Tonight I Can Write Analysis

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

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 I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
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 starry 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 tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
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. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, 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.


translated by W.S. Merwin

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Ways in which Neruda's famous poem both exemplifies and eludes classification as a modernist
text.
There may be no more beloved poem in all of Latin America than Pablo Neruda's
beguiling poem "Tonight I Can Write." Written when Neruda was in his very early
twenties, the poem perfectly captures the paradoxical emotions of recently lost love.
On some level, this poem absolutely resists interpretation and analysis—it is so
simple, so direct, so honest, that there is very little to unpack. Indeed, few students
have difficulty understanding the poem, and few critics have made it the focus of their
critical attention. The poem's language is accessible, and unlike many modernist texts,
it explores emotions that every person can relate to.
Neruda's early love poetry and the loss he expresses in "Tonight I Can Write."
Neruda is well known for his love poetry, yet a lesser known fact is that Neruda, as a
young boy, was so painfully shy that he feigned indifference to girls. Fearing that he
might somehow embarrass himself, Neruda lived his early years as what he called a
kind of "deaf-mute." In his Memoirs, Neruda elaborates saying that "instead of going
after girls, since I knew I would stutter or turn red in front of them, I preferred to pass
them up and go on my way,showing a total lack of interest I was very far from feeling.
They were all a deep mystery to me.
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| Posted on 2008-06-01 | by a guest