I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
By 1961, the costs of his homes, collections, and travels drove Neruda to publish two more books in quick succession: Las piedras de Chile (The Stones of Chile) and the lyrical, but not outstanding, Cantos ceremoniales (Ceremonial Songs). In the former, a rock collector praises the earthly qualities of Chile, the geology of stones and stars that form an iron clarity around their “lasting silence / beneath the Antarctic / mantle of Chile.” Neruda reaches back to the essence of nature, which was starting to take a more prominent role in his poetry.
In the same year, the millionth copy of Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song was sold. Only a handful of twentieth-century individual books of poetry—such as Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind—have achieved such popularity.
Still, the success of the love poems didn’t alleviate Neruda’s financial anxiety; all those volumes did not translate into sufficient income. His lack of cash flow is evident in a letter from his secretary Homero Arce to his good friend and publisher Gonzalo Losada, in which Arce asks for a “monetary advance, on top of the monthly payment, to finish paying the costs of the renovation of [Neruda’s] house La Sebastiana in Valparaíso; this is extremely urgent.”
* * *
That summer, done with yet another round of travel, Neruda settled back into Isla Negra with Matilde. There he worked on Memorial de Isla Negra and Fully Empowered, two of his strongest works. One of Fully Empowered’s poems is “Deber del poeta” (“Poet’s Obligation”); deber can be translated as both “obligation” and “duty.” At Isla Negra, likely writing on one of his outdoor benches, set beside a table made out of a carved tree trunk and overlooking the Pacific crashing below, Neruda composed the lines:
To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
It is an emblematic poem, and the last two lines echo his self-appointment as the lyrical spokesman to channel and change the needs and desires of others that he’s asserted in “Macchu Picchu,” “The Invisible Man,” and a few additional works. But in “Poet’s Obligation” he elevates the direct strength of his power to a transcendent level. He doesn’t just speak for them, but rather his poetry becomes such a transformational portal that it can deliver the sea or assume the powers of the sea, with all its attributes. The lyricism is certainly beautiful and potently emotive, which on one hand is all that matters. On the other hand, his egotism seems to trump his empathy. This phenomenon came to the forefront even more in these later decades, emboldened by his cemented stature and fame as the people’s poet. His assumption of this mantle seemed to give him a sense of empowerment, where he could self-mystify in a manner that has caused some to question the veracity of the Communist image he clung to, as well as the degree to which these declarations may have been self-serving.
* * *
Work and writing almost always gave way to his political responsibilities off the page. More and more, he was diverging from the party line. On September 29, 1963, at a Communist Party gathering of some three thousand people in Santiago’s Parque Bustamante, Neruda attacked China. Rhetorically, he demanded to know the whereabouts of that country’s best poet, his friend Ai Qing, an elderly Communist and the father of artist Ai Weiwei. He had been exiled to the Gobi Desert and forced to sign his poems using another name. Neruda confided to the audience, “I think that China’s errors, and its violent internal and external policies, come from just one source: the cult of personality, internally and externally. Those of us who have visited China saw a repetition there of what happened with Stalin.”
Neruda had never publicly condemned Communist authoritarian rule to such a degree as he did in this speech, a remarkable declaration after so many years of support or silence. In the poetry he was now writing, he admitted the mistakes of Stalinism and even denounced Stalin, his hero no longer, who “administered the rule of cruelty / from his ubiquitous statue”:
Everybody asked themselves: “What happened?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
FEAR
What happened? What happened? How did it happen?
How could it happen? But certainly
it happened, it’s very clear that it happened,
it was true, true, the pain of not going back.
Error fell in its terrible funnel,
and out of that came his steely youth.
And hope raised its fingers.
Oh, the gloomy flag, that covered over
the victorious sickle, the hammer’s weight
with a single terrifying effigy!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
