Search results
Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.' The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Learn about the themes, symbols, and poetic devices of Pablo Neruda's famous love poem. Explore the line-by-line explanation, context, and resources of "Tonight I can write the saddest lines".
- Summary
- Themes
- Structure
- Literary Devices
- Analysis of Tonight I Can Write
- Historical Context
- Similar Poetry
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
‘Tonight I Can Write’ by Pablo Nerudais an emotional poem in which Neruda’s speaker depicts his love, his loneliness, and his hopes. Within the lines of ‘Tonight I Can Write’ the speaker describes how easy it is for him to write the “saddest poem of all”. He’s in a state of mind that allows him to write moving lines, of which he gives several examp...
Throughout ‘Tonight I Can Write,’ Neruda engages with themes of love, love loss, and solitude. He expresses his loneliness through poetic language and poignant images. Neruda’s speaker also discusses change, the transformation of his relationship with “her” and how he feels now. It seems to him that she will “be someone else’s” and that he has lost...
The poems that brought Pablo Neruda into the limelight are essentially love poems where he makes use of vivid nature imagery and symbolism to express himself. In the poem, Tonight I Can Write, the poet is extensively lyrical, and the very verbs he uses in the lines like “The night is shattered/and the blue stars shiver in the distance”, emphasize t...
Neruda makes use of several literary devices in ‘Tonight I Can Write’. These include but are not limited to imagery, alliteration, and juxtaposition. The poem consists of night imagery, and the alliteration of the consonant sound “s” all through the lines reflects the quiet night. The night could be both treacherous and beautiful, and this could al...
Lines 1-7
It does not seem as though he realizes what it is to love until he starts writing about her. In fact, it is the idea of love that he loves more than the woman, and thus he can write “the saddest lines”. Such sentiments immediately charmed the young people who were themselves experiencing similar emotions, and they were able to identify with Neruda and appropriate his words in their own love affairs. This is what makes Neruda so much a poet of the common people. As the poor fisherman’s son who...
Lines 8-13
Neruda’s poems are full of easily understood images which makes them no less beautiful. To hear him talk about “verse (that) falls to the soul like dew to the pasture” makes the whole process of writing poetry so comprehensive. Similarly, the deliberate repetition of certain words and images such as: “My sight searches for her…/My heart looks for her“. Emphasizes the over-wrought condition of the crazed lover. The poet is a jealous lover who imagines that “She will be another’s”. However, the...
Lines 14-22
There is a growing feeling of solitariness in the poet that, although nature and the environment have remained unchanged over the years, he has lost the woman he once loved. The expression is intensely lyrical and full of agony when he says:… The night is shattered/and the blue stars shiver in the distance. The poignancy of the situation is further heightened when he realizes: “I loved her,/and sometimes she loved me too. And equally, she loved me,/sometimes I loved her too./How could one not...
Chile has an interesting political background owing to its Spanish Heritage and the way the country has been governed up until the late 19th century; the country was primarily run by a group of wealthy landowners, but this prompted much unrest and eventually civil war. Eventually, a conservative regime was established, but later this was superseded...
This is far from the only love poem that Pablo Neruda wrote. Others that directly relate to the moving imagery in ‘Tonight I Can Write’ include ‘If You Forget Me,’ ‘Sonnet XI,’ and ‘Done Go Far Off‘. Readers might also be drawn to the moving words to be found in Thomas Hardy‘s ‘Rain on a Grave,’ written after the death of his wife, Emma. Or, ‘Sonne...
A poem about the loss of love and the power of poetry, written by the Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. The speaker, who is likely the poet himself, expresses his loneliness, sadness, and hope through vivid imagery and symbolism.
The repetition of, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” brings the reader’s attention to that theme throughout this sad love poem. Pablo Neruda used alliteration throughout this poem with many words beginning with “s” (saddest, shattered, stars, sky, soul, etc.).
- (1.3K)
Tonight I can write the saddest lines. / Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’. / The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
A famous poem by Pablo Neruda expressing his love and loss for a woman. He writes the saddest lines under the starry night and remembers their kisses and eyes.
A famous poem by Pablo Neruda expressing his love and loss for a woman. Read the original Spanish and English versions, translated by W.S. Merwin, and leave a comment.
