Tonight I can write the saddest lines is a poem that navigates the readers to the solitude of Pablo Neruda. He describes the depth of loneliness after he lost his love affair.
Readers can easily travel through the emotions of the speaker. Neruda presents a mixture of love, loneliness, and hope.
The poem begins by marking that he can write the saddest lines since he lost his love. He confirms that he loved her fully but he is unsure if she loved him fully or partially.
He recollects all the best memories associated with his lover. He writes about the nights he held her arms and kissed them again and again.
The poet further compares the feelings he has after this separation. He makes many vain attempts to make him free from her memories but he realizes that her memories are haunting him repeatedly.
Read similar poems here
Read the full poem below
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
Read the summary of Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja here
