A writer from Chile with unfathomable talent does a supreme job in using literary elements to enliven a reader’s emotions. In a collection of poetry by Pablo Neruda, Neruda presents beautiful imagery in both long and short poems. Regardless of the length of his poems, he manages to weave a complex web of adjectives in all of his work, creating lines that stimulate the senses. Pablo Neruda is very dynamic when it comes to the spectrum of the topics he chooses to write about. His poems are neither about typical love nor are they about routine despair; they are a combination of every life aspect. The spectrum ranges from war to nature and romance to communism. Pablo Neruda’s poetic elasticity has made him into a poet that is highly celebrated and revered. He takes two different topics with two, completely different meanings and ties them into one idea that makes perfect sense. Neruda’s poetry reads as if it is untainted and unedited, it is as if the reader is looking directly into the thoughts of Neruda’s mind and absorbing the intense message of emotion.
The images we see in our mind are derived only from our own imagination, but they flourish and blossom when we open ourselves up to reading someone else’s thoughts. We experience an entire new world that can only be seen with the eyes of the mind, Neruda aids in this new-found vision. Pablo Neruda’s lyrical abilities create an emotional atmosphere for the reader, the imagery is an escape. The imagery is an adventure, a chance to take your mind to an unknown location of beautiful ideas that it has never experienced. In one of my favorite poems by Neruda titles Joachim’s Absence, Neruda utilizes the literary element of imagery to aid the reader in understanding an account of suicide. A gentleman dives into an ocean to end his life and the description reads, “I feel these waters leaping and splashing. These waters splash upon me and they have acid lives”. Those descriptive lines of imagery appealed to the eyes, sense of touch, and sound. As the poem is being read, the cold icy water can be felt, and the sound of a corpse striking the water can be heard. His style of imagery keeps the tongue and mind entertained; it is hypnotic, eloquent, and explicit. In another account, a poem titles The Queen demonstrates Neruda’s use of imagery, it reads, “No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks at the carpet of red gold that you tread as you pass”. This poem gives the reader a beautiful image of a woman who Neruda loved, a woman that Neruda saw as a queen, a queen that belonged to him only. The “crystal crown” and the “red carpet” both offer eloquent, beautiful images that resemble that the woman who he loved was both beautiful and eloquent. Imagery, the most important poetic element, is Neruda’s strongest point; he mastered the art of description in his poetry.
In a handful of Pablo Neruda’s poem, he compares various aspects of life or idiosyncrasies of a woman to bread. Dating back to thousands of years ago, bread was and still is seen as something that fuels life’s vitality. It is the basic necessity that keeps an individual alive; it is bread, something that every human must obtain. In a romantic poem of Neruda, he finds bread comparable to the laughter of a woman he was in love with. The poem is titles Tu Risa, which means your laughter, and it depicts how important the laughter of the woman is to him. He compares the laughter to bread which means her laughter sustains him, revitalizes him, and nourishes him. Also, in many of Neruda’s poems, he compares life situations to the oceans and seas. Life situations are always surprising, mysterious, and risky, exactly like an ocean or a sea. No one knows what lies under the crisp blanket of blue until they dive in to search and discover. Just as we do not know exactly with a life predicament is like unless we experience the problem and face its trials. Neruda’s double comparisons put the reader’s feelings in awe; they melt the reader and amaze the reader because Neruda makes such beautiful combinations.
Pablo Neruda uses irony best when he is describing love. He describes love as something so great and enjoyable that it could put any individual in a nostalgic trance, but in the poem I Could Write the Saddest line, Neruda’s irony kicks in. In that poem the lines read, “Through nights like these I held her in my arms. I kissed her again and again under the endless sky”. The poem describes the perfect moment the lovers shared in the past, but the entire poem is about the male lamenting over the loss of his lover. He reminisces and mourns over the lost love, a love that is irreplaceable. He once had something so amazing, he once was in a state of completeness, but now he is in a state of disarray because he is no longer with the one he adores.
There is no plot to reveal in Neruda’s collection of poems, but that does not mean the reader will be dissatisfied or bored. The details in each poem are enough to keep any reader transfixed. Pablo Neruda never fails at eliciting the emotions of his reader through his literary techniques. His techniques are precise, complex, descriptive and well thought out. This combination makes a dynamic author whose writing has the ability to melt hearts. Neruda is very unique, his work does not depict ordinary emotions, and instead it creates new emotion in the hearts of the readers.