Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile under the name Ricardo Eliecer Netali Reyes Basoalto and took his pseudonym to hide his career as a poet from his disapproving relatives. He was born without wealth and sold off all this belongings to publish his first book ’Twilight’, later receiving political appointment as a result of his celebrity. He served as ambassador to Burma, and later Buenos Aires, Argentina. Here he befriended Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet from Spain, and later Neruda was transferred to Spain, making even more close friends with his fellow poets. Sadly, his time there was scarred by the Spanish Civil War, featuring Federico Garcia Lorca’s execution. This was an incredibly disheartening blow to Neruda. Neruda recorded the events of the civil war, and used it as inspiration for his poetry. He was recalled as a direct result of his political activism in Spain. Neruda went to Paris to resettle Spanish refugees fleeing the war, helping the families get their paperwork to relocate to Chile. He began in earnest to publish his more political work and commit himself to political causes. He was a consul to Mexico, and when he finished his term he was elected to the Senate as a member of the Communist party, which would later result in an arrest warrant due to the declaration of communism as illegal in Chile. After several years in hiding, the arrest of Communist writers was pulled back and canceled, allowing him to return to the public sphere. He became a consul to France until his cancer diagnosis which prompted his return to Chile, where he died in 1973 with his third wife.

Pablo Neruda was married three times with two divorces, and received several awards for his poetry and political work, including: the Nobel Prize for Literature, the International Peace Prize, the Stalin Peace Prize, and the Lenin Peace Prize. His death has been investigated as possibly worsened by foul play, and multiple separate investigations have looked into this, and continue to look into it. When he was buried in his final resting place, crowds defied government orders to come and celebrate his life. Among Latin American poets, he is one of the most widely known and well respected, both for his politics and for his undeniable skill in crafting moving poetry.

Let’s dive into 15 examples of his beautiful poetry.

(1) It’s Good To Feel You Are Close to Me:

“It’s good to feel you are close to me in the night, love,

invisible in your sleep, intently nocturnal,

while I untangle my worries

as if they were twisted nets.

Withdrawn, your heart sails through dream,

but your body, relinquished so, breathes

seeking me without seeing me perfecting my dream

like a plant that seeds itself in the dark.

Rising, you will be that other, alive in the dawn,

but from the frontiers lost in the night,

from the presence and the absence where we meet ourselves,

something remains, drawing us into the light of life

as if the sign of the shadows had sealed

its secret creatures with flame.”

(2) Luminous Mind, Bright Devil:

“Luminous mind, bright devil

of absolute clusterings, of upright noon---:

here we are at last, alone, without loneliness,

far from the savage city's delirium.

Just as a pure line describes the dove's curve,

as the fire honors and nourishes peace,

so you and I made this heavenly outcome.

The mind and love live naked in this house.

Furious dreams, rivers of bitter certainty,

decisions harder than the dreams of a hammer

flowed into the lovers' double cup,

until those twins were lifted into balance

on the scale: the mind and love, like two wings.

---So this transparency was built.”

(3) Love, We’re Going Home Now:

"Love, we're going home now,

Where the vines clamber over the trellis:

Even before you, the summer will arrive,

On its honeysuckle feet, in your bedroom.

Our nomadic kisses wandered over all the world:

Armenia, dollop of disinterred honey:

Ceylon, green dove: and the YangTse with its old

Old patience, dividing the day from the night.

And now, dearest, we return, across the crackling sea

Like two blind birds to their wall,

To their nest in a distant spring:

Because love cannot always fly without resting,

Our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea:

Our kisses head back home where they belong."

(4) Ode to Salt:

"This salt

in the salt cellar

I once saw in the salt mines.

I know

you won't

believe me

but

it sings

salt sings, the skin

of the salt mines

sings

with a mouth smothered

by the earth.

I shivered in those

solitudes

when I heard

the voice

of

the salt

in the desert.

Near Antofagasta

the nitrous

pampa

resounds:

a

broken

v oice,

a mournful

song.

In its caves

the salt moans, mountain

of buried light,

translucent cathedral,

crystal of the sea, oblivion

of the waves.

And then on every table

in the world,

salt,

we see your piquant

powder

sprinkling

vital light

upon

our food.

Preserver

of the ancient

holds of ships,

discoverer

on

the high seas,

earliest

sailor

of the unknown, shifting

byways of the foam.

