I’m normally not one to read poetry. I find it pretentious and, frankly, confusing but I understand that poetry can convey ideas and concepts that can’t be captured in novels or stories. I just personally don’t enjoy reading it.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda is a collection of poems with a focus on love and nature. Seeing as they were love poems, and I don’t have much experience with critically reading poetry, I judged some of their content by how I would feel had someone given me the poems. Other poems I just read and tried to figure out how clearly the emotions were conveyed.

I found it impressive that Neruda could find so many different ways of writing about love. While the subject itself got tiring after a while, I was impressed that he could keep finding new ways to describe what it meant to him. He explored the different emotions love can conjure, from longing to anger to sadness. However, some of the comparisons and observations didn’t really make sense. In the poem White Bee, Neruda writes “Your breasts seem like white snails,” which I don’t think I’d take as a compliment. In fact, I’m not even sure what that means. In Girl Lithe and Tawny, Neruda writes “your mouth that has the smile of water,” which again, I’m not entirely sure what that means. I think it’s a compliment, but I don’t know what is trying to be conveyed. Obviously, this could be a translation error, so maybe in the original text, it made sense, but the version I read made these lines confusing.

While the title itself is a little bizarre, Your Breast Is Enough is one of my favorite poems from the collection. The phrasing and descriptions drawn between nature and the subject of the poem are quite sweet and flattering. It really gave the impression of Neruda looking forward to the subject’s presence and dreaded them leaving. The line “in you is the illusion of each day” really gave the impression that Neruda genuinely saw a future with or, at the very least, looked forward to each day with whoever he was talking about.

In the end, the poems turn to a somber note and in Tonight I Can Write, Neruda writes about losing a lover. Not in the sense that she died, although the beginning certainly felt like that, in the sense that she moved on and found another person. I actually thought the poem really captured the feeling of having someone you loved move on and you yourself moving on, but still remembering what it felt like to love them. That poem led into the final one, A Song of Despair, which further highlights the sadness previously expressed. Neruda really focuses on the sea, especially its destructive force. He’s able to clearly convey the turmoil he went through and the pain that love caused him. The entire work really showed all the sides to love, the good and the bad, and while I don’t enjoy poetry, I found it interesting to read.

Question:
Do you like reading poetry? Why or why not.