23 poems by Pablo Neruda that will fascinate you

April 21, 2024

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, better known as Pablo Neruda , was a poet who was born on July 12, 1904 in Parral (Chile) and died on September 23, 1973 for causes that have not yet been clarified, but that seems to have been poisoned.

Neruda's poetic talent is undoubted . In 1971 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and has been admired and recognized for his great work.

23 poems by Pablo Neruda

From a very young age he already made clear his great talent and interest in poetry and literature. At the age of 13 he already worked in a local newspaper as writings. He is one of the best-known Spanish-speaking poets and, throughout his life, he left a lot of poems that convey deep feelings and emotions.

In this article we have collected 23 poems by Pablo Neruda so you can enjoy them .

1. Sonnet 22

How many times, love, I loved you without seeing you and maybe without memory,

without recognizing your look, without looking at you, centaury,

in opposite regions, in a burning midday:

You were just the aroma of the cereals that I love.

Maybe I saw you, I supposed you in passing raising a cup

in Angola, in the light of the June moon,

or were you the waist of that guitar

that I played in the darkness and it sounded like the sea beyond measure.

I loved you without my knowing it, and I searched for your memory.

In the empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait.

But I already knew what it was. Suddenly

while you were with me I touched you and my life stopped:

in front of my eyes you were, reigning me, and queens.

Like fire in the woods, fire is your kingdom.

A poem that deals with the memory of love, a love that may not be corresponded . You can continue to love despite time and distance, you can be in love without seeing, only with memories and hope. It is the strength of the heart.

2. Poem 1

Woman's body, white hills, white thighs,

You look like the world in your attitude of surrender.

My wild laborer's body undermines you

and it makes the son jump from the depths of the earth.

I was just like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,

and in me the night entered its powerful invasion.

To survive, I forged you like a weapon,

like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.

But the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.

Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.

Ah the breast vessels! Ah the eyes of absence!

Ah, the pubic roses! Ah your slow and sad voice!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.

My thirst, my longing without limit, my indecisive path!

Dark channels where the eternal thirst continues,

and the fatigue continues and the infinite pain.

This poem by Pablo Neruda is inside the book "Twenty poems of love and a song of despair". A text that reveals a rebellious Neruda, in his adolescence. This book is considered painful, because Neruda suffers love, and longs for it .

This piece of poetry, specifically, is about the sexuality and the body of the woman. Although he lives it, he does not own it. Losing yourself in a woman's body can be both a physical and a spiritual experience. Neruda is between the desire to have that woman and the anguish of not being with her.

3. If you forget me

I want you to know one thing.

You know how is this:

If I look at the crystal moon, the red branch

of the slow autumn in my window,

if I touch the impalpable ash by the fire

or the wrinkled body of the wood,

everything brings me to you, as if everything that exists,

aromas, light, metals, were small boats that sail

to the islands of yours that await me.

Now, if little by little you stop loving me

I will stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly you forget me do not look for me,

that I will have forgotten you.

If you consider long and crazy

the wind of flags that goes through my life

and you decide to leave me at the shore

of the heart in which I have roots,

think that on that day,

at that time I will raise my arms

and my roots will go to look for another land.

But if every day,

every hour you feel that you are destined to me

with implacable sweetness.

If every day goes up

a flower to your lips to look for me,

Oh my love, oh my,

in me all that fire is repeated,

in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,

my love is nourished by your love, beloved,

and as long as you live, it will be in your arms

without leaving mine.

Sometimes, you find that person that turns your heart over, that brings out emotions that you thought it was impossible to feel. Your life changes completely, and your life turns into the life of that person you love with madness , with real madness. You know that if that person comes back, you will feel the same again, but it is not like that and you must accept it.

4. Poem 12

For my heart enough your chest,

For your freedom my wings are enough.

From my mouth will reach the sky

what was sleeping on your soul.

It is in you the illusion of every day.

You come as the dew to the corollas.

You undermine the horizon with your absence.