Dust of the sea, in you

the tongue receives a kiss

from ocean night:

taste imparts to every seasoned

dish your ocean essence;

the smallest,

miniature

wave from the saltcellar

reveals to us

more than domestic whiteness;

in it, we taste infinitude. "

(5) Poet's Obligation:

"To whoever is not listening to the sea

this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up

in house or office, factory or woman

or street or mine or dry prison cell,

to him I come, and without speaking or looking

I arrive and open the door of his prison,

and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,

a long rumble of thunder adds itself

to the weight of the planet and the foam,

the groaning rivers of the ocean rise,

the star vibrates quickly in its corona

and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating.

So. Drawn on by my destiny,

I ceaselessly must listen to and keep

the sea's lamenting in my consciousness,

I must feel the crash of the hard water

and gather it up in a perpetual cup

so that, wherever those in prison may be,

wherever they suffer the sentence of the autumn,

I may be present with an errant wave,

I may move in and out of the windows,

and hearing me, eyes may lift themselves,

asking "How can I reach the sea?"

And I will pass to them, saying nothing,

the starry echoes of the wave,

a breaking up of foam and quicksand,

a rustling of salt withdrawing itself,

the gray cry of sea birds on the coast.

So, though me, freedom and the sea

will call in answer to the shrouded heart."

(6) Potter:

"Your whole body has

a fullness or a gentleness destined for me.

When I move my hand up

I find in each place a dove

that was seeking me, as

if they had, love, made you of clay

for my own potter's hands.

Your knees, your breasts,

your waist

are missing parts of me like the hollow

of a thirsty earth

from which they broke off

a form,

and together

we are complete like a single river,

like a single grain of sand."

(7) Some Beasts:

" It was the twilight of the iguana:

From a rainbowing battlement,

a tongue like a javelin

lunging in verdure;

an ant heap treading the jungle,

monastic, on musical feet;

the guanaco, oxygen-fine

in the high places swarthed with distances,

cobbling his feet into gold;

the llama of scrupulous eye

the widens his gaze on the dews

of a delicate world.

A monkey is weaving

a thread of insatiable lusts

on the margins of morning:

he topples a pollen-fall,

startles the violet-flght

of the butterfly, wings on the Muzo.

It was the night of the alligator:

snouts moving out of the slime,

in original darkness, the pullulations,

a clatter of armour, opaque

in the sleep of the bog,

turning back to the chalk of the sources.

The jaguar touches the leaves

with his phosphorous absence,

the puma speeds to his covert

in the blaze of his hungers,

his eyeballs, a jungle of alcohol,

burn in his head."

(8) The Dead Woman:

" If suddenly you do not exist,

if suddenly you no longer live,

I shall live on.

I do not dare,

I do not dare to write it,

if you die.

I shall live on.

For where a man has no voice,

there, my voice.

Where blacks are beaten,

I cannot be dead.

When my brothers go to prison

I shall go with them.

When victory,

not my victory,

but the great victory comes,

even though I am mute I must speak;

I shall see it come even

though I am blind.

No, forgive me.

If you no longer live,

if you, beloved, my love,

if you have died,

all the leaves will fall in my breast,

it will rain on my soul night and day,

the snow will burn my heart,

I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,

my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but

I shall stay alive,

because above all things

you wanted me indomitable,

and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man

but all mankind."

(9) The Dictators:

"An odor has remained among the sugarcane:

a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating

petal that brings nausea.

Between the coconut palms the graves are full

of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.

The delicate dictator is talking

with top hats, gold braid, and collars.

The tiny palace gleams like a watch

and the rapid laughs with gloves on

cross the corridors at times

and join the dead voices

and the blue mouths freshly buried.

The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant

whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,

whose large blind leaves grow even without light.

Hatred has grown scale on scale,

blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,

with a snout full of ooze and silence."

(10) The Light Wraps Around You:

" The light wraps you in its mortal flame.

Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way

against the old propellers of the twighlight

that revolves around you.

Speechless, my friend,

alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead

and filled with the lives of fire,

pure heir of the ruined day.

A bough of fruit falls from the sun on your dark garment.

The great roots of night

grow suddenly from your soul,

and the things that hide in you come out again

so that a blue and palled people

your newly born, takes nourishment.

Oh magnificent and fecund and magnetic slave

of the circle that moves in turn through black and gold:

rise, lead and possess a creation

so rich in life that its flowers perish

and it is full of sadness."

(11) Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines"

" 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 soul 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."

(12) The United Fruit Co. :

"When the trumpet sounded, it was

all prepared on the earth,

the Jehovah parcelled out the earth

to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda,

Ford Motors, and other entities:

The Fruit Company, Inc.

reserved for itself the most succulent,

the central coast of my own land,

the delicate waist of America.

