My comment would be: 'written on the wings of butterflies.'

This beautiful poem seems to be a love letter written in the most delicate and profound way. The poet uses vivid imagery to describe how everything in the world, from the crystal moon to the impalpable ash, carries him to the beloved. It's as if the entire universe is conspiring to bring them closer. However, the poet also acknowledges the possibility of love fading away. If the beloved stops loving him little by little, he will do the same. But if the love between them is destined and unwavering, it will burn like a fire that never extinguishes. The poet's love feeds on the beloved's love, and as long as they both live, their love will remain in each other's arms, never leaving. It's a powerful and touching expression of love and its various possibilities.

As my fourth Neruda poetry collection, "100 Love Sonnets" is, without a doubt, lacking when compared to "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair", "The Captain’s Verses", and "Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon". Just like the intimacy and body landscapes in Gerard Schlosser’s paintings, Neruda描绘了爱 in a wide range of emotions and shades. From devotion to inquisition to desolation, from red to mauve to blue. However, the words used to convey these emotions can be sparse. With such a limitation, it's no wonder that the sonnets can be tiresome and repetitive.

But each time a sonnet successfully touches on a certain feeling or a certain memory, with words that seem to fit in the only way Neruda can描绘 them, it纵情驰骋 through romance and love-making in the utmost splendour, without forgetting its moments of neediness for reassurance and affirmation. Neruda wholeheartedly worships and adores his third wife, Matilde, in this collection. And for an affair to give birth to a hundred sonnets is almost enough for love to infect your whole being, consumingly and blindly.

Whilst this collection is divided by different times of the day (Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Night), I can nearly describe the reading experience as sweet dew that slowly trickles down among the blades of grass in the earliest of mornings as the sun takes its time to rise. Sometimes, it feels like it's all happening in a dream. But you don't always want to stay in one.

Overall, I bookmarked 15 sonnets in this collection. And as a passionate lover of bread, I was very amused by a particular sonnet that declares a beloved as made of bread. I don't think anything can be as sensual as this:

SONNET XIII
The light that rises from your feet to your hair,
the strength enfolding your delicate form,
are not mother of pearl, not chilly silver:
you are made of bread, a bread the fire adores.

The grain grew high in its harvest of you,
in good time the flour swelled;
as the dough rose, doubling your breasts,
my love was the coal waiting ready in the earth.

Oh, bread your forehead, your legs, your mouth,
bread I devour, born with the morning light,
my love, beacon-flag of the bakeries:

fire taught you a lesson of the blood;
you learned your holiness from flour,
from bread your language and aroma.

*

Two sonnets I dearly loved:

SONNET LXVI
I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

SONNET LXV
Matilde, where are you? Down here I noticed,
under my necktie and just above my heart,
a certain pang of grief between the ribs,
you were gone that quickly.

I needed the light of your energy,
I looked around, devouring hope.
I watched the void without you that is like a house,
nothing left but tragic windows.

Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens
to the fall of the ancient leafless rain,
to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned;
so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.

*

Others sonnets worth mentioning:
Sonnet VIII
Sonnet XVI
Sonnet XVII
Sonnet XLIX
Sonnet LXXXI
Sonnet LXXXIX

Intimate and eloquent,

this piece of writing has a certain charm that draws you in.

However, I must admit that trying not to read it in one take was a bit of a challenge for me.

But perhaps that's part of its allure.

It's the type of poetry that you want to keep coming back to,

savoring each word and line,

letting the emotions and images it evokes wash over you.

With its intimate tone and eloquent expressions,

it has the power to touch your heart and stir your soul.

Each time you read it, you might discover something new,

uncovering hidden layers of meaning and beauty.

So, take your time with this poetry,

allow it to unfold before you,

and enjoy the unique experience it offers.

Although I have read the English translation, I am writing in Bengali.

Neruda, who is called the poet of world love and the poet of revolution, whose poetry Che Guevara had listened to his lover. Even today, millions of lovers can easily express the words of their hearts by taking refuge in his language. In his personal life, his love did not achieve success exactly but his experiences he has lived through and passed on to the people of generation after generation, and from there it has become their eternal language.

He has written 1400 lines of this book for the purpose of his third wife Matilde Urrutia. For whose purpose he has said "Now that I have declared the foundation of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life."

Although there is a touch of all kinds of experiences in the sonnets, perhaps his expressed love has given its purest form through the anxiety of his writing. By submerging in the depth of experience, he has brought up the most precious anxieties. Then he has sold them at a high price.

Matilde Urrutia was the third wife of Pablo Neruda, and he lived with her until his death. She dedicated a great deal of her work to him, and also these Cem Sonetos de Amor (a hundred?!) Where on earth is my Neruda?!

This is my favorite:

"I don't love you except because I love you;
I go from loving you to not loving you,
From waiting for you to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who dies,
The only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood."



