Sarkar1

Name: Agniva Sarkar

Semester: 6

Department: English

C U Roll Number: 212211-21-0071

C U Registration Number: 211-1112-0062-21

College Roll Number: 113

Title: 'Memories and Melancholy' in Pablo Neruda's Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines
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Agniva Sarkar

Professor Dr. Somrita Ganguly

Tutorial CC14

16 May 2024

'Memories and Melancholy' in Pablo Neruda's Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines
In Oxford dictionary, the word 'melancholy' means having or expressing the feeling of
being very sad, especially for a long time and in a way that cannot be explained. And
definition of the word 'memories' is ability to remember. Melancholy and memory often
intertwine in literature, evoking nostalgia, longing, and reflection. Memories, especially
poignant ones, can trigger feelings of melancholy as they remind individuals of past joys or
sorrows. Melancholic states can intensify one's focus on bad and good memories, deepening
their emotional impact. In literature, this interplay is often explored to convey themes of loss,
yearning, and the passage of time. A lot of time, by centuries poets used melancholic
memories in their works to describe the state of the situations the one suffers. Situations like
loss, alienation, displacement, sad past, death, and racial conflicts has been the reason of
melancholic tone. This melancholia makes memories gloomy and reminder of the sadness
over and over again. In poetry melancholy always been carried for expressing feelings of
sadness, solitary.
Arnold in Dover Beach refers to this state of melancholy when he talks about the
'eternal note of sadness' which was heard by 'Sophocles long ago'.
Pablo Neruda has written his poems on diverse range of topics that differ with the
situations and the mental conflicts he faced. He developed four kinds of writings that reflect
four aspects of his personality. His love poetry, which is emotional, passionate, sensuous and
tender; his poetry which shows his gloominess and frustration he faced during his consulship
in Asia; his epic poems which are witness of his concern towards the freedom and political
cause of Latin America; and finally his day-to-day poetry which portrays his concern for the
everyday problems common man. This study focuses only on those issues, such as poet’s
sense of alienation and loss, his displacement, obsession with death and the period of exile
that became the major reasons of his melancholia.
Neruda married thrice. His marriage life had not been successful. He left his first wife
Maruca and fell in love with Delia del Carril. Delia became her second wife but their
relationship soon ended in divorce. The poet felt isolated after losing his second wife. The
poem “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” shows a love story that starts from the initial
infatuation and ends in a separation. This poem expresses the pain the poet feels after losing
his beloved. The poet says:
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I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

“Tonight I Can Write” is a poem about memories of a lost love and the pain they can
cause. Throughout the poem the speaker recalls the details of a relationship that is now
broken. He continually juxtaposes images of the passion he felt for the woman he loved with
the loneliness he experiences in the present. He is now at some distance from the relationship
and so acknowledges, “tonight I can write the saddest lines,” suggesting that the pain he
suffered after losing his lover had previously prevented any reminiscences or descriptions of
it. While the pain he experienced had blocked his creative energies in the past, he is now able
to write about their relationship and find some comfort in “the verse that falls to the soul like
dew to the pasture.” Neruda is experiencing the same immense night, but in the poem we can
see how he is recalling his beloved’s and his beloved’s who is not his anymore, poet is
experiencing melancholia with memories about the night he’s experiencing in the poem.
Neruda says “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. / Tonight I can write the saddest lines. / I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. /
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. / I kissed her again and again under the
endless sky. / She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.”
Neruda employs nature imagery to suggest the speaker’s conception of the spiritual
nature of his relationship with his lover. When he describes them kissing “again and again
under the endless sky,” he describes his physical relationship with her in cosmic terms. He
also uses this type of imagery to describe his lover, creating a connection between her and
nature. “Traditionally,” states René de Costa in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, “love poetry has
equated woman with nature. Neruda took this established mode of comparison and raised it to
a cosmic level, making woman into a veritable force of the universe.” The speaker compares
his lover’s “great still” and “infinite eyes” to the “endless sky.” He also uses nature to
communicate his love for her. His voice tries “to find the wind to touch her hearing.”
Throughout the poem, the speaker expresses his great love for a woman with whom
he had a passionate romance. He remembers physical details: “her great still eyes,” “her
voice, her bright body,” “her infinite eyes.” He also remembers kissing her “again and again
under the endless sky” admitting “how I loved her.” His love for her is still evident even
though he states twice “I no longer love her, that’s certain.” The remembrance of their love is
still too painful to allow him to admit the depth of his love for her, especially when he thinks,
“Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses,” imagining her “bright
body” under someone else’s caress. The speaker juxtaposes memories of his passionate
relationship with his lover with his present state of alienation and loneliness without her. The
speaker employs the imagery of nature to reflect his internal state. He writes his “saddest
lines” on a night that is similar to the nights he spent with his lover. Yet the darkness and the
stars that “shiver at a distance” in this night suggest his loneliness. The “immense night”
becomes “still more immense without her,” especially when he notes, “to think that I do not
have her. To feel that I have lost her.” He compounds his suffering when he remembers
“nights like this one” when he held her in his arms. The speaker expresses his loneliness
when he notes that he hears someone in the distance singing and repeats, “in the distance.”
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No one now sings for him. He admits, “my sight tries to find her as though to bring her
closer,” and “my heart looks for her, and she is not with me.” As a result, his “soul is not
satisfied. In an effort to assuage the loneliness he feels, he tries to convince himself, “I no
longer love her, that’s certain,” but then later acknowledges, “maybe I love her.” With a
world-weary tone of resignation Poet also says in the poem “love is so short, forgetting is so
long”, poet experiences all the memories to be painful and seem endless, although in contrast
loving was very short for the poet comparing to forgetting the love he had. At last two lines
poet says, ”Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer / and these the last verses
that I write for her” referring to the whole poem as the last time their memories will hurt him
and the last time he will think of his beloved. All the memories becomes melancholic in poets
eyes after realising that his loss of his lover haunting him in the present and haunting him for
future as the loss will never be filled.
We as human, has always romanticised melancholia. Melancholy and death can serve
as powerful symbols in literature. They can represent themes such as the passage of time, the
inevitability of change, the struggle between life and death, and the complexities of human
emotions. By using these themes symbolically, writers can evoke deep emotional responses
from readers. Here death is the loss of poet’s beloved, he’s mourning for the absence of his
beloved who had been with him for some time and by poet’s poem we can understand the
love for his beloved which has been suffering for him, but at the same time poet
romanticising the sufferings and how the memories haunting him in the present.
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Works Cited

Neruda, Pablo. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. 1924.

Pablo Neruda's Tonight I Can Write Summary, Analysis & Themes.

https://study.com/learn/lesson/tonight-i-can-write-pablo-neruda-summary-themes-

analysis.html