Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Nerudawas the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda. Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth12 July 1904
CityParral, Chile
CountryChile
sweet house proportion
So the freshness lives on in a lemon, in the sweet-smelling house of the rind, the proportions, arcane and acerb.
house deeds buzz
Your house sounds like a train at midday, the wasps buzz, the saucepans sing, the waterfall enumerates the deeds of the dew . . .
blood house endure
In the house of poetry nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood.
eye house boards
I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.
con los
Quiero hacer contigoLo que primavera hace con los cerazos
freedom hear moment near road taught voice water
Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.
birds sleeping soul
I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated /that had been sleeping in your soul.
arrow certain dark love loves rose scholars-and-scholarship shadow
I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topazor arrow of carnations that propagate fire:I love you as one loves certain dark things,secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
far-away feels whole
Where were you then? Who else was there? Saying what? Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?
pain pride blood
Who do I belong to? How come I mortgaged my being till I don't belong to myself? How come I sold my blood? And who now owns my indecisions, my hands, my private pain, my pride?
revenge selfish distance
Raw hatred took its time making an outpost of its rage and prepared for me a savage crown with rusty, bloodstained spikes. It wasn't pride that made me keep my heart at a distance from such terror, nor did I waste on revenge or the pursuit of power the forces that came from my selfish griefs or my accumulated joys. It was something else-my helplessness.
sleep dark thinking
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.
hands pieces sun
Sometimes a piece of sun burned like a coin in my hand.
writing humanity earth
On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.