A-Z 2021 N - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Pablo Neruda, 1924)

I've never really read a lot of poetry.  Part of that is that I've often gone through spells where I don't read anything but non-fiction, but equally, it's simply that I've often leaned more into novels (and usually genre stuff at that) than into shorter works, let alone works where the whole thing might be over in a matter of lines.

I may have decided that I don't much enjoy reading Keats, but that absolutely isn't the case with reading poetry in general, as I've learned with this small volume of Pablo Neruda's verse.  Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a small volume (Penguin's edition comes out to 112 pages, and that's with an 18-page introduction, every poem being bilingual on facing pages, and about a dozen Picasso illustrations with blank facing pages), but it packs a punch, to say the least.

The title isn't 100% accurate; the 'Song of Despair' is absolutely a love poem as well, simply one that's more about the pain of love ending than about adoration of the woman Neruda is devoting the words to.  So what we have here is a small collection, just twenty-one poems, most only a page long.  And yet, there's a very good reason that this was chosen to have not just a whole volume to itself, but one in bespoke Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition styling, making it stand out just that little bit more on the shelf, despite having the lowest spine height of the whole bunch.

The poems here are quite unlike the Romantic poets, with their tendency toward placing the object of affection on a pedestal of sorts, as if the lovers were Greek goddesses.  Rather, there's a sort of raw, earthy quality to Neruda's writing, his lovers a part of the world, creatures of sensuality who inspire both words of love and of lust.

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 that 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.

I mean...  That's definitely a form of worship toward one's lover, but not in any kind of remotely chaste sense. There's a sense of unbridled eroticism to every poem in the collection; the most common metaphors compare the lover to the ocean's depths, to the weather, love as something more akin to a force of nature that cannot be resisted or controlled, rather than anything that could be captured in stone and placed in a museum.

It's difficult to say that this slim volume gives a solid idea of what Neruda's poetry was like over the course of his life, however; this was one of his first published works (composed when he was only 20), while his career lasted until his death in 1973.  That said, given that it is still, a century on, the highest-selling poetry collection in the Spanish language, their timeless quality ensures that Neruda occupies a solid position among the acknowledged masters of poetry.

Picking up the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 certainly doesn't hurt, though.