It rechristened its territories

as the ’Banana Republics’

and over the sleeping dead,

over the restless heroes

who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags,

it established the comic opera:

abolished the independencies,

presented crowns of Caesar,

unsheathed envy, attracted

the dictatorship of the flies,

Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,

Carias flies, Martines flies,

Ubico flies, damp flies

of modest blood and marmalade,

drunken flies who zoom

over the ordinary graves,

circus flies, wise flies

well trained in tyranny.

Among the blood-thirsty flies

the Fruit Company lands its ships,

taking off the coffee and the fruit;

the treasure of our submerged

territories flow as though

on plates into the ships.

Meanwhile Indians are falling

into the sugared chasms

of the harbours, wrapped

for burials in the mist of the dawn:

a body rolls, a thing

that has no name, a fallen cipher,

a cluster of the dead fruit

thrown down on the dump."

(13) Ode to Wine:

"Day-colored wine,

night-colored wine,

wine with purple feet

or wine with topaz blood,

wine,

starry child

of earth,

wine, smooth

as a golden sword,

soft

as lascivious velvet,

wine, spiral-seashelled

and full of wonder,

amorous,

marine;

never has one goblet contained you,

one song, one man,

you are choral, gregarious,

at the least, you must be shared.

At times

you feed on mortal

memories;

your wave carries us

from tomb to tomb,

stonecutter of icy sepulchers,

and we weep

transitory tears;

your

glorious

spring dress

is different,

blood rises through the shoots,

wind incites the day,

nothing is left

of your immutable soul.

Wine

stirs the spring, happiness

bursts through the earth like a plant,

walls crumble,

and rocky cliffs,

chasms close,

as song is born.

A jug of wine, and thou beside me

in the wilderness,

sang the ancient poet.

Let the wine pitcher

add to the kiss of love its own.

My darling, suddenly

the line of your hip

becomes the brimming curve

of the wine goblet,

your breast is the grape cluster,

your nipples are the grapes,

the gleam of spirits lights your hair,

and your navel is a chaste seal

stamped on the vessel of your belly,

your love an inexhaustible

cascade of wine,

light that illuminates my senses,

the earthly splendor of life.

But you are more than love,

the fiery kiss,

the heat of fire,

more than the wine of life;

you are

the community of man,

translucency,

chorus of discipline,

abundance of flowers.

I like on the table,

when we're speaking,

the light of a bottle

of intelligent wine.

Drink it,

and remember in every

drop of gold,

in every topaz glass,

in every purple ladle,

that autumn labored

to fill the vessel with wine;

and in the ritual of his office,

let the simple man remember

to think of the soil and of his duty,

to propagate the canticle of the wine."

(14) La Reina (Spanish and English):

" Yo te he nombrado reina.

Hay más altas que tú, más altas.

Hay más puras que tú, más puras.

Hay más bellas que tú, hay más bellas.

Pero tú eres la reina.

Cuando vas por las calles

nadie te reconoce.

Nadie ve tu corona de cristal, nadie mira

la alfombra de oro rojo

que pisas donde pasas,

la alfombra que no existe.

Y cuando asomas

suenan todos los ríos

en mi cuerpo, sacuden

el cielo las campanas,

y un himno llena el mundo.

Sólo tú y yo,

sólo tú y yo, amor mío,

lo escuchamos.

I have named you queen.

There are taller than you, taller.

There are purer than you, purer.

There are lovelier than you, lovelier.

But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets

No one recognizes you.

No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks

At the carpet of red gold

That you tread as you pass,

The nonexistent carpet.

And when you appear

All the rivers sound

In my body, bells

Shake the sky,

And a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,

Only you and I, my love,

Listen to me."

(15) Don't Go Far Off:

"Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --

because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long

and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station

when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because

then the little drops of anguish will all run together,

the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift

into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;

may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.

Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far

I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,

Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?"

These provocative works of Pablo Neruda in no way belong to the author of this article, and the display of them here is to raise awareness of a large selection of his works and do him the proper credit. I admit I debated if I should include analysis of the poetry selection, and as is obvious, I did not. I have in my personal experience found myself disagreeing with formal poetry analysis, so I invite you to consider these works and post your individual ideas as comments below, or engage friends in a conversation. The best and most beautiful aspect of poetry are the hidden depths not even the author may have seen. In this way, you make it your own, and learn about your own consciousness. Please look to poetry, when all else fails.