Love, Desire, or Lust?: A study of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair

Pablo Neruda is considered one of the most esoteric and finest Chilean poet and diplomat. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971. He has touched upon multiple issues be it political, social or love. His famous collection of poetry, “Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair” published in 1924, is the most popular collection of Spanish language poetry. Neruda writes of love in many ways. He writes about love that has been lost, love that replaces solitude, and love that haunts lovers forever.

Neruda’s intense love for love poetry is very much noticeable in his collection of poems, “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”. Although it is one of the very best known collections of Neruda, it was refused to be published by Chile’s leading publisher because it was said to be blatantly erotic. Where there’s eroticism, carnality is bound to follow. The carnal passions find a deep root in Neruda’s Love poetry. I feel it focuses more to quench the physical thirst of a male and in this manner sidelines what a woman wants. Through my paper, I want to go a step further in asserting another side of Neruda’s love. Misogyny and sexism are other names for objectification of women. But before proceeding further on Neruda’s poems I want to clarify what exactly female objectification means. So here I quote,

“The objectification of women involves the act of disregarding the personal and intellectual abilities and capabilities of a female; and reducing a woman’s worth or role in society to that of an instrument for the sexual pleasure that she can produce in the mind of another.”1

Immanuel Kant, an influential idealist philosopher characteristically writes on sexual objectification that “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled; the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.”2 (Kant Lectures on Ethics, 163).

“I am the unified self control centre of the universe” man has always claimed. “The rest of the world which I define as the other has meaning only in relation to me as man/father, possessor of the phallus.”3 This claim to centrality has been supported not only by religion and philosophy but also by language. It is an attempt to dominate the others through verbal mastery.

And hence from time immemorial masculine thinking has always been oppressive and phallogocentric.

The women in paintings, movies or novels are usually represented in terms of their body and physical beauty. Through ages, it has been seen that the women have been reduced to being nothing more than objects to be won, prizes to be shown off, and playthings to be used and abused. The same idea could be seen reverberating in the poems of Neruda.

In my paper, I have selected a few of his poems which would account my understanding of Neruda. The very first poem which I want to talk about is “Ah Vastness of Pines”.

Like a possessive child who wants to fulfill his desire of owning a doll, Neruda incorporates the similar idea when he calls a female a “toy doll” in this poem. Doll is said to be an object of desire, and once the charm of the doll fades away, it is rightly ignored and thrown away. A doll is an epitome of perfection in terms of physique and beauty. Similarly he wants a perfect beauty for himself with whom he can toy away his desires and fantasies, and when the charm fades away, the doll is thrown away.

Almost every age is seen undermining a woman as reproductive machinery. Similarly in these lines

“… twilight falling in your eyes, toy doll

earth-shell, in whom the earth sings!”

Neruda equates a woman with earth who is a genitor of life just like the earth and also seems to be saying that she is just like a shell or a superficial covering, a womb whose sole purpose is limited to just shelter a new life.

The same idea of doll is being repeated in another poem of his titled “I Have Gone Marking” when he says,

“stories to tell you on the shore of evening,

Sad and gentle doll, so that you should not be sad”

He is trying to impose his will on the female and wishes to paint her emotions according to him. He wants a passive listener who could listen to his long tales with patience.

Neruda seems to be scanning a woman’s body and minutely x-raying it like a cartographer who marks the map. He is seen as exploring the body of his lover as though it was an atlas. Atlas is referred to as a guide to search the places on the globe but over here Neruda calls the body of his woman as an atlas in which he is finding something so as to fulfill his thirst.

“I have gone marking the atlas of your body

With crosses of fire”

In another poem of his titled as “Body of a Woman”, start with, here I quote,

“Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,

You look like a world, lying in surrender.

My rough peasant’s body digs in you

And makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.”

The poet describes the body of a woman white fleshed, lying helplessly in surrender. The color white can be signified as the color of purity and chastity. Neruda is highly obsessed with the assets of women and so much so that he compares the assets of the woman with nature’s imagery. On one hand, he eulogizes the body of a woman and in the very next lines, he defames it as well. For him a woman should be chaste, pure and untouched but there are no set rules for a male’s body which is shown as dirty, unclean, and tired like a peasant’s body. He is using a very crude imagery of digging into a body which could be equated with the exploitation of earth as well. When earth is dug, we get precious jewels and stones, in the same way when the body of a woman is dug; it gives the same sensual pleasure and joy to the poet.

The idea of possessing is also echoing in the first line of the last stanza of the poem,

“body of “my” woman, I will persist in your grace.

My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!”

The transformation from the body of a woman to the body of my woman can be seen clearly in these lines. The idea of possession is very firm in males. They tend to possess the women in their lives as their own property. The last stanza as we see becomes highly personal and he wants to burden his woman with his own desires, and will. In a nutshell, he wants a firm support, a succor on which he could lay back his turbulent shifty and shaky self.

The same idea of possession could be seen resonating in his another poem, “In my Sky at Twilight”, when he says

“You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips

And in your life my infinite dreams live.”

