Tonight I can write by Pablo Neruda

I Read this poetry at my Graduation




Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. 
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her. 

Pablo Neruda was one of the most popular and prolific poets during the twentieth century. In 'Tonight I Can Write,' Neruda focuses on a lost love. The speaker longs for a love once had and idealizes the passion that was felt. Translated by American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin, this poem exudes youthful depressed and has a rhythmic flow due to the use of repetition. Identify the phrases that are repeated in this poem and notice how more meaning is added to those words as they are used in different ways.
When the poet writes, I no longer love her, that's certain, he just means the opposite. It means that his love has been rejected/ that he is separated for ever from her. And he wants to forget her. He wants to stop loving her. But his mind plays truant, He cannot! 

This state is re-emphasized by the next line. But maybe I love her. 

Yes, Love is so short, forgetting is so long. Only those who were in love and then lost it, can understand the pain. 
The PAIN is so long! 

The reader is able to fully understand the depth of what the speaker is feeling when that line is read multiple times and expanded upon with the lines that come after it. We know the speaker is sad because he is no longer with this woman and the night reminds him of her, which brings up bittersweet memories that he struggles to let go of. The word 'night' is also repeated throughout the poem. In the second stanza the night is described by saying, 'The night is shattered and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.' This descriptive phrase creates imagery, which is when words are used to create visual images in the reader's mind. Neruda creates an image of the night sky in the reader's mind by using the color blue and describes them as far away.
In the fifth stanza, we understand why the speaker keeps talking about the night: 'Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.' Now we understand why his description of this particular night is so important, and the feelings of romantic nostalgia and loss are conveyed.
The poem is set against the night which is, by its very nature, an expanse of darkness, sadness, insecurity, the invisible and the incomprehensible. The absence of light itself generates negative emotions.  In the poem, this phenomenon of the cycle of cosmic movement heightens the   effect of the poet’s love being followed by the end of that experience of love.  Whatever bright stars there are,  they  are  very distant, just  like the poet’s  feelings of  love which are now a thing of  the past far removed from his memory and  consciousness.  They reappear as remotely as the blue stars that shiver in the distance.
The full moon shines with the same brightness, whitening the same trees but the lovers are no longer the same.  The human, the historical has changed even though the natural processes continue at their own pace which is ruled by the laws of the universe.






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