The poem discusses themes of love, loss, and solitude as the speaker expresses his loneliness over losing his love. He remembers holding her during nights like the present one but now feels lost without her. Though he no longer loves her, he may still love her, and the grief caused by losing her will soon fade, challenging conventions of romantic love poetry.
The poem discusses themes of love, loss, and solitude as the speaker expresses his loneliness over losing his love. He remembers holding her during nights like the present one but now feels lost without her. Though he no longer loves her, he may still love her, and the grief caused by losing her will soon fade, challenging conventions of romantic love poetry.
The poem discusses themes of love, loss, and solitude as the speaker expresses his loneliness over losing his love. He remembers holding her during nights like the present one but now feels lost without her. Though he no longer loves her, he may still love her, and the grief caused by losing her will soon fade, challenging conventions of romantic love poetry.
The poem discusses themes of love, loss, and solitude as the speaker expresses his loneliness over losing his love. He remembers holding her during nights like the present one but now feels lost without her. Though he no longer loves her, he may still love her, and the grief caused by losing her will soon fade, challenging conventions of romantic love poetry.
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To Night I Can Write: Theme/Critical Appreciation
Throughout ‘Tonight I Can Write’ Neruda engages with themes of love, love lost, 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 her. But, readers should not, it is only because of this sad state of mind that he’s able to write this poem. He remembers “nights like this” when he held her and now he’s “lost without her”.
The lady whom he has loved is going to be another’s and the poet thinks that he can voice his loss in the most poignant terms. He can express it in the conventional way, that the night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance. The wind revolves in the sky and sings. He remembers that he loved his lady. Perhaps she also loved him, but he is not sure. He held her with his arms, through night like the present one and kissed her under the endless sky. She certainly loved him, maybe he also loved her, for no one could have missed her great still eyes. Perhaps he can write the saddest lines when he thinks that he does not have her and feels that he has lost her forever, and the night is more fierce without her. His verse may fall to the soul like dew drops to the green pasture.
It is no use thinking that his love could not keep her. The night is shattered and she is no longer with him. Someone is singing in the distance, and his soul is not at all happy that it has lost her. His sight searches for her, and his heart looks for her. The same moonlit nights whiten the same trees. But they are no longer the same.
It is certain that he no longer loves her, but he loved her once very much. His voice could not reach her. She is going to be another’s, her voice, bright body and infinite eyes – all will be another’s. It is true that he no longer loves her, but he may love her. His love was so short but forgetting may take longer time. This may be the last pain she makes him suffer, and this the last verse he writes for her.
Though there is much in the poem that is in line with the conventional romantic lyrics, Neruda’s love poem strikes a new note in that it is not addressed to the loved one and that it probes the complexity of love. The poem also challenges the convention of traditional love poetry and the very conception of romantic love. Mutability is presented as a reality in love relationship and it is suggested that the grief caused will soon be forgotten and will lead to a revival of love.
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”, they emphasize the pent-up passion that inspires his poetry. The significance of the love affair lies in the fact that he has lost her, for he admits that while: She loved me/sometimes I loved her too.
