thus the second category—but I am so glad that I’ve had a chance to read this sensual, unique, and raw collection of poems.
As daring as the poems are in terms of eroticism, their combination with gorgeous depictions of nature is irresistible. “Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond! Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing. Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul,” Neruda says of an unnamed lover. Many of these poems are mournful and elegiac as if they’re reminiscing a loved one gone. Others are filled with bliss and longing, and the longest poem, the song of despair, is a distressing, passionate song of regret. It’s filled with an unique and acute emotion that’s difficult to describe: regret, fear, grief?
As said in the introduction by Cristina Garcia, this small collection of poems was eagerly received by the public as soon as it was published in 1924, since what the world lacked—and wanted—was precisely this: instead of the cold, impersonal remains of the first World War, an intimate literary work to remind them that humanity, with all its desires and beauty, still existed.