Matilde Urrutia's relationship with Pablo Neruda was a complex and passionate one. The "Cem Sonetos de Amor" is a beautiful collection of poems that reflects their deep emotions. The favorite sonnet I have chosen shows the intense and ever-changing nature of love. It describes how love can bring both joy and pain, how it can make the heart move from cold to fire. The poet expresses his blind love for the one he loves, even when not seeing her. The idea that love can consume and even lead to death is a powerful and moving concept. Overall, these poems offer a unique and profound insight into the nature of love and the relationship between Matilde and Pablo.

XVII

I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate the fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
within itself, hidden, the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love lives darkly in my body
the compressed aroma that ascended from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
thus I love you because I don't know how to love any other way,

except in this way in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand on my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dream.

I absolutely adore sonnets and I love Pablo Neruda. All I desire is to read all the books he has written. His words have a magical charm that draws me in and makes me feel a deep connection. The way he expresses love and emotions in his sonnets is truly remarkable. Each line seems to hold a hidden meaning, waiting to be discovered. I find myself getting lost in the beauty of his poetry, and it gives me a sense of peace and inspiration. I can't wait to explore more of his works and continue to be captivated by his literary genius.

Kicking off Scorpio season is an exciting time.

One beautiful way to do so is by delving into the Neruda sonnets dedicated to his wife.

Pablo Neruda's sonnets are a profound expression of love and longing.

His words paint a vivid picture of the deep emotions he felt for his beloved.

When men yearn, it is a powerful and touching thing.

Their hearts are filled with a desire for connection and affection.

Neruda's sonnets capture this essence perfectly.

They allow us to peek into the world of a man in love, experiencing all the joys and pains that come with it.

As we read these sonnets during Scorpio season, we can feel the intensity and passion that Neruda poured into his words.

It is a reminder that love is a force to be reckoned with, and that it can inspire some of the most beautiful and moving works of art.

So, let us embrace Scorpio season and沉浸 in the beauty of Neruda's sonnets to his wife.

I love you like a plant that doesn't bloom,
but which hides within it all the flower light,
and lives from your love, dark in my body
the aroma that, squeezed, rose up from the ground for me.
I love you not knowing how, from where or when,
I love you equally without problem or pride:
I love you thus because I don't know any other way,
except this one where I'm not nor are you,
where your hand on me I feel as my own,
where when I sleep your eyes also close.

This beautiful poem expresses a profound and mysterious love. The speaker compares their love to a plant that holds the potential of a flower within, even if it doesn't outwardly bloom. The love seems to have a life of its own, growing and thriving in the darkness of the speaker's body. The source and origin of this love are unknown, yet it is felt equally and without complication or pride. The speaker is so deeply in love that they feel a sense of unity with the beloved, as if their hands and eyes are one. This love is all-encompassing and beyond understanding, existing in a space where neither the speaker nor the beloved truly exist in the traditional sense. It is a love that defies explanation and yet is felt with great intensity.

I really sometimes wonder if I love right, love correctly, or if I love at all and am not just miming what I think, what I want, I feel. For me, I love all at once, I fall very fast, but rarely. I will go long loveless periods through life, happy and unthinking of what passions I am missing, unenvious of people paired in love, like a bright new boat at sea not thinking at all of the harbor.

And suddenly in a lightning flash (un coup de foudre), I am whipped up into a maelstrom of passion and anguish. I am battered on all sides, forced always to maneuver at the helm and can think of nothing else, whatever. I am tormented in waiting out the storm, waiting for the dawn, the exchanged "I love you" or just a sign or symbol of reciprocation. I wait by the telephone, always checking messages, or finding myself reading through old messages. I am mad in love, always. But I think it may be better to be mad than never to feel that madness ever, always to love on a level plane.

What I love in poetry is that it is always, when done right, an attempt at saying what can never be said. Death, love, grief, loss, these things are common material, for what truths can ever be said in language about them? We all feel them every day, but words diminish them. To Love is golden in all its glister, but to speak of love is only to wear gawdy jewelry, paste diamonds and pyrite. It is a poor imitation to describe love, language is an ill-fitted coat for it, it hangs loose and leaves unfitting folds. But poetry, though not all of it, comes close to representing Love. Not every poem, nor maybe even not any whole poem, but lines, phrases, words on the page, somehow strike me and I think "yes, that's just it! that's just the way it is!" And there are a few poets who really strike me as troubadours of love, Love in a meaningful way, meaningful to me. Pablo Neruda (with Edna St. Vincent Millay, and at turns Ronsard, Akhmatova, Plath, Secton, Whitman, sometimes Catullus and Roethke...) stands out as feeling how I feel, writing what I feel abstractly and without words.

Many of the sonnets in this collection I do not love, and many I do not like and make me feel nothing. But there are a few which feel infinite to me, which burn in me like my own loves. And my favorite from Neruda, maybe my favorite-ever love poem, "If you forget me" I return to often, maybe every time I feel that pang of love.

