Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century poets of the Americas. “No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,” observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime. John Leonard in the New York Times declared that Neruda “was, I think, one of the great ones, a Whitman of the South.” Among contemporary readers in the United States, he is largely remembered for his odes and love poems. Source

Sonnet 65

Matilde, where are you? I only just noticed

behind my necktie and above my heart,

a certain melancholy between my ribs:

It was that, all of a sudden, you are gone.

I needed the light of your energy so much.

I looked all around me, devouring hope,

and saw that the space without you is a house,

with nothing left in it but tragic windows.

In the pure silence now, the roof is listening

to the falling of ancient leafless rain,

to feathers, to what the night has imprisoned.

And so I still wait, like a lonely house,

for you to see me and inhabit me again.

Until that time, my windows ache.

Published:

1959

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Surrealism

Anthology Years:

2022

Themes:

Love & Relationships

Poetic Form