Die of love

Today’s selection for National Poetry Month takes us to Chile. Or at least, it takes us to a Chilean poet.

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto is better known to us as Pablo Neruda, a stunning cultural force of the 20^th Century. Taking his pen name from a Czech poet, Neruda served Chile as a politician and diplomat, all the while writing furiously. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and died two years later (very possibly murdered by agents of the Pinochet regime).

He was deeply affected by his time spent in Spain during the 1930s and wrote some very powerful poems about the Spanish Civil War, which are as important to understanding that incomprehensibly vicious time as any historical artifact.

Neruda felt that it was a poet’s job to be involved in everything. As he said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, “A poet is at the same time a force for solidarity and for solitude.”

Well.

I’m sharing one of his sonnets with you.

Sonnet LXVI

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.