Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines By Pablo Neruda

The poem “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” by Pablo Neruda has a timeless quality, it’s message about loving someone who you aren’t with anymore and young loves passion can be enjoyed by everyone at any point in time. The speaker of the poem writes the saddest lines about his love for a girl that he is no longer with but still loves and she herself is in and out of love for him. He reminisces on their time spent together, the night itself reminds him of when they shared loving embraces.

The night seems so vast and empty now that he doesn’t have her anymore “The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance… To hear the immense night, still more immense without her” he feels the separation acutely. He’s mournful about the fact that his great love for her was not enough.

The singing he hears is not enough to calm his hurt soul.

He uses one of the sense when he states that he uses his sight to look for her and to find her. His environment is the same as the one where he used to spend time with her, although it looks the same their love is not the same anymore. He recites how much he loved her/ still loves her, how profound it felt. The hurt he feels that she will move on and someone else will take his place. Forgetting a young love is hard, his soul is unsettled by the fact that it has lost her.

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He ends this passionate anguish stating that these lines are the last he’ll write to his lost love. The theme of the poem is someone losing the person they loved and the tone is anguished, loving and bitter. The poem is written in free verse and it makes use of simple language or concrete language. Which makes it all the more powerful since it’s simple words are able to communicate such hurt and love.

The diction is key in connecting the poem with readers since it’s so easily digestible that many can relate with the emotions the speaker evokes. The author of the poem uses repetition throughout the poem to underline his love for her and to show how hurt and bitter he feels. Neruda uses imagery throughout the poem to highlight how vast the sky seems now that he’s lost her “the night is shattered” he also uses imagery when describing how much the seeming endlessness of the sky “falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.” In the poem there is also a lot of back and forth confusion on who is in or out of love, or who left who. This adds to the feelings of young love and all the trials lovers go through, where one or the other falls in and out of love. Neruda also uses strong metaphors in the poem like “The blue stars shiver in the distance,” which highlights the speakers melancholy and loneliness, even the stars feel the loss of love, the loss of warmth.