What is your favorite Pablo Neruda poetry?

Answer 1

I'm glad you said poetry, for it would be impossible to settle on only one poem.

I still think you just can't beat Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair, published when he was only about twenty yeas old. Controversial then for its eroticism, nowadays it seems almost tame. Its sensual imagery is one of its charms. For example, here's the final stanza of #14:

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Now, that's the love poem every man wishes he could have written for his lifelong love: "I want / to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."

Finally, in 1971, despite his many years as an ardent Stalinist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I think it was in spite of, not because of his, political career and the social dimensions of his writing. It is his writing about love, about the beauties of sense experience, about ordinary things in life, that make his poetry accessible to so many readers and popular in so many languages.

If you want to give poetry as a gift, you can't beat some of his odes to ordinary things. Four volumes of these odes were published in the 1950s, at the height of his political involvement. Still, he had time to sing the praises of everyday things: "I have a crazy, / crazy love of things, / I like pliers, / and scissors. / I love / cups, rings, and bowls-- / not to speak, of course, / of hats. / I love / all things."

In his "Ode to the orange," he begins by saying, "Orange, / the world was made / in your likeness." Countries, he says, are like the sections of an orange. Speaking of returning to the country of his own birth (Chile), he writes,

when
I penetrate
your borders and your waters,
when I praise
your women
and admire how the woods
gently rock
the birds and sacred leaves
. . . . .
I understand that you,
planet, are
an orange,
a fruit born of fire.

I wish I could quote the whole of "Ode to Salt." How well it represents both his earthiness and his intense devotion to the infinite. Here are two sections, the opening and the closing:

This salt
in the saltcellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me,
but
it sings,
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those solitudes
when I heard
the voice of
the salt
in the desert.

. . . . .

Dust of the sea, in you
the tongue receives a kiss
from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned
dish your ocean essence;
the smallest,
miniature
wave from the saltcellar
reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness;
in it, we taste infinitude.

From the saltcellar to infinitude in just about sixty short lines: sensual, even when he is not erotic, but more important, spiritual when he is most earthy.

Answer 2

I'm rather fond of Sonnet LX:

"Whoever intends me harm, lets your blood, too:
the poisonous blow directed against me,
falling across my labors like a net,
darkens your wincing flesh in its corrosion.

Under a flowering moon, beloved, may I never
see the odium of others lining your forehead,
remote of forgotten rancors ravage your sleep
with thier useless crown of knives: I do not wish to see it.

Behind me as I move, the malevolent pass,
a grimacing horror copies my face if I laugh,
I sing among mockers and backbiters, cursed by the covetous.

This is my life, my darling, the cloud life has gathered me under,
the vacuous garment that limps at my heels as I go,
the scarecrow smiling his bloody smile among the crows."


... I just really like the last line :).

Answer 3

Hands down...LOVE SONNET XI...
"I want to eat your skin like a whole almond"....
That is tittillating...

Answer 4

that's difficult to say...I like all of his poems!