There’s a good scene in Patrick O'Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin books when Dr. Stephen Maturin’s friend, Sir Joseph Blaine, turns to him with a strange medical issue: he can no longer feel lust. When Stephen wisely observes that time extinguishes the old flame in all of us eventually, and that to be freed of it is to be saved from some terrible burns, Sir Joseph replies that, while it’s one thing to feel pain, it’s much worse to feel nothing at all.
There have certainly been many writers who feel that lust is what keeps them young. I’ve heard them called the “Poets of Eros,” a distinguished if questionable assembly that includes the likes of Derek Walcott, Robert Hass, and Ted Hughes. Each of these poets is great in his own way, relating to the world primarily in terms of unfulfilled desire. But the grandaddy of them all is probably Chile’s Pablo Neruda, whose electrifying first book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair turns 100 this year.
Neruda was a poet-diplomat, a breed of statesman that seems to have died out with the Twentieth Century, a dynamic and irascible figure whose idealistic vision for his country was noble in flavor but complicated in application. He’s one of those shining leftist poets who could risk his life to save Spanish refugees during their civil war on the one hand, but openly admire Joseph Stalin on the other. From his colorful love life to his death by political assassination, there’s a lot about Neruda that invites our curiosity and speculation. But there can be no speculating about the power of his writing, which is a force we will probably never stop reckoning with:
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace. My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road! Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.
So goes the last stanza of the first poem in his first collection. I’d imagine that most women—not least the one to whom he addressed this poem—might object to being used as a symbol for the “infinite ache” of life. That’s fair enough. But whatever his critics say, Neruda was more than a serial objectifier of the opposite sex. The same troubling impulse that made him locate the divine longing of his life in the bodies of women also seems to have granted him profound sympathy. Indeed, in the next poem of the collection, the sweaty lust has given way to a beatific vision:
Speechless, my friend, alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead and filled with the lives of fire, pure heir of the ruined day.
A creative writing professor of mine did a whole unit on Neruda and, one day, he pulled a gag on us, plopping down a paper copy of one of his poems on each desk and asking us to identify which collection it came from. We collectively scratched our heads: it had all the earmarks of Neruda’s work, from the metaphors of light and darkness to the restless to the underlying lustfulness of the tone, but none of us could quite place it.
After about ten minutes, the professor clued us in on the game. The poem wasn’t Neruda’s—it was the his. He’d drummed it up that morning by writing out a list of female body parts—arms, legs, hair, lips—and then inserting a few exclamation points and political proclamations. The point, I suppose, was that much of Neruda’s work seems to have been written to a formula.
But that gag reflects less on any lack of quality in Neruda’s work than it does on the high quality of my professor’s ability to read it. You could accuse many great authors of writing to a formula. Hughes comes to mind again, as does Lorca. Even Eliot’s stuff looked pretty repetitive before Ezra Pound took an axe to the manuscripts. There are plenty of lines in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair that make me blink when I read them, but none of them make me bored. There’s a surrealist tinge to it all (what, after all, is the “numberless heart of the wind / beating above our loving silence”?), but even his strangest passages approximate something concrete and real.
Neruda died of suspicious causes in Isla Negra in 1973, a vantage from which he could watch the total collapse of his political ambitions. He had been far too comfortable with the rise of Communist thugs in Chile and Argentina, and mourned the American-backed coup that led to the destruction of Chile’s leftist regime. But for all his posturing and misplaced enthusiasm, his poems were, and always will be, a force of solidarity, sympathy, and unification. Because all of us feel that infinite ache, the desire we sometimes place in each other but which transcends the thirst for mere pleasure. 100 years later, there is still plenty of time to fall in love with Neruda’s first great poems. “There were grief and the ruins,” one line goes, “and you were the miracle.” We still have plenty of ruins—political and personal—all over the place in 2024. But luckily, we still have the miracle of Neruda, too.
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