Poem Analysis

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Jonathan Seeha Mrs. Frank ENG 3U Tuesday, February 26, 2013 The Works of Pablo Neruda Pablo Neruda, whose real name was Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto, is said to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He was born on July 12, 1904 in the Chilean town of Paral. His father worked on the railway and his mother, who died shortly after his birth, as a school teacher. A few years later his father remarried and they moved to Temuco where Neruda spent most of his childhood. At the age of thirteen, he spent most of his time focusing on writing poetry for the daily “La Manana”. In 1935, the Spanish Civil War commenced, and Neruda closely followed and recorded the events, including the execution of his friend Federico Garcia Lorca. The content of his poetry during this period leaned more toward political and social matters. In 1936, Neruda divorced from his first wife, Delia de Carril. Following the war, he joined the Communist Party of Chile in 1945, but by 1948, he fled Chile because the government was after him. After living in exile for a few years, he finally returned home in 1952. Neruda lived a lifetime of loss, uprisings, and death. The two poems I chose to analyze, Death Alone (page 7) and If You Forget Me (page 8), I felt were appropriate as to the nature of Pablo Neruda's difficult life. In the opening stanza of Death Alone, Neruda uses dark imagery to emphasize the harsh reality of desolation that surrounds the event of death. He explains that when we are on the verge of dying, we “[collapse] inwards from skin to soul” (7) and our “heart[s] thread[] a . . . dark tunnel” (3), the tunnel being symbolic for the solitude that compliments death. In addition, the imagery of the “lone cemeteries” (1) and the “tombs full of soundless bones” (2) set the mood of the poem and reinforce the idea that death is lonely and quiet. Another example to support that
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