Eternally on the run like a wave.

I said you sang in the wind

like the pines and like the masts.

Like them you are tall and taciturn.

And you suddenly get sad like a journey.

Welcoming as an old road.

You're full of echoes and nostalgic voices.

I woke up and sometimes they emigrate

and birds that sleep in your soul flee.

These verses belong to the work of the author "Twenty poems of love and a desperate song" that was published in 1924. The theme on which this poem revolves is the absence of the human being . The story is located in the Chilean sea, because the author spent much of his life next to the waves, the masts and the wind.

5. Poem 4

It's a storm-filled morning

in the heart of summer.

As white goodbye handkerchiefs travel the clouds,

the wind shakes them with their traveling hands.

Innumerable heart of the wind

beating over our silence in love.

Buzzing through the trees, orchestral and divine,

like a language full of wars and songs.

Wind carrying in fast theft leaf litter

and diverts the beating arrows of the birds.

Wind that knocks it down in a wave without foam

and substance without weight, and inclined fires.

It breaks and submerges its volume of kisses

fought at the door of the summer wind.

The author highlights the summer environment in which the wind is an important factor, as this, surely, affects his mood, giving peace and tranquility. But the striking is the first verse, which interrupts the storm in the middle of summer. That is to say, a momentary separation , surely with someone, with whom there have been good and bad moments.

6. Love

Woman, I would have been your son, for drinking

milk from the breasts as from a spring,

for looking at you and feeling by my side and having you

in the golden laugh and the crystal voice.

To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers

and adore you in the sad bones of dust and lime,

because your being will pass without grief next to me

and came out in the stanza - clean of all evil.

How would I know how to love you, woman, how would I know?

love you, love you like nobody ever knew!

Die and still love you more.

And still love you more and more.

This poem is about the immensity of love, about how strong and deep this feeling can be . Again, an unfulfilled love, in which the author wishes with all his strength to be lost in the body and soul of that person who has changed his life completely

7. Poem 7

For my heart enough your chest,

For your freedom my wings are enough.

From my mouth will reach the sky

what was sleeping on your soul.

It is in you the illusion of every day.

You come as the dew to the corollas.

You undermine the horizon with your absence.

Eternally on the run like a wave.

I said you sang in the wind

like the pines and like the masts.

This poem belongs to the book "20 poems of love and a desperate song". The text is about the presence of a woman who, after her departure, remains eternally alive in the memory. It is written with hope despite the sad thoughts of having to get away.

8. One hundred love sonnets

Naked you are as simple as one of your hands:

Smooth, terrestrial, minimal, round, transparent.

You have moon lines, apple paths.

Naked you are thin as naked wheat.

Naked you are blue like the night in Cuba:

You have vines and stars in your hair.

Naked you are round and yellow

like summer in a golden church.

Naked you are as small as one of your nails:

curve, subtle, pink until the day is born

and you get in the subway of the world

as in a long tunnel of costumes and jobs:

your clarity is extinguished, dresses, defoliates

and again it is a naked hand again.

A few very nice verses that they are about the beauty of a woman who catches her . It traps you in its purest intimacy, in which your memory travels through your body. In each word he describes with finesse the qualities of the person he loves in which each verse expresses his feelings and thoughts about it.

9. My heart was a living and turbid wing ...

My heart was a living and turbid wing ...

a frightening wing full of light and longing.

It was spring over the green fields.

Blue was the height and the ground was emerald.

She-the one who loved me-died in the spring.

I still remember his pigeon eyes in sleeplessness.

She-the one who loved me-closed her eyes ... late.

Field evening, blue. Afternoon of wings and flights.

She-the one who loved me-died in the spring ...

and he took the spring to heaven.

Neruda gives us the opportunity to enjoy this piece, in which the author talks about the memory of that woman he once loved. It is the strength of the soul, which invades every second of your thought. Even though he talks about love being dead, he's still alive like the first day .

