Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda

Link to Poem (Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda): http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179257




Image Link:
https://wordmusing.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/i-like-for-you-to-be-still-pablo-neruda/
Biography:

• Pablo Neruda was born  Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, but began to go by the name “Pablo Neruda” when he was a young teenager. Neruda traveled to around the world, including to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid as part of a consulship, and joined the Republican movement after the Spanish Civil War. In 1943, he returned to Chile and was later elected senator of the Republic, where he joined the Communist Party of Chile. Neruda was forced to live “underground” in his country, due to his protests of President González Videla. Pablo Neruda died of cancer in 1973 in Santiago, Chile, two years after he’d received a Nobel Prize.

Speaker:

• The speaker of the poem is Pablo Neruda, and he is speaking to a woman that he loves. He is telling her all the different ways that he loves her, and describing her through those ways. Neruda speaks about loving the unknown woman without knowing about love- he is just doing it because he doesn’t “know any other way.” He tells the woman that she is special and different, and that he loved her separately than anyone else he’d loved in his lifetime. He thanks her in the poem also, crediting the way he turned out to her love: “Thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body.”

Imagery and Figurative Language:

• In the line, “I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries/ the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,” Neruda is comparing the woman to a plant using a metaphor. This is an example of figurative language. This seems like Neruda is talking about how special the woman is, a kind of special that she carries hidden within herself.
• In the line, “so close that your eyes close with my dreams,” Neruda is describing the relationship between himself and the woman. The imagery in this line uses sight and makes it so that they are more one person together than two separate entities.
• Lastly, in the line, “I love you as one loves certain obscure things,/ secretly, between the shadow and the soul,” Neruda’s use of visual imagery here reinforces the idea of him and the woman he loves as one person- that they love each other so much that they are the same.

Tone:

• The tone of the poem seems to be sentimental and slightly dreamy, like he is remembering something beautiful and misses it. Neruda seems to be looking back on his time with this woman that he loves and reflecting about the way in which he loved her- how they were so close and familiar with each other that they became one person.

Theme:

• The theme of Sonnet XVII, by Pablo Neruda, is that to love completely and honestly is the most beautiful thing of all. Neruda tells this woman how he does and does not love her, making it clear that there is a distinction between her and everyone else. He is making the point that no matter how many people you love in your lifetime, you will love each of them differently, because they are different people. Neruda is evoking the beauty of these separate kinds of love, and explaining himself to the woman, while telling her the way he loves her. Neruda’s poem is honest and thoughtful, and shows clearly his relationship with this mystery woman, describing her through his love for her.

Non-SIFTT:

• Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda contains lots of repetition. He repeats the phrase “I love you” several times throughout the poem, reinforcing the theme of different kinds of love. Neruda repeats this phrase in order to make clear the different kinds of love he feels for different people, specifically the woman the poem is aimed at. Neruda also compares the woman in the poem to a flower in several different places, repeating that piece of imagery in different ways. The line, “I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,” describes the woman as almost a hidden beauty, which she holds “hidden, within [herself].” Neruda’s woman isn’t described as a delicate blossom, but more as a hidden wonder. Neruda uses repetition in Sonnet XVII to to reinforce his theme of different kinds of love for different people.