Pablo Neruda Essay

This culture of poetry has been carried down generation after generation since then, with the use of the same stylistic features and based on the same themes. Some of the most legendary poets of the ancient past include William Shakespeare, William Dunbar and George Ashby. They are considered to be the ‘fathers of poetry’ since when everyone is first learning about this culture, their names are heard of the most at the beginning. Most of these poets had worked so legendarily that they are still in use in this current era, even at times combined with the academic syllabuses. The most common one worldwide is about the legendary love story of Romeo and Juliet, by Shakespeare in the 15th century. Pablo Neruda however, does not openly write about this political injustices.

He expresses almost all his feelings and thought metaphorically in his poems, at times, giving one ambiguous revelation on the poems. That was just how good he was in poetry. All these former traditions and former political situations had a hand one way or the other in most of the poems that Pablo Neruda ended up writing. As a young man, he based most of his poems on love (Wilson). His certificate indicated a heart failure as the main cause of death. However, the Chilean government held a statement in 2015 holding proof that it was highly possible that the government of back then, might have had an involvement in his death (Moss). Other than his political career, he took a lot of his time in his poetry occupation too.

He launched this career at just ten years old and got most of his work published later in his life. He was such an amazing poet that he is referred to as ‘The national poet of Chile’ in this modern era. From all the stylistic devices he used to try and emphasize the theme of love, it is not hard to portray what kind of a passionate man Pablo was, despite his major involvement in politics, commonly known as ‘the dirty game’. He somehow managed to pour out his feelings in writing still. He could also be termed a critical thinker because most of his work requires a reader to dig deep, not just on the surface, to get what he was passing along (Chatterjee 133-142).

Like most modern poets, he had a deep use of stylistic devices like personification, metaphors, similes, allusion, rhetorical questions, anaphora, vivid description, diction, imagery, foreshadowing and even epigraphs, among others. Metaphors, however, was the one literary device that surfaces in most of his poems. Also on the poem ‘Every day you play’, he cites, ‘my words rained over you’, and also in the line ‘. Slaughtering butterflies’. From these two examples, one can vividly paint a picture of what Pablo was trying to insinuate (De costa). One can easily fail to identify imagery as a device because it portrays an image so clear in ones’ mind that one skips the thought that that was maybe a stylistic device. That is one factor that makes Imagery one of the hardest stylistic device to identify.

It changes from an overly warm and affectionate to a tone that is warning and threatening. Outwardly reading the poem, Pablo is seen to make the poem’s recipient see just how much they belonged together; how right it was since the whole universe was drawing him back to ‘you’, who was the recipient of the poem. That was just in the second stanza. His tone, however, changes in the third, fourth and fifth stanzas. His tone becomes a little threatening and more of a warning. In the first two stanzas, Pablo tries showing Matilde how the whole universe and his whole being, is drawing him back to her. In the third, fourth and fifth stanzas, he warns her of what is going to happen if she was to stop loving or generally if she decides to forget about him (Wilson).

He foreshadows what is going to happen when she stops being there for him. He says that he was also going to stop loving or forget about her too. Pablo can be viewed as vengeful from these particular stanzas. He even metaphors a burning fire to their love, saying that their love burns as strong as that fire and it would only be extinguished if her love for him died. There is, however, another speculation on who the ‘you’ Pablo was referring to was. Some believe that the whole poem was metaphorically written to his country, Chile. Considering the fact that this certain piece is speculated to have been written while on a political exile, the chances are high that he was somehow sending a message back home the best way he knew how to; through poetry.

The ‘you’, who we formerly believed to be the mistress, could have been used as a metaphor for Chile, his country, where he was a currently acting top government official around the years 1945-1948 (Beshers). He was ready to reciprocate. His tone can be classified harsh here, changing from the previously loving and passionate one. In the fifth stanza, he even says that he is ready to seek another land should they leave him at the shore (Neruda 13-13). This is yet another metaphor since the land refers to another country while the shore refers to his exile. The sixth and last stanza obviously has the most metaphors in this whole poem. The first person ‘I’ who he uses mostly here might be a metaphor for the whole political party that Gabriel originally abandoned, and the ‘you’ recipient to metaphorically stand for Gabriel himself.

On the sixth and last stanza, one can conclude that the loving and passionate tone that Pablo portrays, could be a soothing gesture to lure Gabriel to bring him back to the party (Nolan). When he talks about his there love burning forever; he could simply be a metaphor for loyalty to mean that, they would stay together happily if Gabriel’s loyalty were not to change along the way. No one knows if this whole poem was maybe a secret plea to Gabriel to reconsider ending his feud with his former party. This is, however, the least considered idea about who the real ‘you’ was in this poem. jstor. org/stable/25681384 Chatterjee, Arnab. "Poetics as resistance: exploring the selected poetry of Pablo Neruda and Sachidananda Vatsayayan Ajneya.