10. Friend, do not die

Friend, do not die

Listen to me these words that come out burning,

and that nobody would say if I did not say them.

Friend, do not die

I am the one waiting for you in the starry night.

Which under the bloody setting sun awaits.

I watch the fruits fall on the dark earth.

I look dance the drops of dew on the grass.

In the night to the thick perfume of the roses,

when the round of the immense shadows dances.

Under the southern sky, the one that awaits you when

the afternoon air like a mouth kisses.

Friend, do not die

I am the one who cut the rebellious garlands

for the jungle bed fragrant sun and jungle.

The one who brought yellow hyacinths in his arms.

And torn roses. And bloody poppies.

The one who crossed his arms to wait for you, now.

The guy that broke his arches. The one that bent his arrows.

I am the one who keeps the taste of grapes on my lips.

Refreshed clusters. Red bites.

He who calls you from the plains sprouted.

I am the one who wants you in the hour of love.

The afternoon air shifts the tall branches.

Drunk, my heart. under God, wobbles.

The unleashed river breaks into tears and sometimes

his voice becomes thin and becomes pure and tremulous.

The blue complaint of the water resounds in the evening.

Friend, do not die!

I'm the one waiting for you in the starry night,

on the golden beaches, on the blonde eras.

The one who cut hyacinths for your bed, and roses.

Lying among the herbs I am the one waiting for you!

One of Pablo Neruda's saddest poems, about a friend who is fighting for her life and may not survive. A piece that reaches the heart and asking desperately not to leave.

11. Thirst for you.

Thirst for you harasses me on hungry nights.

Trembling red hand that rises up to its life.

Drunk with thirst, crazy thirst, thirst for jungle in drought.

Thirst for burning metal, thirst for avid roots ...

That is why you are thirsty and what has to satisfy it.

How can I not love you if I have to love you for that?

If that is the tie how to cut it, how.

As if even my bones thirst for your bones.

Thirst for you, atrocious and sweet garland.

Thirst for you that at night bites me like a dog.

The eyes are thirsty, what are your eyes for?

The mouth is thirsty, what are your kisses for.

The soul is on fire from these embers that love you.

The body live fire that has to burn your body.

Of thirst Infinite thirst Be thirsty for your thirst

And in it it annihilates itself like water in the fire

12. I love you here ...

I love you here

In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.

The moon shines on the errant waters.

They walk the same days chasing each other.

Fog unfurls in dancing figures.

A silver gull slips down from the sunset.

Sometimes a candle. Tall, tall stars.

Or the black cross of a ship.

Single.

Sometimes up early and even my soul is wet.

It sounds, the distant sea resounds.

This is a port.

I love you here

Here I love you and in vain the horizon hides you.

I am still loving you among these cold things.

Sometimes my kisses go on those serious ships,

They run by the sea where they do not reach.

I'm already forgotten like these old anchors.

The springs are sadder when the afternoon comes to an end.

My life is uselessly hungry.

I love what I do not have. You are so distant.

My boredom struggles with the slow twilights.

But the night arrives and begins to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.

They look at me with your eyes the biggest stars.

And as I love you, the pines in the wind,

They want to sing your name with their wire sheets.

Love is one of the most beautiful experiences that human beings can feel, because It floods with strong emotions the day to day and the feelings of the person . Love, but when it leaves, it remains in the memory of a broken soul. Asking again and again, kiss those lips again.

13. Do not blame anyone

Never complain about anyone, or anything,

because fundamentally you have done

what you wanted in your life.

Accept the difficulty of building yourself

same and the courage to start correcting you.

The triumph of the true man arises from

the ashes of his mistake.

Never complain about your loneliness or your luck,

Face it with courage and accept it.

One way or another is the result of

your acts and prove that you always

you have to win ..

Do not be bitter about your own failure or

upload it to another, accept now or

You will continue to justify yourself as a child.

Remember that any time is

good to start and that none is

so terrible to give up.

Do not forget that the cause of your present

it's your past as well as the cause of your

future will be your present.

