Tonight I can Write
Line 27-32
The speaker repeats, “I no longer love her, that’s certain,” but immediately contradicts himself, uncovering his efforts at self-deception when he admits, “but maybe I love her”. With a world-weary tone of resignation, he concludes, “love is so short, forgetting is so long”. His poem has become a painful exercise in forgetting. In line twenty-nine, he explains that because this night is so similar to the nights in his memory when he held her in his arms, he cannot forget. Thus, he repeats, “my soul is not satisfied”. In the final two lines, however, the speaker is determined to erase the memory of her and so ease his pain, insisting that his verses (this poem) will be “the last verses that I write for her”.
Theme
Memory and Reminiscence
“Tonight I Can Write” is a poem about memories of a lost love and the pain they can cause. Throughout the poem, the speaker remembers the details of a relationship that is now broken. He continually juxtaposes images of the passion he felt for the woman he loved with the loneliness he experiences in the present. He is now at some distance from the relationship and so confesses “tonight I can write the saddest lines,” suggesting that the pain he suffered after losing his lover had previously prevented any memories or descriptions of it. While the pain he experienced had made a bar to his creative energies in the past, he is now able to write about their relationship and find some comfort in “the verse [that] falls to the soul like dew to the pasture”.
Love and Passion
Throughout the poem, the speaker expresses his great love for a woman with whom he had a passionate romance. He remembers physical details: “her great still eyes,” “her voice, her bright body,” “her infinite eyes”. He also remembers kissing her “again and again under the endless sky” admitting “how I loved her”. His love for her is still evident even though he describes twice “I no longer love her, that’s certain.” The remembrance of their love is still too painful to allow him to admit the deep of his love for her, especially when he thinks, she is “Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses,” imagining her “bright body” under someone else’s caress.
Physical and Spiritual
Neruda brings nature imagery to suggest the speaker’s idea of the spiritual nature of his relationship with his lover. When he describes them kissing “again and again under the endless sky,” he describes his physical relationship with her in heavenly terms. He also uses this kind of imagery to describe his lover, creating a connection between her and nature. “Traditionally,” states René de Costa in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, “love poetry has equated woman with nature. Neruda took this established mode of comparison and raised it to a cosmic level, making woman into a veritable force of the universe”. The speaker compares his lover’s “great still” and “infinite eyes” to the “endless sky”. He also uses nature to communicate his love for her. His voice tries “to find the wind to touch her hearing”.
Alienation and Loneliness
The speaker contrasts memories of his passionate relationship with his lover with his present state of alienation and loneliness without her. The speaker employs the imagery of nature to reflect his internal state. He writes his “saddest lines” on a night that is similar to the nights he spent with his lover. Yet the darkness and the stars that “shiver at a distance” in this night suggest his loneliness. The “immense night” becomes “still more immense without her,” especially when he notes, “to think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her”. He compounds his suffering when he remembers “nights like this one” when he held her in his arms.
The speaker expresses his loneliness when he notes that he hears someone in the distance singing and repeats, “in the distance”. No one now sings for him. He admits, “my sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer,” and “my heart looks for her, and she is not with me”. As a result, his “soul is not satisfied. In an effort to assuage the loneliness he feels, he tries to convince himself, “I no longer love her, that’s certain,” but then later acknowledges, “maybe I love her.” With a world-weary tone of resignation, he concludes, “love is so short, forgetting is so long”. Determined to end his sense of alienation and loneliness, the speaker insists that these will be “the last verses that I write for her”.
I have written this summary of the poem Tonight I can write. This is the second part of the article. To read the previous article, click the link below : https://paidforarticles.in/tonight-i-can-write-558725
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