“And yet a permanence of stone and language/upheld the city raised like a chalice/in all those hands: live, dead, and stilled,/aloft with so much death, a wall, with so much life,/struck with flint petals: the everlasting rose, our home,/ this reef on Andes, its glacial territories” (Neruda 29).
This stanza comes from section VII of Neruda’s epic poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu”. This section plays with the contrast of the permanent and the vanished. Neruda paints the sacrifice of the Incan people in the construction of the citadel as a noble sacrifice, contrasting from the doom he feels in the first few sections about urban life. He grapples with the reality of the lives that went into the construction and describes the rock as having embodied the spirit “in all those hands”.
The contrast of life and death is an important motif for the poem in general and this section highlights it well by the permanence of both the stone (inanimate) and language (animate). There is a transference to the stones itself as a way to show the life that can come from the nobel death. The permanence of the stone maintains the permanence of the language, representative of the living. There is another example of this contrast by the description of the walls. Neruda uses “a wall” as a flexible dependent clause. The “wall” is preceded by “aloft with so much death” and followed by “with so much life”, showing a transference between life and death through construction.
There are 2 interesting images represented in this section which are also found throughout the poem – the chalice and the rose.
The image of the chalice appears early in the poem as a symbol of Neruda’s negative outlook on urban life. Later in Section VII the image is converted to a positive symbol. In Christian tradition, the chalice is the vessel that Jesus uses to share his blood at the last supper, and can also represent the womb of Mary. In the chalice, there is an emptiness but there is also opportunity as it is used to connect man to God. Neruda describes the citadel as such to emphasize the spiritual nature of the site. Additionally, the raising of the chalice represents success or celebration.
Finally, the image of the rose is used in this section as well. Throughout the poem, Neruda employs feminine/sexual imagery and the rose is no exception. The rose is representative of beauty, femininity and the fleeting nature of time. It’s interesting that Neruda uses such a feminine symbol to represent the citadel, which to me feels masculine in its blocky construction. Nonetheless, Neruda wants to emphasize how the site represents the “bloom” of the Incan empire. The entire bush is not rose flowers, but Macchu Picchu is highlighted as one of the bloom to illustrate its fertility and importance to the empire.