Here the lover is imposing his dreams and passions on his inert beloved. She is “his” woman. The key to her body lies in the hands of the lover himself. Here is this man who is trying to derive amorous pleasure from an unreciprocated lover, when he says

“My sour wine is sweeter on your lips

Oh reaper of my evening song,

How solitary dreams believe you to be mine

You are mine, mine I go shouting it to the afternoon’s”

Another poem of Neruda, “Every Day you play” plays with the idea of fulfillment of male sexual desire and boasting of chauvinist ego. A few lines of the poem echo the idea of damsel in distress who’s being saved or rather savaged by the knight in the shining armor.

“Cling to me as though you were frightened …….

Now, now to, little one you bring me honeysuckle

And even your breast smell of it”

Here the poet seems to be belittling the woman by calling her little one and also seems to be ordering her to surrender her body in his arms. It seems that her savior is becoming her molester.

The line “I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth”, quite sensually invokes the idea of crude and painful love making. It seems that Neruda is conflating sex, violence and aesthetics together. On the parting note, he says

“I want

To do with you what spring does with the cherry

Trees.”

Spring is a season of blossoms and growth and during this season we find the emergence of new buds and new life. It seems that spring impregnates the trees with fruits and flowers and the similar idea parallels in the above lines.

Moving on to the next poem, “White Bee”, we find that the poet is bringing in the idea of drones being used and thrown by queen bees. As we know that the sole function of a drone bee in the colony of social bees is to mate with the queen bee. Similarly the poet seems to be a drone, portraying himself as powerless soul in front of his ladylove and also tries to incorporate the streaks of femme fatale in her. White itself seems to be quite a derogatory term, as white could represent purity and chastity. He wants a pure, untouched lady or bee for him.

“White bee, you buzz in my soul, drunk with honey,

And your flight winds in slow spirals of smoke.

I am the one without hope, the word without echoes,

He who lost everything and he who had everything.”

But immediately in the next lines, he debunks the stature of queen bee and we find the bee entrapped in the spider’s web helpless and unsecure. Hence the tables are turned and it’s the poet who is the master or the spider, and the beloved who was supposed to be the powerful queen bee is instead the naked helpless soul.

“Ah your body, a frightened statue, naked.

…..

Your breasts seem like white snails.

A butterfly of shadow has come to sleep on your belly.”

It seems that the lover is highly obsessed with nudity and is trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality and vulgarity on the same pedestal. Sexual objectification seems to reverberate in almost all his poems. The collection’s last poem, “Tonight I can write” is no different. Once the libido of the lover is fulfilled the beloved is tossed away just as a commodity. Ultimately when the lover gets over with the charm and vile of his beloved, he undermines her as if it was just a passing affair.

“I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too” transforms to “she loved me, sometimes I loved her too.”

It seems that the poem is highly phallocratic and degrading the identity of women.

Plato and Freud defined woman as “irrational and invisible as imperfect castrated man.”4 Woman’s bodies and sexual pleasure have been so absent and so misrepresented in the male discourse. I feel that women intellectuality cannot be expressed or understood within the identity claiming assumptions of phallocentric discourse.

A strong gibe to Neruda’s treatment of women as a sex object came from a very prolific Canadian female poet, Margaret Atwood in her poem, “Is/Not”. She takes a dig at Neruda’s love poems by supplementing her own love poem which turns the whole idea that love and physicality are the same. Men and women are equal and “fellow/travelers”. They have equal rights to be “angry” and hence share an equal pedestal. All she wants is an egalitarian society.

“Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise
sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities
you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,
nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveler
….
permit yourself anger
and permit me mine
which needs neither
your approval nor your surprise
….
which needs instead
to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.”5

To substantiate my point to a more extent on the debacle which the females have gone through, I am now quoting an ace modern feminist blogger whose poem is creating ripples on the internet.

The poem titled, “Brain over Body” by Raleigh uses harsh words to debunk the clichéd norms set by the male dominating society. The poem points to the fact that a female is more than a body, she has a brain which imparts her intellectualism and individuality. She is not an object which could be tossed or twisted; neither is she Eve who will falter for Satan’s slippery tongue and sycophancy.

“I love you
that’s all they ever say
Sweet words for a greedy tongue
Do they think me property?
An object to be auctioned without delay,
They’re reckless. Living for the young.

I am strong
Your muscle may be better off in a fight
But you don’t use your common sense!
Don’t underestimate me
My words can still bite
I am a creature of intelligence

Do not touch me
My skin is of silk and my heart of gold
The way I think is elaborate, labyrinthine
I am a free soul
Let me be, without throttle hold
Love ME, not for my legs or what’s in between
Love me because you think me a Queen.”6

Hence, I feel that women’ ubiquitous cultural alienation should be eradicated. Although the pressures and oppressions of gender may be as invisible as air, they are also as inescapable as air and like the weight of air they imperceptibly shape the forms and motions of our life.

To conclude my paper, I would like to quote Lucy Irigaray’s essay “Women has sex organs just about everywhere”

“The geography of her pleasure is much more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is imagined. She is infinitely other in herself.”7

Eve was not just formed to entertain Adam. Women have their own individuality and intellectuality which is needed to be understood by the patriarchal world. A female does not aspire for superiority but for equality as well.

Bibliography

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_objectification
2. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Louis Infield (trans.), (Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 162–68
3. https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/11462/1/fulltext.pdf
4. https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/11462/1/fulltext.pdf
5. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/is-not/
6. http://allpoetry.com/poem/11671622-Brain-Over-Body-by-Raleigh
7. https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/11462/1/fulltext.pdf