Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)

Discuss Pablo Neruda's poem, 'Tonight I Can Write"as a loss of love poem.

Discuss Pablo Neruda's poem,"tonight I can write the saddest lines"as a loss of love poem.

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One of the most interesting things about this poem's exploration of heartbreak is the fact that the speaker, while certainly heartbroken, doesn't actually know whether he's still in love. This means that, on the one hand, he might simply be sad because he's missing someone he's in love with—in other words, his heartbreak is a kind of frustrated love with no available recipient. But on the other hand, he may be sad despite the fact that he's no longer in love—in other words, the absence of love is itself heartbreaking for him. To make things even more complex, his feelings of heartbreak seem to make it harder for him to figure out whether he still loves his former lover. His sadness muddles his thinking and exhausts him, making it hard for him to accurately assess his own feelings.

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