Learn from the bold, from the strong,

who does not accept situations,

who will live in spite of everything,

think less about your problems

and more in your work and your problems

without eliminating them they will die.

Learn to be born from pain and to be

bigger than the biggest obstacle,

look into the mirror of yourself

and you will be free and strong and you will stop being a

puppet of the circumstances because you

You are your destiny

Get up and look at the sun in the morning

and breathe the light of dawn.

You are part of the force of your life,

Now wake up, fight, walk,

decide and you will triumph in life;

never think about luck,

because luck is:

the pretext of the failures ...

Although most of Neruda's poems are about love, it refers to guilt. The message is clear: do not blame anyone, look at yourself and get out . Always with your head held high.

14. The sea

I need the sea because it teaches me:

I do not know if I learn music or conscience:

I do not know if it's alone or being deep

or just snore voice or dazzling

Assumption of fish and ships.

The fact is that even when I'm asleep

somehow magnetic circle

in the university of the swell.

It's not just the crushed shells

as if some trembling planet

will participate gradually death,

no, from the fragment I reconstruct the day,

from a streak of salt the stalactite

and of a spoonful the immense god.

What once taught me I keep it! It's air,

incessant wind, water and sand.

It seems little for the young man

that here he came to live with his fires,

and yet the pulse that went up

and went down to its abyss,

the cold of the blue that crackled,

the crumbling of the star,

the tender unfolding of the wave

squandering snow with the foam,

the still power, there, determined

like a deep stone throne,

he replaced the room in which they grew

stubborn sadness, piling up forgetfulness,

and changed my existence abruptly:

I gave my adhesion to pure movement.

The sea was always part of the life of Neruda, who lived in Valparaíso , a city that is located on the Chilean coast. There he found, many times, the inspiration to write. In these verses it is possible to perceive the love towards the smell, the color and the movement of the waves and everything that surrounds this paradise.

15. Do not be far from me

Do not be far from me just one day, because how,

because, I do not know how to tell you, the day is long,

and I'll be waiting for you like in the stations

when trains fell asleep somewhere.

Do not leave for an hour because then

in that hour the drops of wakefulness come together

and maybe all the smoke that is looking for a house

come to kill even my lost heart.

Oh that your silhouette is not broken in the sand,

Oh, and do not let your eyelids fly in the absence:

Do not leave for a minute, beloved,

because in that minute you will have gone so far

that I will cross the whole earth asking

if you will return or if you will let me die.

This poem is about the desire to be with that woman for whom one feels a deep and intense feeling and, as a consequence, exists a need to express it , to be able to merge in your body.

16. I can write the saddest verses tonight ...

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

Write, for example: «The night is starry,

and they shiver, blue, the stars, in the distance ».

The night wind spins in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this I held her in my arms.

I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I also loved her.

How not to have loved her great still eyes.

A poem that makes clear an immense sadness for not being able to be with the loved one. For wanting and not being able, for wanting and not having , for dreaming and awakening. A dream that occupies much of your time and your thinking.

17. Look at yourself

Today I dance Paolo's passion in my body

and drunk from a joyful dream my heart flutters:

Today I know the joy of being free and being alone

like the pistil of an infinite daisy:

oh woman-flesh and sleep-come and love me a little,

come to empty your sun glasses in my way:

that in my yellow boat your crazy breasts tremble

and drunk of youth, which is the most beautiful wine.

It's beautiful because we drink it

in these trembling vessels of our being

that deny us the enjoyment so that we enjoy it.

Let's drink. Never stop drinking.

Never, woman, ray of light, white pulp of poma,

suavices the tread that will not make you suffer.

Let's plant the plain before plowing the hill.

To live will be first, then it will be to die.

And after the road turns off our tracks

and in the blue we stop our white scales

- golden arrows that star in vain -

Oh Francesca, where will my wings take you?