\\n  You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists:
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.\\n

To me this is what it is to be in love. It is that everything becomes a messenger, a sign, a whisper of Love, even ugly and insignificant things, small things and silly trifles, and also big things that shake you, everything becomes a little boat which carries you off in a flash to that feeling of longing, of loving, of that person which you love which is absent. Time becomes measured in time-with and time-without, and always there is a feeling of lack in the former, and unending excess in the latter.

Neruda knows, and writes of in his Love Sonnets, that love is an ache. Though love adds an infinitude to life, though it brims over everywhere on everything, it too makes one want more than enough, more than is possible or conceivable. To love someone is to want them so bad and so frequently that you would ruin yourself, like a child over-indulging in sweets. And the worst, the most painful but maybe the most wonderful, too, part of love, is the persistent mystery.

\\n  I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving.\\n

To love someone because they are beautiful or kind or generous or smart is an affront to love. While these may spark an initial attraction they are insufficient to inspire love. While attraction may be slave to Love's Dictionary (what is "beauty"? what is "intelligence" or "ambition"?), love is a slave, rather, to it's gesturary. One's love is impinged upon by that smile they wear when you look at them a long time, or the way they carry themselves into the room, or bend over to remove a shoe, or grab a pen and think a moment before writing; it is that flash of confusion on the face when they are surprised, or the tension which builds in their brow when they are stifling despair, or when they are worried and they fidget just a bit. There can be no pride nor complexity in love, because to be in love is to be completely vulnerable to loss. While love adds to everything, it is a constant threat of losing everything, and having to build up from the ruins alone. It is so simple, excruciatingly simple "to love and be loved; to not love nor be loved; to love and not be loved; not to love but be loved" - it is the unnecessary things, the petty superficialities which interfere and threaten love, which make it seem complicated. When the brain and the heart are in discord, when one lies to oneself about what they want, what they love, what they need.

Like in Roland Barthes' Lover's Discourse, I am moved by Neruda's understanding that to love is also to wait.

\\n  so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.\\n

For one feels in love that before love their life was an empty house, unlivable. And they maintained it, washed the windows and unclogged the gutters and kept the paint fresh from chipping, but inside it was always empty, perhaps only filled in the corners but subtle things in shadows. But when you are in love, it seems that suddenly all your house is busy with new furniture and decoration for some imminent party, and there are things that you love but don't need, and things which are needed but not loved, and all over there is activity, and everyone (for now there seem so many guests) is thinking of one thing. And when you are with that person you love, it is not the party which you were waiting for, it seems like you are living in the house and it is some anonymous Sunday morning (you drinking your coffee, them reading the paper, feeding the cat), and everything is calm and quiet. But when they leave, there is the rush in the heart to make them stay. Your whole body aches to make them stay for ever, to keep them prisoner. What if they go away and they stop loving you? Your mind is again aflutter with worries and anxieties, and when it is about to give up, it is re-nourished by a fleeting memory of their smile, or a kind word, or an unexpected message. But always the windows ache, and inside the boiler cries.

Great poetry reading is truly a remarkable experience. It has the power to transport us to different worlds, evoke a wide range of emotions, and inspire our creativity. There are countless great poets and their works that are worth recommending. For example, the beautiful and profound poems of William Wordsworth, which celebrate the beauty of nature and the human spirit. His words seem to dance on the page and touch our hearts deeply. Another outstanding poet is Emily Dickinson, whose unique style and thought-provoking themes make her poetry a joy to read. Her concise yet powerful expressions can make us look at the world from a different perspective. And let's not forget the great Shakespeare, whose sonnets and plays are filled with masterful poetry. His words have stood the test of time and continue to captivate audiences around the world. These are just a few of the many great poets and their works that I highly recommend. Whether you are a poetry lover or new to the world of poetry, I encourage you to explore and discover the beauty and power of great poetry reading.

Love poems are nothing but beautiful, and they are extremely charming. In them, the soul speaks more than in the works of other poets. Neruda's soul is the one that writes, not just for Matilda, but to teach all lovers how to love. Perhaps every lover will find in them something that will steal his heart and send it to his beloved, or that he will recite in her ears!

A hundred sonnets of love, for a hundred years of love!

To My Dear One:

Love of my life!
If I look at you in pain,
For the second time, I will die.

Without You:

Without you,
Whatever lies on the ground of Restani,
May it be destroyed.
Without you.

My Window Hurts:

And I wait for you,
Until you return again
And give me life.
Because without you,
My window hurts.

Will You Return?

When you are not here,
This question keeps revolving in my mind,
Will you return?

The Thirst of Fire:

Although nothing
Should separate people from each other,
But the sun and the moon,
Until now,
Have done this very often.

Our Kisses:

Love, without wings, cannot fly,
So our kisses,
Are our wings.

Come with Me:

Come with me, through pain, through wound,
Come with me until I show you
Where my love begins.