Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1924

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Authorial Context: Neruda’s Twenty Songs

“Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” is the second-to-last poem in Pablo Neruda’s most famous book, Twenty Songs of Love and a Song of Despair. Though it speaks of sadness at the loss of his lover, it is technically one of twenty love songs. The song that follows, the last in the collection, is that of despair.

At the time, poets in Latin America were writing Symbolist and Modernist poetry, which tended to be more erudite, employing images as symbols for ideas and feelings. Readers were meant to decode these symbols as a way of understanding the poem. If poets wrote about love or sex, they also employed euphemistic language. Neruda’s first volume of poetry, twilight (1923), was written in a Modernist, Symbolist style.

What makes Neruda’s Twenty Songs unique is the way the speaker describes the body directly, relating romantic and sexual encounters openly, without using inuendo. In “Every Day You Play,” for example, Neruda writes, “Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle, / and even your breasts smell of it” (Lines 22-23). He also says, “My words rained over you, stroking you. / A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body” (Lines 30-31), and “I want to do to you what spring does to the cherry blossoms” (Line 35).

In “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines,” the speaker describes kissing a lover and holding her in their arms during the night, as well as imagining someone else kissing her now that the speaker no longer “has” her.

Though the poems in Twenty Songs make heavy use of metaphor and simile, they convey carnal desire more explicitly than other poems of that time dared to do. This not only represents a change in Neruda’s personal style, but it also represents a change in the zeitgeist of poetry overall. The use of symbolism in poetry would wane in the 1920s, and poets began experimenting with Surrealism and Confessionalist modes. Confessional poetry allowed subject matter that was considered taboo, including sexual encounters. Surrealism made use of the imagination, allowing poets to break rules of physics, syntax, and perceived reality to speak more from the unconscious and use dream-logic to break with conventions.

This evolving style was a welcome change for readers, and the release of Neruda’s Twenty Songs made him famous. The collection shows his affinity for hyperbolic language, heightened senses of imagination, and heavy use of metaphor and simile to create dream-like, intensely emotional images. Love and loss are universal themes, and Neruda’s evocative, emotional exploration of such themes explains the book’s continuing popularity.

Literary Context: Neruda’s Life Influences on Poetry

Throughout his life, Neruda wrote love poems, poems of witness, and poems about Latin America. Some claim that he put Latin America on the map, especially with his later book Canto General, in which he retells the history of Latin America in poetic form. Neruda was very active politically; he was a sitting Senator, and he even ran for president. Neruda wrote poems that bore witness to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, some of which were laments for his friend and colleague, Lorca, who was executed by the despot of Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Amidst his political work and writing, Neruda continued to write love poems, and in his later years he published a book of odes to everyday things, as well as the collection 100 Love Sonnets (1959).

Neruda’s life was filled with romantic and marital tumult. He had three wives and countless mistresses. In 1930, he married Maria Antonieta Haagenaar, a bank employee of Dutch and Indonesian heritage who did not share Neruda’s language. In 1936, they had a daughter born with Down Syndrome. Neruda and Maria separated shortly after her birth, at which time Neruda was already seeing a painter, Delia del Carril, 20 years his senior. In 1942, Neruda’s daughter died in the Netherlands at the age of eight, though Neruda did not learn of her death until much later. Neruda married del Carril, and their marriage lasted for nearly 20 years. Though they remained married, Neruda continued to have affairs with others.

In Neruda’s later years, he met Matilde Urrutia, whom many agree was the love of his life. They had much in common, both being from the south of Chile, both raised in relative poverty. She was a singer and actress but gave up her career once she met Neruda. While still married to del Carril, he lived with Urrutia in exile in Europe until he returned to Chile. He then divorced his second wife and married Urrutia in 1966. He had a brief affair with his wife’s 30-year-old niece while Matilde was away, causing severe distress in his marriage, but the two reconciled, and Matilde remained married to Neruda until the end of his life.

Neruda’s love poems continue to engage with themes and motifs that he began developing in Twenty Songs. Frequently, the speaker of the poems compares the object of affection to the Earth and to natural phenomenon. In Sonnet 17, Neruda writes the following:

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose

from the earth lives dimly in my body (Lines 5-8).

The sonnets express an overpowering feeling that Neruda feels is all-consuming but mysterious. He expresses this sentiment in Sonnet 17, for instance, when he writes, “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where” (Line 9).

As in “Tonight I Can Write,” Neruda’s love poems demonstrate intense emotion. Both the songs of love and the songs lamenting the end of relationships make use of imagery from the natural world, connecting the women in his poems to the Earth itself and making them into figures as large as the entire Earth. In “Every Day You Play,” Neruda expresses a comparison between the beloved and the entirety of creation. In “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines,” Neruda’s speaker says that their former lover’s eyes are “infinite,” mirroring the way they speak about the sky as being immense and “endless.” This all-encompassing metaphor suggests a feeling that is beyond rational. Some argue that the intensity of the feelings become more important than the people to whom the poems are addressed. The women become objects of affection rather than people with their own independent needs. They represent ideas rather than real people.

“Tonight I Can Write” focuses almost entirely on Neruda’s former lover’s physical attributes, without saying much, if anything, about her intellect or individual desires, capabilities, or non-physical features. Instead, the speaker focuses on the fact that “through nights like this one I held her in my arms” (Line 29). The poem places more emphasis on the speaker’s ability to possesses the woman than on the woman herself.

In Neruda’s biography, he admits that he once raped a cleaning woman and that she had every right to “despise him.” In recent years, more feminists in Chile and elsewhere have argued against placing Neruda and his work in such a position of prominence. In 2018, they convinced the government not to name the international airport of Chile after him. In spite of the controversy around his life and writing, Neruda’s work is still taught widely in universities around the globe.