A speaker praises his loved one, yet finds he is unable to satisfy her: this is not an unfamiliar trope in Neruda’s work. But in Ode with a Lament, from the second volume of Neruda’s somber Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth), the loved one’s demands are even higher—her soul “a bottle filled with thirsty salt” (l. 3). Her skin is compared unerotically to “a bell filled with grapes” (l. 4), an image of illness that forces the reader to readjust any presumption of the relationship at hand. In return the poet’s offerings become more surreal and violent: “I have only fingernails to give you, / or eyelashes, or melted pianos, / or dreams that come spurting from my heart” (ll. 5–7).

In a world of “submerged hearts / and pale lists of unburied children / There is much death” (ll. 17–19), and the speaker laments his shame at being safe while his love is sacrificed. He sags under the weight of “an interminable / wet-winged shadow that protects my bones” and is haunted “while I dress, while / interminably I look at myself in mirrors and windowpanes, / I hear someone who follows me, sobbing to me / with a sad voice rotted by time” (ll. 25–30).

The closing invocation is to the love’s funeral self: “Come to my heart dressed in white, with a bouquet / of bloody roses and goblets of ashes. . . .” (ll. 38–39).

The unusual images in this bleak poem may spring from Neruda’s most personal, internalized griefs. His mother, Rosa, died within weeks of his birth, and Neruda often linked the appearance of roses with intimations of mortality. In this case the “girl among the roses” (l. 1) may well be Neruda’s own daughter, Malva Marina, born the year before the poem’s publication. Neruda’s only child was plagued from birth with brain hemorrhaging and excess fluids in her oversized head, a volatile state that may inspire some of the poem’s most raw, disturbing visions: “You stand upon the earth, filled / with teeth and lightning . . . You are like a blue and green sword / and you ripple, when I touch you, like a river” (ll. 31–32, 36–37). Despite the frantic efforts of the poet’s family and friends to “cure” Malva Marina with kind attention and the best doctors, she was diagnosed with hydrocephaly and did not live past her eighth year.

Neruda prized the form of the ode, which directly addresses an admired object and originates in song. Much of his later collection Odas elementales follows the classical Pindaric structure of strophe, then antistrophe, culminating in epode. In Ode with a Lament, however, the abject mourning of stanza four interrupts this formal rhythm. The poem becomes not so much ode as hymn: an appeal to what is loved but inaccessible, held apart—as in death—by the hand of the divine.

Categories: Chilean Literature, Literature, World Literature

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