DDCPoetry

Poem found here:  "One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII" by Pablo Neruda Love poems.  When do they become too cute and too saccharine, or when does one past the test of time and mean something more.  Does this matter?  Love poems are definitely a mood poem to me.  Not the type to return to when I'm not into love poems -- like after a fight with a loved one or missing the loved one after a long departure, but even then it can go back and forth emotionally. For this poem, the images and thoughts are what brings me back to this poem.  This is not simply a declaration of love in verse, but something more deeper, maybe soulful. "I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, / or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:"  No hyperbole or outward expanse of love.  At least that's what I take from these lines.  The images in the poem are in negation -- don't love, and I don't know if salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations have a bigger symbolic meani...

The poem is written in four quatrains.  The poem lingers with its images -- the grey beret and the idea of autumn to create a poem of lament or celebration perhaps. I remember you as you were in the last autumn. You were the grey beret and the still heart In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on. And the leaves fell in the water of your soul. All the quatrains are end-stopped, so every quatrain feels like a scene.  Here the speaker first notices the other with "grey beret and the still heart" -- the visual que; however, note the contrasting images of the flames in the eyes and the water of the soul.  These images usually don't come together unless to compare something.  My guess the comparison refers to the external aspect versus the internal. Clasping my arms like a climbing plant the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace. Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning. Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul. Desire?  Want? Lust? ...

Poem found here:   "Perhaps not to be is to be without your being" by Pablo Neruda The poem is untitled.  Or rather, the first line of the poem is the title of the poem, and even with the first lines there seems to be an identity crisis, "Perhaps not to be is to be without your being."  Not in the sense of the serious existential who am I crisis, but this one is born out of identity of a couple and self -- which is just a serious, but not as deep. The speaker defines what it means to be without in the next couple of lines, "without your going, that cuts noon light / like a blue flower, without your passing / later through fog and stones," note how the images are very image and nature based bringing a pastoral sense, and note as well that, by using nature, there's a greater expanse of loneliness exhibited, "without the torch you lift your hand / that others may not see as golden," Now by going of the sense of sight, this line, "that perha...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Clenched Soul" by Pablo Neruda Originally read: June 27, 2013 More information about the Poet: Pablo Neruda Each stanza has a sense of turmoil.  The push and pull of a relationship that's not really stated, but compared to. With the first stanza, "We have lost even this twilight / No one saw us this evening hand in hand / while the blue night dropped on the world."  The setting of the poem starts at the loss of twilight, assuming that's the start of the day.  The speaker appropriates this moment to a "we" hand in hand.  The last image, "blue night dropped on the world" has foreboding undertone -- somewhat encompassing. "I have seen from my window / the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops."  A visual stanza in which, note, the speaker is alone.  He is looking out.  And "fiesta" here is not my first inclination of a "party."  I think the word is more inclined to t...