Pablo Neruda Poems:
Ode to My Salt - This salt in the saltcellar I once saw XVII - I do not love you as if you were salt-rose. LXVI - I do not love you - except because I love you LXXIII - Maybe you'll remember that razor-faced man
who slipped out XX - Tonight I can write the saddest lines
Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd's hands.
Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.
I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin.
My feet were
two woolen
fish
in those outrageous socks,
two gangly,
navy-blue sharks
impaled
on a golden thread,
two giant blackbirds,
two cannons:
thus
were my feet
honored
by
those
heavenly
socks.
They were
so beautiful
I found my feet
unlovable
for the very first time,
like two crusty old
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
those incandescent
socks.
Nevertheless
I fought
the sharp temptation
to put them away
the way schoolboys
put
fireflies in a bottle,
the way scholars
hoard
holy writ.
I fought
the mad urge
to lock them
in a golden
cage
and feed them birdseed
and morsels of pink melon
every day.
Like jungle
explorers
who deliver a young deer
of the rarest species
to the roasting spit
then wolf it down
in shame,
I stretched
my feet forward
and pulled on
those
gorgeous
socks,
and over them
my shoes.
So this is
the moral of my ode:
beauty is beauty
twice over
and good things are doubly
good
when you're talking
about
a pair of wool
socks
in the dead of winter.
Pablo Neruda, (1904-1973), whose real name is Neftal
Ricardo Reyes Basoalto,
was born on 12 July, 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile. His father was a railway
employee and his mother, who died shortly after his birth, a teacher. Some years later
his father, who had then moved to the town of Temuco, remarried doa Trinidad Candia Malverde.
The poet spent his childhood and youth in Temuco, where he also got to know
Gabriela
Mistral, head of the girls' secondary school, who took a liking to him. At
the early age of thirteen he began to contribute some articles to the daily
"La Maana", among them, Entusiasmo y Perseverancia - his
first publication - and his first poem.
In 1920, he became a contributor to the literary journal "Selva Austral"
under the pen name of Pablo Neruda, which he adopted in memory of the Czechoslovak poet
Jan Neruda (1834-1891). Some of the poems Neruda wrote at that time are to be found in his first published
book: Crepusculario(1923). The following year saw the publication of Veinte
poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada, one of his best-known and most
translated works. Alongside his literary activities, Neruda studied French
and pedagogy at the University of Chile in Santiago.
