Pablo Neruda Love Poetry contains his 100 Love Sonnets inspired by his wife, Matilde.

Pablo Neruda Love Poetry was greatly inspired by his wife Matilde Urrutia, especially the voluminous 100 Love Sonnets published in 1959.

SONNET II

Love, how many roads to obtain a kiss,

what lonely wanderings before finding you!

Trains now trundle through the rain without me.

Spring has yet to come to Taltal.

But you and I, my love, are together,

together from our clothes to our bones,

together in Autumn, in our water, at our hips,

until it's just you together, me together.

To think it took all the stones borne by the river,

flowing out of the mouth of the river Boroa;

to think that, held apart by trains and nations

you and I had but to love each other,

with everyone mixed up, with men and women,

with the earth that nurtures the carnations.

Here is another example from Pablo Neruda Love Poetry of the famous 100 love sonnets.

‘Lost in the woods I snapped off a dark branch’ (From: 100 LOVE SONNETS VI)

Lost in the woods, I snapped off a dark branch

and, lifted its murmur, in thirst, to my lips:

perhaps the weeping voice of the rain,

a shattered bell, or a broken heart.

It came to me, something out of far distance,

deeply concealed, and hidden by Earth,

a cry, defeated by immense autumns,

by half-opened moistness of shadowy leaves.

But waking out of the wood’s dream there,

that hazel branch sang under my tongue,

and its vagrant perfume rose to my mind

as if suddenly roots I had long abandoned

searched me, the lost domains of childhood,

and held me, wounded by wandering fragrance.

Sonnet VIII is another good example from Pablo Neruda Love Poetry of the 100 Love sonnets

Sonnet VIII

If your eyes were not the color of the moon,

of a day full [here, interrupted by the baby waking -- continued about 26 hours later ]

of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,

if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,

if you were not an amber week,

not the yellow moment

when autumn climbs up through the vines;

if you were not that bread the fragrant moon

kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,

oh, my dearest, I could not love you so!

But when I hold you I hold everything that is --

sand, time, the tree of the rain,

everything is alive so that I can be alive:

without moving I can see it all:

in your life I see everything that lives.

100 Love Sonnets form an integral part of Pablo Neruda Love Poetry. Let us look at Sonnet IX.

‘In the wave-strike over unquiet stones’ FROM: 100 LOVE SONNETS IX

In the wave-strike over unquiet stones

the brightness bursts and bears the rose

and the ring of water contracts to a cluster

to one drop of azure brine that falls.

O magnolia radiance breaking in spume,

magnetic voyager whose death flowers

and returns, eternal, to being and nothingness:

shattered brine, dazzling leap of the ocean.

Merged, you and I, my love, seal the silence

while the sea destroys its continual forms

collapses its turrets of wildness and whiteness,

because in the weft of those unseen garments

of headlong water, and perpetual sand

we bear the sole, relentless tenderness.

As a fine example of Pablo Neruda Love Poetry, Sonnet XVII has all the ingredients the poet is famed for.

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

I hope you enjoyed these love sonnets from Pablo Neruda Love poetry. I have quite a few more if you follow the links below.

Click here for yet more Pablo Neruda Love Sonnets

Click here for Pablo Neruda Passionate Love Poetry

Click here for Pablo Neruda Melancholic Love Poetry

Click here for Pablo Neruda Joyous Love Poetry

Return from Pablo Neruda Love Poetry to Love Poetry of The World