Pablo Neruda love poetry is tender, melancholy, sensuous and passionate.

For all its variety and mutability, Pablo Neruda's poetry is always passionate. Naturally Pablo Neruda Love Poetry has this attribute as a hallmark, an easily recognisable feature. In these pages, let us look at examples of the passion so redolent in his love poetry. I have chosen four poems for this purpose:

Sonata

Neither the heart cut by a piece of glass in a wasteland of thorns

nor the atrocious waters seen in the corners

of certain houses, waters like eyelids and eyes

can capture your waist in my hands

when my heart lifts its oaks

towards your unbreakable thread of snow.

Nocturnal sugar, spirit

of the crowns,

ransomed

human blood, your kisses

send into exile

and a stroke of water, with remnants of the sea,

neats on the silences that wait for you

surrounding the worn chairs, wearing out doors.

Nights with bright spindles,

divided, material, nothing

but voice, nothing but

naked every day.

Over your breasts of motionless current,

over your legs of firmness and water,

over the permanence and the pride

of your naked hair

I want to be, my love, now that the tears are thrown

into the raucous baskets where they accumulate,

I want to be, my love, alone with a syllable

of mangled silver, alone with a tip

of your breast of snow.

As is usual we can see all the characteristics for which Pablo Neruda Love Poetry is acclaimed. Passion, tenderness and sensuality, in Sonata

Your Feet

When I cannot look at your face

I look at your feet.

Your feet of arched bone,

your hard little feet.

I know that they support you,

and that your sweet weight

rises upon them.

Your waist and your breasts,

the doubled purple

of your nipples,

the sockets of your eyes

that have just flown away,

your wide fruit mouth,

your red tresses,

my little tower.

But I love your feet

only because they walked

upon the earth and upon

the wind and upon the waters,

until they found me

Well I guess "Your Feet" certainly speaks for itself as passionate Pablo Neruda Love Poetry!

Here is another example of passionate Pablo Neruda Love Poetry, this time from "The Captain's Verses" (Versos del capitan) which you may recollect, form part of the large body of mature love poetry along with 100 love sonnets inspired by Matilde Urrutia.

Your hands From: ‘Versos del capitán’

When your hands leap

towards mine, love,

what do they bring me in flight?

Why did they stop

at my lips, so suddenly,

why do I know them,

as if once before,

I have touched them,

as if, before being,

they travelled

my forehead, my waist?

Their smoothness came

winging through time,

over the sea and the smoke,

over the Spring,

and when you laid

your hands on my chest

I knew those wings

of the gold doves,

I knew that clay,

and that colour of grain.

The years of my life

have been roadways of searching,

a climbing of stairs,

a crossing of reefs.

Trains hurled me onwards

waters recalled me,

on the surface of grapes

it seemed that I touched you.

Wood, of a sudden,

made contact with you,

the almond-tree summoned

your hidden smoothness,

until both your hands

closed on my chest,

like a pair of wings

ending their flight

In my opinion, I have saved the best till last. This poem, "Drunk as Drunk" is the best example of passionate Pablo Neruda Love Poetry:

Drunk as Drunk (Translated from the Spanish by Christopher Logue)

Drunk as drunk on turpentine

From your open kisses,

Your wet body wedged

Between my wet body and the strake

Of our boat that is made of flowers,

Feasted, we guide it - our fingers

Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -

Over the sky's hot rim,

The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice

And equinox, drowsy and tangled together

We drifted for months and woke

With the bitter taste of land on our lips,

Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime

And the sound of a rope

Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,

We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,

And lay like fish

Under the net of our kisses.

Click here for Pablo Neruda Melancholic Love Poetry

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