Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
An unidentified omniscient third-person speaker
Form and Meter
Free verse in one seventeen-line stanza; some translations divide the poem into a ten-line and a seven-line stanza
Metaphors and Similes
Through metaphor, Neruda compares the smell of corpses to flower petals. He uses simile to compare the shine of the palace to that of a clock, and then uses simile to compare lament to a plant.
Alliteration and Assonance
The poem is characterized by alliterative S and B sounds in phrases like "stilled strangulation," "snout filled with silence and slime," "buried blue mouths" and "bludgeon by bludgeon."
Irony
The metaphorical comparison of rotting flesh to flower petals is ironic, unexpectedly juxtaposing pleasant and distressing imagery. More generally, the laughter and leisure of the dictators is ironically juxtaposed with the suffering of everyday people, with the surprising closeness of the two highlighting the contrast between them.
Genre
Protest poetry; poetry of witness
Setting
An unnamed dictatorship, likely in the mid-twentieth century
Tone
Distant, enigmatic, rueful
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonists are the suffering and dying people in the canefields. The antagonists are the dictators harming them.
Major Conflict
The major conflict is the political and physical fight between fascist dictatorship and local resistance.
Climax
The climax occurs when the protagonists and antagonists meet through the spread and movement of the dictators' laughter.
Foreshadowing
The poem's final lines, announcing that "vendetta was born," foreshadow a never-seen future conflict.
Understatement
By calling one of the dictators (or members of the dictator's government) "finical," a word suggesting fussiness and irritation rather than true evil, the speaker understates the harmful impacts of dictatorship.
Allusions
The poem as a whole alludes to the dictatorships and authoritarian governments of the twentieth century, while the reference to sugarcane, in particular, alludes to the brutal history of sugar plantations in the global south.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
The dictator's allies are represented through metonymy as "wineglasses, collars, and piping." A strange, sinister animal is represented through synecdoche as a snout, while the dead are referred to as "newly-killed voices and buried blue mouths."
Personification
The dictators' laughter is lightly personified, described as moving purposefully through space like a person or animal.
Hyperbole
The statement "lament was perpetual" is a hyperbolic way to describe the intensity and ongoingness of the lament.
