A Year of Love Poetry, Day-by-Day: Sonnet LI (100 Love Sonnets) - Pablo Neruda

(*Depending on the speed of your internet connection, it may take a couple of minutes to load the first time. *)

"Passages IV" - Charcoal and acrylic by Elena Peteva. Now in the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I fell in love with it, had my chance to acquire, vacillated, and by the time I decided ..... lost it. Both for its symbolism and my encounter with it as a love-and-life lesson on when heart and eye should out-vote the brain, there could be no other image more apropos.

"Love is the universal migraine" wrote Robert Graves in the poem "Symptoms of Love". And, like an actual migraine, it renders us paralyzed and wordless to describe: regardless of the stage (or state) of a "love connection"' we feel as though no one else has ever felt as we do. Since my first "migraine", poetry has been the palliative for its course. Exhilarated or despairing, elated or dumb-founded by an affaire de coeur, someone talented has expressed my feelings better, more vividly, eloquently, and passionately. My goal is to post one poem each day for a year as an exercise and meditation on the subject.

The poems come from a poetry collection accumulated over a life-time of marveling at the sometimes-madness-sometimes-misery of being in love but always always in awe of the mystery and hope, whether as the pursuer or the pursued.

In his poem "Amar" (To Love), which is posted here, Carlos Drummond de Andrade writes of the heart as being a bottomless reservoir of Love. He urges that we must continue to ladle it out, whether after a loss or when that Love has fallen on parched earth, because that's what we are meant to do - nay, we must do. No other poem speaks as much to me in encouraging that optimistic, hopeful view.

Part of my objective for the project is to see how re-reading, selecting, and commenting on so much "love poetry" would affect my own energy, spirit, receptivity, and capacity to love. It led - eventually- to a rumination about Love, which you can find here: “Talking About Love Is Like Dancing About Architecture” .

So, while you await the next lift-off, are already soaring or just barely crawling away from a crash, may these poems - by the gifted and the mad, the famous and the (somewhat) forgotten, spanning centuries and cultures - show you that your anguishes and ecstasies are shared and universal.

Intimations, Declarations, Persuasions, Celebrations, Separations, Desolation: these are the stages of a love affair, as characterized by Jon Stallworthy for his anthology of love poetry. I have followed the same protocol in tagging the poems here.

Harrison Tao
March 1, 2010

Since poets may be represented more than once, photos and biographical information will be only with the first posting of a poem by each. This site is quirky for navigating to a particular poet. They are listed in order of the number of their poems that I have selected.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Sonnet LI (100 Love Sonnets) - Pablo Neruda

Given that this - and the earlier one - come from the "100 Love Sonnets" volume (in Spanish - 1960), it's a good bet that, before this blog is done, there will be more here! Neruda's love poetry was his most popular in South America, more so than his political ones. These sonnets were dedicated to his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. (He was sensitive enough to delay publication, so as to not hurt the feelings of the ex-wives.) In the dedication, he called the verses "... little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them". Sigh...
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Sonnet LI

transl. from Spanish by Stephen Tapscott

Your laugh: it reminds me of a tree

fissured by a lightning streak, by a silver bolt

that drops from the sky, splitting the poll,

slicing the tree with its sword.

A laugh like yours I love is born

only in the foliage and snow of the highlands,

the air’s laugh that bursts loose in those altitudes,

dearest: the Araucanian tradition.

O my mountain woman, my dear Chillán volcano,

slash your laughter through the shadows

the night, morning, honey of the noon:

birds of the foliage will leap in the air

when your laugh like an extravagant

light breaks through the tree of life.

Pablo Neruda

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