When I was reading Pablo Neruda I couldn’t help but feel that he was not a happy man. All three of the poems I read by him tend to have negative and sad feelings. In “Walking Around” he talks about how he is tired of being a man and everything that comes with living. He wants so much to be wild and alive and not be a regular man and maybe he feels he has to do this by being crazy and out of his mind, “It would be beautiful / to go through the streets with a green knife / shouting until I died of cold” (lines 14-16). He further states that he does not want to be a “root in the dark” kind of person, “I do not want to go on being a root in the dark, / hesitating, stretched out, shivering with dreams, / downwards, in the wet tripe of the earth, / soaking it up and thinking, eating everyday”(lines 18-21). These lines show how he doesn’t even want to go on living life regularly, with dreams that wont come to life, and overthinking as regular humans do. He wants to be free and stretched out and not just be a root that stays in one place and is stuck there helplessly till someone rips him out.
I thought his poem “Tonight I Can Write…” was also very interesting. He chooses to write “…the saddest lines”(line 1). He can choose to write about anything he does not need to write about sadness, however he chooses to which I found odd. He mourns a relationship he lost with a woman who simply couldn’t love him as he loved her. He repeats the line, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines”, I think to remind the reader constantly that he is sad and to ensure the reader that this poem is not to be read lightly, that it should give off a sad feeling. When you lose a love it is so hard to explain how you feel to anyone, I think this was his way of trying to explain. He also uses the word “saddest”, not just sad, as though there is absolutely nothing sadder than what he went through when losing his loved one. Perhaps he had to put this all down as a form of therapy to finally let go of this pain. “Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer / and these the last verses that I write for her” (lines 11-12). He notes that this will be the last time he writes of her, almost like he is giving himself this last moment to remember her and that after this, she will be gone to him forever, both physically and mentally. Not in a bad way but in a healthy way, that he needs to move on from her.