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
carpe-diem sky tree
What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?
queens sky hymns
I have named you queen. There are taller than you, taller. There are purer than you, purer. There are lovelier than you, lovelier. But you are the queen. When you go through the streets No one recognizes you. No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks At the carpet of red gold That you tread as you pass, The nonexistent carpet. And when you appear All the rivers sound In my body, bells Shake the sky, And a hymn fills the world. Only you and I, Only you and I, my love, Listen to it.
sky hymns rivers
And when you appear all the rivers sound in my body, bells shake the sky, and a hymn fills the world.
sky tree earth
What did the earth teach the trees? How to speak to the sky.
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.