Peace
begins
in a single
chair.
The odes received favorable reviews, including high praise from Alone. While his conservatism never became a major factor in his literary criticism of Neruda, Alone found it hard to accept both the prosody and political bent in some of the work he wrote toward the end of his exile, heavy on social realism and Stalinist overtones, Las uvas y el viento in particular. This made his review of the first book of odes in the conservative newspaper El Mercurio more remarkable:
Some say this clarity of expression was imposed by the Soviets so that Neruda would be able to reach the masses. If that were true, we would have to forgive the Soviets for an awful lot . . . never has the poetry of Neruda seemed more authentic . . .
We would like to place a limit on this praise. It is said that no judgment is good without its reservations. But we can find none. We even forgive the poet his communism.
Alone was really impressed by the book’s optimism, writing, “Neruda has never smiled as he does now.” The new joy led to a new clarity in his poems, Alone believed, directly reaffirming Neruda’s goals. Besides their lyrical value, many of the odes work as a political tool, using compelling verse to convey the social utility of everyday, natural objects. Because of the familiarity and accessibility of these objects, we often lose sight of their value. Neruda’s goal was to help the reader to recognize their implicit virtue. “Ode to the Onion,” for instance, celebrates an ordinary vegetable through elevated praise:
the earth
[made] you,
onion,
clear as a planet,
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.
With “Ode to Wine” (complete poem in Appendix I) as the last poem of the first book of Elemental Odes, Neruda leaves his readers on a joyous note and with a renewed respect for the magic of winemaking. Neruda exalts the elixir, not as a gift from the gods of ancient times or modern religions, but as a result of man and nature’s hard, collaborative work to grow the grapes and work them into the final product.
While Neruda adapted and modified the traditional ode to his own artistic purposes, he began by following Pindaric classical form, praising the poem’s subject in a direct, personal address:
Wine color of day,
wine color of night,
wine with your feet of purple
or topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of the earth
He then demonstrates that wine is for all:
you’ve never been contained in one glass,
in one song, in one man,
choral, you are gregarious,
and, at least, mutual
Wine is for rich and poor alike, abundantly pleasuring each and all, a salve in bad times, a celebratory toast in good. Neruda here shows the vastness of wine’s spirit, its sacredness to man.
Then in a typical move, Neruda turns from the natural to the sensual:
My love, suddenly
your hip
is the curve of the wineglass
filled to the brim,
your breast is the cluster,
your hair the light of alcohol,
your nipples, the grapes
your navel pure seal
stamped on your barrel of a belly,
and your love the cascade
of unquenchable wine,
the brightness that falls on my senses,
the earthen splendor of life.
This merging of the woman’s body with the celebrated object is in line with many of his odes and a nod to the work of the English romantics.
Neruda ends by ensuring that the reader appreciates the labor, especially by nature herself, that goes into creating wine and all the properties of it he has just exalted:
I love the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine
upon a table
when people are talking,
that they drink it,
that in each drop of gold
or ladle of purple,
they remember
that autumn toiled
until the barrels were full of wine,
and let the obscure man learn,
in the ceremony of his business,
to remember the earth and his duties,
to propagate the canticle of the fruit.
The poem ends with us rooted in a vision: what is most sacred about wine is the work man puts into cultivating earth’s bounty. In Canto General, Neruda stressed how man was made from the earth. He now stresses man’s duty to cultivate what the earth provides. In both cases, he reminds us that we and the earth are a single indissoluble entity and that it is through a collective, cooperative effort that this essential oneness is created.
* * *
Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Between 1936 and 1938, he had arrested over a million of his own party members in his Great Purge. At least six hundred thousand were killed, many from torture. He imprisoned and killed hundreds of thousands of peasants who resisted agrarian collectivization. Estimates range from five to fifty million deaths caused by the famine that resulted from Stalin’s ill-conceived policies. Many believe the famine in Ukraine was an intentional act of genocide. Stalin imposed a regime of state terror all over the Soviet Union, which spread into Soviet Bloc countries as well. There were over a million and a half deportations to Siberia and Central Asia.
Still, Neruda wrote a 236-line poem, “On His Death,” soon translated for communists around the world:
To be men! This is
the Stalinist law!
To be a communist is difficult,
You have to learn how to be one.
To be communist men
is even more difficult,
and you have to learn from Stalin,
his serene intensity,
his concrete clarity,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Stalin is the noon,
the maturity of man and the peoples.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Stalinists. Let us bear this title with pride.
Stalinists. This is the hierarch of our times!
Stalinist workers, fishermen, musicians!
Stalinist forgers of steel, fathers of copper!
Stalinist doctors, nitrate workers, poets!
Stalinist learned men, students, campesinos!
Cheers, greetings today! The light hasn’t disappeared,
the fire hasn’t disappeared,
but rather the light, the bread, the fire and hope,
grow from invincible Stalinist time!
Neruda’s support of Stalin, of Stalinism, is one of the most controversial aspects of his life and character, an apparent divergence from the
