The Lasting Love

“The Lasting Love”

In the poem “Tonight I Can Write,” 20th century Chilean poet Pablo Neruda writes about his infatuation with his previous lover. In the biography of Pablo Neruda it reads that” As a teenager he received encouragement from one of his teachers, the poet Gabriela Mistral, who later won a Nobel Prize for poetry,” and how “It is almost unconceivable that two such gifted poets should find each other in such an unlikely spot.” One of the author’s sources, Dean Rader also writes how Pablo Neruda was beyond his time, because the poet’s poem is still isolated, untouchable, perfect, and flawless. Pablo Neruda expresses repeatedly how “Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” meaning he couldn’t write them before, when he was in his relationship. Through the use of repetition, imagery, diction, and sound devices in this poem, Pablo Neruda expresses his personal experience from his past love.

In the first four lines of “Tonight I Can Write” Neruda gives his audience an image of what the night is like and how “the stars are blue and shiver in the distance,” (line 34) in other words, the night is bright and cold. The meaning of distance in the second and third lines as he says the stars are shivering in “the distance,” means he is far, far away from his love, and that he is alone. Neruda speaks about the natural world, focusing on how it reminds him of his lost love and the nature of their relationship. The speaker begins writing at night, when the darkness of the night matches his mood. The night sky offers him no comfort because “the stars are blue and shiver in the distance,” but appreciates the wind and of how it sings to him.

In the poem Neruda uses free verse, with no set line length or regular rhyme pattern. He relies on imagery, line lengths, repetition, or sound devices to maintain unity and show progression of ideas. In the fifth line Neruda repeats the first line and follows it with a statement of his love for the woman he is in love with. Neruda begins to talk about their relationship and tell the audience what might have went wrong in their relationship, when he states “sometimes she loved me too” (6). He then remembers being with her on a “night like this one” (7) the night he is writing the poem. Neruda talks about his poem in his poem when he says “And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.” The poet hoped he would be kissing his lover “again and again under the endless sky” (8) just like he hoped their relationship would be endless. The reader might come to think that the poet is trying to distance himself from the love he has for her and from the pain she has caused him. As the reader can see he still loves her, stating “How could one not of loved her great still eyes,” (10) but the poet at the same time is, wanting so much to forget.

Neruda is trying to forget his love but in the poem he tries to find her, with the words, “ my sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer,” (line 19) “ My heart looks for her, and she is not with me,” (20) “ My voice tries to find the