Another of the poems that are characteristic of Pablo Neruda, in which he speaks of the sea and of a woman to whom the author asks him to live intensely love , giving free rein to the heart and the expression of feelings.

18. Woman, you have not given me anything

You have given me nothing and for you my life

defoliates his rose bush of despair,

because you see these things that I look,

the same lands and the heavens themselves,

because the network of nerves and veins

that sustains your being and your beauty

one should shudder at the pure kiss

of the sun, of the same sun that kisses me.

Woman, you have given me nothing and yet

I feel things through your being:

I'm glad to look at the earth

in which your heart trembles and rests.

My senses limit me in vain

-sweet flowers that open in the wind-

because I guess the passing bird

and that it wet your feeling blue.

And yet you have not given me anything,

your years are not blooming for me

the copper waterfall of your laughter

It will not quench the thirst of my flocks.

Host that did not taste your fine mouth,

lover of the beloved who calls you,

I will go to the road with my love to the arm

like a glass of honey for the one you love.

You see, starry night, singing and drinking

in which you drink the water that I drink,

I live in your life, you live in my life,

You have given me nothing and I owe everything to you.

It may happen that the other person does not give us anything but that we feel an immense attraction that envelops us and that feeds our desire to be with her. This is exactly what this poem is about.

19. The wind blows my hair

The hair combs my hair

as a maternal hand:

I open the door of remembrance

and the thought is leaving me.

Other voices are those that I carry,

it's from other lips my singing:

to my memory grotto

It has a strange clarity!

Fruits from foreign lands,

blue waves from another sea,

loves of other men, penalties

that I dare not remember.

And the wind, the wind that combs my hair

like a motherly hand!

My truth is lost in the night:

I have no night or truth!

Lying in the middle of the road

They must tread me to walk.

My hearts pass through me

drunk with wine and dreaming.

I am a motionless bridge between

your heart and eternity.

If I die suddenly

I would not stop singing!

A beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda, who collects part of the great creativity of the author, and in which it is possible to appreciate the expression of his deep subjective conflicts in reference to the desire that he feels.

20. I'm afraid

I'm scared. The afternoon is gray and sadness

from heaven it opens like a mouth of the dead.

My heart has a cry for a princess

forgotten at the bottom of a desert palace.

I'm scared. And I feel so tired and small

I reflect the afternoon without meditating on it.

(In my sick head there is no dream to fit

just as in the sky there has not been a star.)

However in my eyes a question exists

and there is a scream in my mouth that my mouth does not scream.

There is no ear on earth that hears my sad complaint

abandoned in the middle of the infinite earth!

The universe dies, of a calm agony

without the party of the sun or the green twilight.

Agonizes Saturn as a grief of mine,

the earth is a black fruit that the sky bites.

And by the vastness of emptiness they go blind

the afternoon clouds, like lost boats

to hide broken stars in their cellars.

And the death of the world falls on my life.

The internal conflicts that the author goes through cause a great fear that tries translate in these verses . This fear, so felt, affects the mind and the body, and it emerges and develops until it causes a deep fatigue.

21. Yesterday

All the exalted poets laughed at my writing because of the punctuation,

while I beat my chest confessing points and commas,

exclamations and two points that is, incest and crimes

that buried my words in a special Middle Ages

of provincial cathedrals.

All those who swooned began to brave themselves

and before the rooster that sang they went with Perse and with Eliot

and they died in your pool.

Meanwhile I got tangled up with my ancestral calendar

more dated every day without discovering but a flower

discovered all over the world, without inventing but a star

surely already extinguished, while I imbibed in its brightness,

drunk with shadow and phosphorus, the sky was stupefied.

The next time I return with my horse for the time

I will arrange to hunt properly crouched

everything that runs or that flies: to inspect it previously

If it is Invented or not invented, discovered

or not discovered: no future planet will escape from my network.

A few verses of impressive beauty that come embodied from an autobiographical context, in which Neruda talks about yesterday, but also about the present and where he has arrived. All with extraordinary language that floods the senses.