Abandonment
Poems like "A Song of Despair" dwell on the desolation and isolation of abandonment, framing it as the frightening flip-side of intimacy and love. In "A Song of Despair," the speaker reminiscences about his former lover. As he thinks about this lost love, however, the speaker begins to feel even more lonely and lost: positive memories lead inexorably to an even stronger feeling of sadness. Similarly, the lover's abandonment in "Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)" leaves the speaker feeling isolated not merely from her but from the natural world that he associates with her. Neruda uses this sense of abandonment to further his ideas that love is a dangerous pursuit, one that can end in great riches or great loss, or, at times, both. Other poems, such as "If You Forget Me," similarly explore this theme, building tension by suggesting the possibility of abandonment in order to underscore the intensity and uncertainty of romance. In each case, Neruda links the possibility of abandonment to the risky pursuit of love.
Identity
In poems like "Love Sonnet XVII," Neruda speaks to the addictive but troubling nature of love. He suggests that love is a dangerous endeavor because it requires each lover to give up certain elements of their selfhood, allowing their identity to become blurred with and even subsumed by that of their loved one. In Sonnet XVII, the love between the narrator and the lover is particularly dangerous and intense, namely because the two participants have given so much of themselves to the other that they have ceased to exist as their past themselves; their individual personalities have been erased. Neruda doesn't only explore this theme in traditional love poems. In his odes, by interrogating the blended lives of human beings and the objects that surround them, Neruda suggests that individual lives and identities are inseparable from the objects and people that surround them. Neruda's interest in deconstructing individual identity extends to his political poetry, which explores the idea that historical and material forces shape the lives of working people in powerful ways that can override individual desires and actions.
Sex
In Neruda's poetry, figurative language links sexuality and the natural world, especially in the case of the female body. Metaphor compares women's bodies to natural landscapes and processes, in lines such as the following from the poem "Body of a Woman": "Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, / ... / My rough peasant’s body digs in you / and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth." These metaphors have drawn criticism in some corners for objectifying the female body or framing femininity as a sexually passive state. However, in poems like "La United Fruit Company," Neruda himself satirizes the (rhetorical) sexualization of colonized land, writing that "The United Fruit Company/ reserved for itself.../ the delicate waist of America." This portrayal of sexualization as a process of possession and control is a contrast to the portrayal in Neruda's love poems. In these poems, sex (and love) erase divides between individuals and nullify power differentials. Furthermore, the languid, businesslike sexual objectification of the United Fruit Company differs from the desperate passion portrayed in some of Neruda's love poems. In "Love Sonnet XI," the speaker, driven mad by desire and love, complains that "I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. / Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets."
Decay and Death
Particularly in his Residencia en la Tierra volumes, Neruda links the experience of personal hopelessness with the broader theme of physical, social, and emotional decay. At times this theme is treated with a near-melodramatic heaviness, Neruda experimenting with just how far he can push the theme before it overwhelms. In "Death Alone," Neruda describes death and decay as a kind of eerie inversion, with "death in the bones, / like a pure sound, / a bark without its dog." Often, Neruda writes of decay as a state of waste or asymmetry, in which the world's resources and sensations arise unevenly or are unable to reach their target. We see this concern in the following lines from "The Widower's Tango": "the sound of useless swords that can be heard in my soul, / and the pigeon of blood that’s all alone on my forehead / calling for things that are missing, missing people, / substances strangely inseparable and lost." But in his more political works, like "The Dictator," death is portrayed not as pointless suffering but as an injustice in need of correcting.
At other moments, Neruda treats these themes with more lightness: in "A Dog Has Died," Neruda writes, with self-deprecation, that "I, the materialist, who never believed / in any promised heaven in the sky... / Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom / where my dog waits for my arrival / waving his fan-like tail in friendship." Or, in cases like "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market," he addresses death with a blend of grief and wonder, exploring how death can be a type of journey into the unknown rather than a mere void.
Bearing Witness
Pablo Neruda was a committed communist who often expressed political views in his poetry, though he also maintained a firm belief in the primacy of emotional honesty and artistic integrity over political causes in poetry. As a poet, and sometimes as the speaker in his own poems, he took on the role of witness to historical events. These included events he actually witnessed as well as those he did not. At times, this meant portraying a speaker frustrated in his instinct to bear witness, unable to fully inhabit the experiences of another. In "The Heights of Macchu Picchu," "The Dictator," and other historical poems (especially those in his work Canto General) Neruda writes about the experiences of the colonized subject rather than the conquerer. Yet in the former poem he does so from the perspective of a modern visitor to Macchu Picchu, longing to understand, communicate with, and speak on behalf of its long-dead inhabitants. At other times, Neruda's speakers are not merely witnesses themselves: they urge others to join them in the act of witnessing. In "I Explain a Few Things," Neruda's speaker invites and then commands others to observe the bloodshed of the Spanish Civil War in the lines "Come and see the blood in the streets. / Come and see / The blood in the streets. / Come and see the blood / In the streets!"
Workers and Work
Neruda's poetry displays the influence of leftist politics, not merely through its critique of fascism and colonialism, but also through its manner of describing labor and laborers. We see this even in the unexpected context of "Ode to my Socks," in which the (non-monetized) labor of knitting becomes a source of enormous beauty and connection. Meanwhile, in "The Heights of Macchu Picchu," Neruda addresses the generations of laborers responsible for creating Latin America's civilization and culture, rhapsodizing, "Look at me from the depths of the earth, you, / the farm worker, the weaver, the quiet shepherd, / the tamer of guardian guanacos, / the mason on his defied scaffolding, / the water carrier bearing Andean tears..." In all of his work, Neruda's focus on the physical world as a thing to be handled, manipulated, produced, and consumed is related to his interest in labor itself: if life is fundamentally a material process, as it is in Neruda's writing, then physical labor is central to all elements of being alive.
Nature
In Neruda's work, the natural world is often treated as a realm of beauty, abundance, and antediluvian mystery. In poems like "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market," the natural world—especially parts of it inaccessible to human beings—is described as a near-fantastical realm, one that contrasts with the crass mundanity of the human and urban world. That human world tends to encroach on and exploit nature: as a result, Neruda's political and historical poetry often uses descriptions of unspoiled nature as a way to elide politically dominant narratives and access other, less-dominant ones. As previously discussed, the natural world tends to be linked to sexuality and romance in Neruda's love poetry. This is true both in the sense that the lover is metaphorically described via the language of nature, and in the sense that the lover has the power to alter the speaker's relationship to the natural world, helping him feel connected to otherwise inhuman and intimidating terrain. Thus, if human commerce and power struggles are encroachments on nature, love and sexuality are, in Neruda's works, something of a route back into it.
