Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Neruda, Pablo
Dusty glances fallen to earth
or silent leaves which bury themselves.
Lightless metal in the void
and the suddenly dead day’s departure.
On high hands the butterfly shines
its flight’s light has no end.
You kept the light’s wake of broken things
which the abandoned sun in the afternoon throws at the
church steps.
Here, one can see Neruda’s gift for surreal imagery
without the programmatic irrationality and dislocation
of the Surrealists.
In Residence on Earth, too, there are magnificent
catalogs in the manner of Walt Whitman: “the angel of
sleep—the wind moving the wheat, the whistle of a
train, a warm place in a bed, the opaque sound of a
shadow which falls like a ray of light into infinity, a repetition
of distances, a wine of uncertain vintage, the
dusty passage of lowing cows.”
Like Whitman, Neruda in Residence on Earth opens
Spanish poetry to the song of himself: “my symmetrical
statue of twinned legs, rises to the stars each morning/
my exile’s mouth bites meat and grapes/ my male arms
and tattooed chest/ in which the hair penetrates like
wire, my white face made for the sun’s depth.” He presents
uncompromising statements of human sensuality;
he descends into himself, discovers his authenticity, and
begins to build a poetic vision that, although impure, is
genuinely human. He manages in these sometimes brutal
poems to reconcile the forces of destruction and creation
that he had witnessed in India in the material world
of buildings, work, people, food, weather, himself, and
time.
Although Neruda never achieved a systematic and
internally consistent poetic vision, the balance between
resignation and celebration that informs Residence on
Earth suggests a philosophical acceptance of the world.
“Tres cantos materiales” (“Three Material Songs”),
“Entrada a la madera” (“Entrance to Wood”), “Apoges
del apio” (“Apogee of Celery”), and “Estatuto del vino”
(“Ordinance of Wine”) were a breakthrough in this respect.
In “Entrance to Wood,” the poet gives voice to
wood, which, though living, is material rather than spiritual.
Neruda’s discovery of matter is a revelation. He introduces
himself into this living, material world as one
commencing a funereal journey, carrying his sorrows
with him in order to give this world the voice it lacks.
His identification with matter alters his language so that
the substantives become verbs: “Let us make fire, silence,
and noise,/ let us burn, hush and bells.”
In “Apogee of Celery,” the poet personifies a humble
vegetable, as he does later in The Elemental Odes.
Neruda simply looks closely and with his imagination
and humor reveals a personality—how the growth of
celery reflects the flight of doves and the brilliance of
lightning. In Spanish folklore, celery has humorous
though obscene connotations which Neruda unflinchingly
incorporates into his poem. The resultant images
are bizarre yet perfectly descriptive. Celery tastes like
lightning bugs. It knows wonderful secrets of the sea,
whence it originates, but perversely insists on being
eaten before revealing them.
Popular wisdom also finds its way into the poem
“Ordinance of Wine.” Neruda’s discovery of the wonders
of matter and of everyday experience led him to
describe the Bacchanalian rites of drunkenness as laws,
the inevitable steps of intoxication. In the classical tradition,
Neruda compares wine to a pagan god: It opens
the door on the melancholy gatherings of the dishonored
and disheartened and drops its honey on the tables
at the day’s edge; in winter, it seeks refuge in bars;
it transforms the world of the discouraged and overpowers
them so that they sing, spend money freely, and
accept the coarseness of one another’s company joyfully.
The celebrants’ laughter turns to weeping over
personal tragedies and past happiness, and their tears
turn to anger when something falls, breaks, and abruptly
ends the magic. Wine the angel turns into a winged
Harpy taking flight, spilling the wine, which seeps
through the ground in search of the mouths of the dead.
Wine’s statutes have thus been obeyed, and the visiting
god departs.
In “Ordinance of Wine,” “Apogee of Celery,” and
“Entrance to Wood,” Neruda reestablished communion
between man and the material world in which he lives
and works. Since work was the destiny of most of his
readers, Neruda directed much of his poetry to this reconciliation
between the elemental and the social, seeking
to reintroduce wonder into the world of the alienated
worker.
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