“Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” Pablo Neruda declares in the opening, and the reader believes him. In simple, incantatory language, the poet’s longing for a lost love suffuses his perceptions of the natural world: “To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. / And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture” (ll. 13–14).

The speaker repeatedly invokes the infinite, estrellada (starry) sky that sheltered many of their most intimate moments: “Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms / my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her” (ll. 29–30). Somewhere she still lives under the same sky, and this illusion of proximity torments rather than comforts him: “In the distance someone is singing. In the distance… Another’s. She will be another’s” (ll. 17, 25).

Neruda’s couplets capture conflicting impulses: the adolescent surrendering to passionate grief, versus the poet harnessing that energy, declaring escribir (writing) as a mechanism of control. This tension yields a delightfully unreliable narrator: “I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too… She loved me, sometimes I loved her too… I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her” (ll. 6, 9, 27).

Neruda places Tonight I Can Write as the close of the series—“Though this be the last pain she makes me suffer / and these the last verses that I write for her” (ll. 31–32). The reader must decide whether this is a poet’s final authority, or whether it will prove to be one more in a series of self-contradictions.

In 1924, the publication of Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) sealed the perception of early Neruda as an emotionally direct speaker, a poet of love and loss. He had an ambivalent relationship with this reputation for lyric poetry—and particularly with the popularity of Tonight I Can Write, which he would often withhold at readings until the last moment.

Yet sometimes Neruda delighted in his role as “matchmaker-poet,” patron saint of lovers in all languages. His friend Jorge Edwards, a fellow author, observed, “He thought of love as natural expansion, like breathing.”