This week I chose to read Pablo Neruda’s ‘Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair. At first, I thought it was a beautiful and romantic read. I liked the storytelling narrative of the poems and how each poem guided us through the relationship from the poet’s eyes. For example, in the first poem, the poet is declaring his love to the woman, which at first glance, I found romantic. Then, by poem ten, the ‘lovers’ grow more distant from each other, which the poet mentions he is sad about. Finally, by poem 20, the relationship is over. The poet looks back on the relationship and mourns his journey to that point. Again, similarly to other novels we have read in this class thus far, I see themes of nostalgia as the poet says, “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her” (49). The poems combined together have this story pattern through time, where these vivid descriptions take us through the journey of love and heartbreak—reminiscing the relationship with a nostalgic view. Finally comes ‘The Song Of Despair’, talking about the cycle of falling in and out of love and being nostalgic, pondering of her as a memory, because their love is now in the past.
Although I found the poems enchanting at first glimpse, after watching the lecture video and hearing the critiques, my thoughts started to differ. In the first poem, the poet materializes the woman and her body, and as Louis Detwiler states, poem 1 “could quite possibly describe/imitate an act of rape”. Re-reading the poems with more careful surveillance towards these critics, I could see how this love was possibly unreciprocated. On page 47, it says, “sometimes she loved me too,” hinting towards the relationship not being reciprocated at other times. Unreciprocated love can cause a lot of sorrow, but we can not fully understand whether or not she felt that way without her perspective. I feel as though adding her perspective to the narrative would add more to the overall story. Knowing her thoughts rather than viewing her as a still object left for the man’s pleasure would add more depth to the story these poems persue. Sometimes in DV(domestic violence) relationships, the partner will stay for various reasons. Such as, there is this trauma bond that makes the victim feel attached, or they get love bombed into thinking the abuser cares for them.
My question is, did you notice what the critiques noticed right away? Honestly, I didn’t see it because I was too focused on other themes, such as nature and the art of poetry in general. I know it may be hard to separate the art from the artist, but sometimes I do so that I can enjoy the work without the horrid undertones it may have. Overall, I do not typically read poetry, but it was nice to get out of my typical reading style, which is one of my goals with this course.
It was a very good strategy to read the poems again after watching the videos. That is one of the functions of literary criticism, to invite us to see the texts in a different way than we would normally. Reading Neruda can be challenging for several reasons: the difficulty of his poetry (although he doesn't really like to get too complicated) and his personal stance on women. It's always interesting to hear the opinions of others, so I'm looking forward to tomorrow's class.
ReplyDeleteHi Melika! Interesting blog post! To answer your question at first, I did not notice the critiques. I read a couple poems before watching the lecture and I was focusing on the words, word play and relation to nature and its beautiful details. After watching the lecture I went back to re read the poems and I noticed a shift. Instead of focussing on words I was focussing on the overall meaning or message. This caused me not appreciate the poem and words just for itself. It is hard to separate a writer from their writing, but especially in poetry, where words are used with larger meanings. The lecture helped me understand the context but I missed the beauty of just the words.
ReplyDeleteThe development of Neruda's description of love is one of my favorite overarching themes in this poem as well. Compared to his metaphors to nature, and motifs surrounding solitude and darkness, his feelings of love towards the woman are much more dynamic, and end off with him using the past tense of love towards her. I also didn't notice the implication of rape either, at least not to the extent of rape. It certainly seemed like a one-sided love, but he certainly wouldn't be the first poet to love a woman that didn't love him back, so I didn't really think much of it.
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