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Read Along in Spanish & English "Poem XX" (Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche) from Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada by Pablo Ne...
Neruda Poem XX. Neruda recites its famous Poem XX. Writing in its youth, 1924. One within his first works.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda included "Tonight I can write the saddest lines," a.k.a. "Poem 20," in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada). First published in 1924, when Neruda was just 19 years old, the collection charts the course of love, lust, and heartbreak.
There may be no more beloved poem in all of Latin America than Pablo Neruda’s beguiling poem “Tonight I Can Write.”. Written when Neruda was in his very early twenties, the poem perfectly ...
- Summary
- Themes
- Structure
- Literary Devices
- Analysis of Tonight I Can Write
- Historical Context
- Similar Poetry
‘Tonight I Can Write’ by Pablo Nerudais an emotional poem in which Neruda’s speaker depicts his love, his loneliness, and his hopes. Within the lines of ‘Tonight I Can Write’ the speaker describes how easy it is for him to write the “saddest poem of all”. He’s in a state of mind that allows him to write moving lines, of which he gives several examp...
Throughout ‘Tonight I Can Write,’ Neruda engages with themes of love, love loss, and solitude. He expresses his loneliness through poetic language and poignant images. Neruda’s speaker also discusses change, the transformation of his relationship with “her” and how he feels now. It seems to him that she will “be someone else’s” and that he has lost...
The poems that brought Pablo Neruda into the limelight are essentially love poems where he makes use of vivid nature imagery and symbolism to express himself. In the poem, Tonight I Can Write, the poet is extensively lyrical, and the very verbs he uses in the lines like “The night is shattered/and the blue stars shiver in the distance”, emphasize t...
Neruda makes use of several literary devices in ‘Tonight I Can Write’. These include but are not limited to imagery, alliteration, and juxtaposition. The poem consists of night imagery, and the alliteration of the consonant sound “s” all through the lines reflects the quiet night. The night could be both treacherous and beautiful, and this could al...
Lines 1-7
It does not seem as though he realizes what it is to love until he starts writing about her. In fact, it is the idea of love that he loves more than the woman, and thus he can write “the saddest lines”. Such sentiments immediately charmed the young people who were themselves experiencing similar emotions, and they were able to identify with Neruda and appropriate his words in their own love affairs. This is what makes Neruda so much a poet of the common people. As the poor fisherman’s son who...
Lines 8-13
Neruda’s poems are full of easily understood images which makes them no less beautiful. To hear him talk about “verse (that) falls to the soul like dew to the pasture” makes the whole process of writing poetry so comprehensive. Similarly, the deliberate repetition of certain words and images such as: “My sight searches for her…/My heart looks for her“. Emphasizes the over-wrought condition of the crazed lover. The poet is a jealous lover who imagines that “She will be another’s”. However, the...
Lines 14-22
There is a growing feeling of solitariness in the poet that, although nature and the environment have remained unchanged over the years, he has lost the woman he once loved. The expression is intensely lyrical and full of agony when he says:… The night is shattered/and the blue stars shiver in the distance. The poignancy of the situation is further heightened when he realizes: “I loved her,/and sometimes she loved me too. And equally, she loved me,/sometimes I loved her too./How could one not...
Chile has an interesting political background owing to its Spanish Heritage and the way the country has been governed up until the late 19th century; the country was primarily run by a group of wealthy landowners, but this prompted much unrest and eventually civil war. Eventually, a conservative regime was established, but later this was superseded...
This is far from the only love poem that Pablo Neruda wrote. Others that directly relate to the moving imagery in ‘Tonight I Can Write’ include ‘If You Forget Me,’ ‘Sonnet XI,’ and ‘Done Go Far Off‘. Readers might also be drawn to the moving words to be found in Thomas Hardy‘s ‘Rain on a Grave,’ written after the death of his wife, Emma. Or, ‘Sonne...
Pablo Neruda is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century poets of the Americas. “No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,” observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish ...
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The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. I kissed her ...
