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Fall means Neruda - Poem XIV from 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair
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Fall means Neruda - Poem XIV from 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair Poem XIV Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. You are more than this white head that I hold tightly as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands. You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed. Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window. The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish. Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them. The rain takes off her clothes. The birds go by, fleeing. The wind. The wind. I can contend only against the power of men. The storm whirls dark leaves and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky. The play of love in the poem is not just with “light,” but between light and darkness in both persons. For Neruda, love is a confrontations with the real subjectivity of another person. That otherness takes the form of traumatic, destructive passion, and reveals a mutual discord almost beyond endurance. The apparent disconnection between the descriptions of love, and the descriptions of the tempest, at first conceal the fact that for Neruda, love is the only means by which two people “weather” each other. They are in fact animated by their encounter, instead of being destroyed, through an alchemy of sentiment that transforms and assimilates the storm. Neruda writes, “you arrive in the flower and the water.” This defines the divide between new life on the one hand, and chaos on the other. The first flower imagery is suggested by the line, “Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.” This is a plea for happiness, and a gallant seduction, modes which return at the end of the poem. But first Neruda turns to the night sky: “Who writes your name in smoke among the stars of the south?” It is an image of the sublime overwritten with the beautiful – the sublime of the starry sky that becomes the backdrop for the more manageable name of the beloved. The ambivalence of this image of the sky gives way to the absolute sublimity of the inchoate beloved: “Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.” Simply lovely - for more of these ideas see Schiller - On the Aesthetic Education of Man.  |
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