Week 4: Twenty Love Poems - Neruda

The poems in twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair were very interesting to read and in many ways different from poems I’ve read in the past. Each poem follows this overarching theme of nature and uses this to find the beauty in so many little elements of love and attraction. However, these poems were not like many love poems I've read before, in fact they did not always feel as though they were objectively idealizing love, but rather providing a more raw and honest description of all its messy elements. Much like the seasons itself these poems followed a sort of cycle of life. 

The poems felt driven by Neruda's bodily experiences of lust and love as well as by his perspective of the physical world. Neruda writes as though he is infatuated by women in the same way that humans become infatuated by nature. We often look at nature in awe and wonder, and Neruda looks at women in this same way. From an outside perspective he sees the rolling hills and breaking waves of nature and compares these earthly wonders to the thighs and lips of a woman. I believe it was this “outside looking in” perspective that furthered the fact that this reading felt very male gaze oriented. This was not simply due to his focus on women, but rather due to Neruda’s infatuation and idealization of each female body. This idealization felt like more than just love, it felt like he was consumed with lust along with a hint of excited uncertainty. Neruda wrote lines such as “ But my words become stained with your love, you occupy everything, you occupy everything”. Additionally, at times these comparisons of the female body to nature or statues felt almost like a minimization or objectification of the women rather than a true love for one. This is discussed in the lecture and is certainly something I noticed in each poem. His nature metaphors do not convey any other quality other than beauty. To an extent the comparison of the female body to nature was artistic and at times beautiful, however at times it felt like it perpetuated a minimization of women to being something “for men to admire ''. 

It was interesting to read the introduction given before these poems as understanding the time period they were written in provided a lot of context. It is said that “alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead” people wanted a more intimate form of art, which Neruda's poems certainly achieved. 

Additionally, I found the perspective of these poems to be interesting to unpack. Neruda's comparisons of the wonders of each woman to the wonders of nature also gave the writing a sense of “uncertainty” or “unknowingness”. Despite its more mature content, it felt like the author knew very little about lust or love, but rather that he was just consumed by it. These comparisons almost felt like a teenage boy making sense of the world around him. Knowing that Neruda's family and especially father were against his poetry writing, makes me wonder if these poems were his way of writing down all the thoughts throughout his life.

Though I was at times uncomfortable with constant objectification of women in his writing, metaphors are often our way of making sense of things we don't quite understand, and I wonder if Neruda plays into this in his writing. What do you guys think?