Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto

Chilean Poet and Diplomat, Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature

"I love you, love you to begin, to start infinity again and never to stop loving you: why do not love you yet."

"I love your feet because they have wandered over the earth and through the wind and water until they brought you to me."

"I love you somehow inexplicable, ineffable fact, in a way contradictory. Love you with numerous attitudes of mind which change state continuously. Due... but you already know - time, life and death... I love you in a world which is incomprehensible to me, among people who misunderstood, with the contradictions of the soul, with its illogical ways, with fatality fate with stealth of desire, with the ambiguity of the act."

"I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me."

"I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life."

"I need the sea because it teaches me."

"I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her. My voice searched the wind to touch her ??hearing. Alternatively. She will be another. As before my kisses. Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes. longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her. Love is so short, and forgetting is so long. 'Cause on nights like this I held my arms, my soul is lost without her . Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her."

"I need the sea because it teaches me, I don?t know if I learn music or awareness, if it?s a single wave or its vast existence, or only its harsh voice or its shining suggestion of fishes and ships. The fact is that until I fall asleep, in some magnetic way I move in the university of the waves. It?s not simply the shells crunched as if some shivering planet were giving signs of its gradual death; no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment, the stalactite from a sliver of salt, and the great god out of a spoonful. What it taught me before, I keep. It?s air ceaseless wind, water and sand. It seems a small thing for a young man, to have come here to live with his own fire; nevertheless, the pulse that rose and fell in its abyss, the cracking of the blue cold, the gradual wearing away of the star, the soft unfolding of the wave squandering snow with its foam, the quiet power out there, sure as a stone shrine in the depths, replaced my world in which were growing stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion, and my life changed suddenly: as I became part of its pure movement."

"I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long."

"I preach a relentless love. And I do not mind dog or person: only the people is considerably me: only country to me condition. Pueblo and Homeland manage my care: Homeland and people spend my duties and if they kill him lifted around town, it is my country that dies Is that my fear and agony. 's why in combat not expect to stay voiceless my poetry."

"I say love, and the world populates itself with doves."

"I shivered in those solitudes when I heard the voice of the salt in the desert."

"I remembered you with my soul clenched."

"I see the world entirely pink and blue."

"I should like to sleep like a cat, with all the fur of time, with a tongue rough as flint, with the dry sex of fire; and after speaking to no one, stretch myself over the world, over roofs and landscapes, with a passionate desire to hunt the rats in my dreams."

"I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word."

"I stood on the balcony dark with mourning... hoping the earth would spread its wings in my uninhabited love."

"I stopped being a kid because I knew that my people were not allowed his life and denied burial."

"I slept with you and wake up your mouth from your dream gave me the taste of earth, water."

"I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything, I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops, and courtyards with washing hanging from the line: underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling."

"I think it was very informative, but a lot still needs to be done."

"I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star, and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked, the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind."

"I thought the route passed by man, and that there had to leave the destination."

"I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes."

"I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy."

"I will bring you flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."

"I want you to know one thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land. But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me, ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated, in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine"

"I want to live in a world in which human beings are only inadvertently in the head with a ruler, a Speech Word with a label... I want the most, the most unique, everyone can speak, read , listen and flourish. Never understood the struggle but to think this over."

"I want to see thirst in the syllables, tough fire in the sound; feel through the dark for the scream."

"If suddenly you do not exist, if suddenly you no longer live, I shall live on. I do not dare, I do not dare to write it, if you die. I shall live on. For where a man has no voice, there, my voice. Where blacks are beaten, I cannot be dead. When my brothers go to prison I shall go with them. When victory, not my victory, but the great victory comes, even though I am mute I must speak; I shall see it come even though I am blind. No, forgive me. If you no longer live, if you, beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain on my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but I shall stay alive, because above all things you wanted me indomitable, and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man but all mankind."

"If you ask me where I have been I must say "It so happens." I must speak of the ground darkened by stones, of the river that enduring is destroyed: I know only the things that the birds lose, the sea left behind, or my sister weeping. Why so many regions, why does a day join a day? Why does a black night gather in the mouth? Why dead people?"

"If I died and I have not noticed, whom I ask now?"

"If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, I shall already have forgotten."

"If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life."

"If you forget me I want you to know one thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land. But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me, ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated, in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine."

"If you should ask me where I've been all this time I have to say "Things happen." I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth, on the river ruined in its own duration: I know nothing save things the birds have lost, the sea I left behind, or my sister crying. Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock with day? Why the dark night swilling round in our mouths? And why the dead?"

"If you no longer live, if you my beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain in my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but I shall live."

"If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land."

"I'll send you a kiss in the wind and I know you feel, you turn around without seeing me but I'll be there."

"In a kiss, you know all that I kept silence."

"I'm a poet with no provision but I say, without pity and without regret: murderer no good in my opinion."

"In love, you have loosened yourself like seawater."

"In that territory, from pies to your front, walking, walking, walking, I pass her life."

"In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded."

"In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?"

"In the distance someone is singing."

"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 in blood."

"In you the earth? Little rose, roselet, at times, tiny and naked, it seems as though you would fit in one of my hands, as though I?ll clasp you like this and carry you to my mouth, but suddenly my feet touch your feet and my mouth your lips: you have grown, your shoulders rise like two hills, your breasts and over my breast, my arm scarcely manages to encircle the thin new-moon line of your waist: in love you loosened yourself like sea water: I can scarcely measure the sky?s most spacious eyes and I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth."

"In you is the illusion of each day. You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers. You undermine the horizon with your absence. Eternally in flight like the wave."

"Is four the same four for everybody? Are all sevens equal? When the convict ponders the light is it the same light that shines on you?"