Pablo Neruda

Poet Carl Sandburg stated, “Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.” In Pablo Neruda’s poem “If You Forget Me” Neruda reveals the sorrows of losing your country or a person. Neruda does a fantastic job of using details such as crystal moon; red branch. He really paints a picture of the poem in your head. You can just imagine everything he is saying as if it were a painting in your head! Neruda knows how to touch a person’s feelings, similar to what one would feel about a person who had broken up with them but not over. It seems as if it were a warning almost, that is she doesn’t accept Neruda he will be gone, looking for new places to put his roots. Pablo really describes love and emotion well, how he felt for his lover. In the first stanza especially, “Everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail towards those isles of yours that wait for me.” It has a very romantic tone from the language used.

Neruda’s poem “If You Forget Me” comprises of seven stanzas of unequal length. The first stanza initiates eagerness to read the rest of the poem, he leaves you at a cliff hanger; it consists of the stark lines: “I want you to know one thing” This in itself indicates that whatever it is that he wants to be known carries importance, to him or the person reading it. The second stanza explains how he feels about his country, and in the line “You know how this is” he makes it clear that the situation will become understood. Then he explains in the next few lines why: “if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window if I touch near the first the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log. Everything carries me to you. Pablo is explaining that he lives in a place of danger and a place of peace, whenever he is traveling or away, his home land is always on his mind. The theme is expressed in the final lines: “as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little sail boats that said towards those isles of yours that wait for me” Neruda did so much for his country, that’s explaining in the last lines, and how his country will always be there for him.

Neruda uses different kind of languages in this poem, not actual languages, but figurative and imaginative. Neruda paints a picture in your head as you read the poem. How he says crystal moon, meaning light and brightness, or even when he says red branch, red usually means passion or anger and in this poem, it could be taken either way. Love for the other person or hate for the other person because they are forgetting about them. Then in the fifth stanza he uses words that represent nature such as; wind, life, shore, roots, and land. In the sixth stanza Neruda uses words like destined, sweetness, flowed, lips, seek, fire, repeated, extinguished, forgotten, beloved, live, and without all represent the five senses touch, feel, hear, see, and taste.

In the poem “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda he sets the situation as sadness, despair, and especially unrequited love, either from a person or his country. Neruda made this emotion clear with the word choices that he chose. Neruda explains in this poem that if someone or something forgets him he will also forget them due time. Neruda really knows what to say to get a person to understand what he was going through at that time. He knows how to snatch a person’s heart strings. He really gets the sadness and loneliness in the poem by a few key words such as; fire, autumn, ash, wrinkled, repeated, forgotten, and without. Neruda really works on using a lot of adjectives to make his writing more profound and detailed. He really is an amazing poet with the use of all of his words and descriptions.

In conclusion, I chose “If You Forget Me” because I resonated well with this poem. I enjoy this poem very much because of all the descriptions of love and emotion he feels. I personally found it intriguing how the middle of the poem, Neruda contradicts his deep emotional love with the statement “if suddenly you forget me, do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you.” The middle stanzas tell how easily love can be discovered or forgotten and how unattached a person can become if the person they are talking to does as well; but in the end Neruda switches once again to love and says, “But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me…in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine.” The way he ends this poem really moves me, because he’s saying how hard it would be to forget everything they went though and all the strong emotions they spoke of in the beginning of the poem.