Pablo Neruda Poetry Analysis

Pablo Neruda, a well-known romanticist and poet of the 20th century, had produced many works throughout his lifetime. Many of his poems contain metaphors, personification, and other literary devices that express his ideas. Neruda’s poems are often and unsurprisingly described as “playful”, in both form and expression. This is evident though two common themes in his pieces- those regarding women, and those dedicated to everyday objects.

Many of Neruda’s poems, including those in his collection “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”, are expressing a form of love, whether it is budding love or heartbreak. Those that regard a woman he loved often includes comparisons to nature. An example of such a pom would be Every Day You Play, where the line “I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,/ dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses” resides. The narrator of the poem is acting as a suitor to this lady, going as far as to provide her with all these pleasantries, and to [top it all off], a metaphor: “baskets of kisses”. The choice of …show more content…
In the second stanza, he uses lists to express how he could go on and on about such a thing, writing how he “spent [his] childhood counting/ stones and plants, fingers and/ toes, grains of sand, and teeth/ our youth we passed counting/ petal and comet’s tails”. The description of childhood and youth brings in the feeling of playfulness, because children know best about having fun and enjoying themselves, even if it was just about counting. Neruda’s “Ode to the Onion” can also be described as playful when the narrator states “to me onion, you are/ more beautiful than a bird/ of dazzling feathers/ heavenly globe/ platinum goblet”, and the list goes on. Such an outrageous comparison between a simple onion and valuable treasures makes this poem seem