How to improve your poetry (using Pablo Neruda as a guide)
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“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” - Pablo Neruda, “Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)”
At the beginning of Taylor Swift’s short film All Too Well, there’s a quote by Pablo Neruda that flashes on the screen, “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” With Google’s help, I learned this poignant quote is from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)” and that Neruda was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician born in 1904.
When I read the poem online, I was struck by its beauty and simplicity. Neruda seemed to be a master of his craft—he’d been writing poetry and essays since the age of 13 and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. So I ordered a collection of his translated poetry called Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. I figured there was a lot I could learn from his works, and with just 21 poems in the collection (each one to two pages long), it’s easy to understand Neruda’s style in one sitting.
The main takeaways I gleaned are:
Be more imaginative with your poetic devices and use more of them
Repetition is powerful and easy to implement
Try using the same images across poems
Be more imaginative with your poetic devices and use more of them
One of Neruda’s greatest strengths is his mastery of poetic devices (tools or techniques that create rhythm, tone, and meaning—like alliteration, rhyme, and similes), especially metaphors. He makes apt but uncommon connections. For instance, to describe how his lover eludes him, he uses metaphors to equate her physical presence with fog and invisibility: “On all sides I see the fog of your waist […] your arms of transparent stone.” In one poem, I counted a minimum of three poetic devices in each four-line stanza. And each either added meaning or moved the poem forward.
The devices are also incredibly imaginative. For example, instead of writing that time passes by quickly, Neruda personifies the night and equates it with a horse rider to convey the same message: “The night gallops on its shadowy mare / shedding blue tassels over the land.” In doing so, he creates an abstract and surreal tone since it’s impossible for the night to have human qualities and be a horse rider. If Neruda used a simile instead and wrote something like, “The night is like a rider galloping on its shadowy mare,” we’d lose some of that abstract, fantastical tone. The poem and its images take on broader meanings because they’re not literal anymore; they’re open to the reader’s interpretation. This shifts the focus to capturing a feeling rather than taking words at face value. To achieve a similar effect, you should use metaphors over similes.
Here are some other effective lines from the collection that use similes or personification:
“You look like a world, lying in surrender”
“I was alone like a tunnel”
“Ah vastness of pines, murmur of waves breaking”
“The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of goodbye, the wind, travelling, waving them in its hands”
My takeaway: Don’t be afraid to stray from reality and use your imagination. After reading this collection, I realized my poetry is too literal and doesn’t have enough poetic devices, which makes it more like prose than poetry. A good exercise is to set a goal of including, for instance, two poetic devices per stanza. Ask yourself, what is the essence of what I’m trying to say, and how can I use a poetic device to better convey this? Lastly, metaphors are stronger than similes. Try to remove the “like” or “as” and create an implicit comparison.
Repetition is powerful and easy to implement
I think the most effective poetic device in Neruda’s collection is repetition. Repetition creates emphasis because it forces readers to focus on the words that are being repeated. It also allows the poet to change the meaning of the repeated words or phrases without actually changing the words themselves.
In the poem “So That You Will Hear Me,” to describe how a lover drove away the speaker’s solitude and sadness, Neruda writes, “You fill everything, you fill everything.” The repetition here creates a somber tone, which is the opposite of what we’d expect (surely the speaker would be happy his lover drove away his sadness). If Neruda used those words just once, we probably would have interpreted them positively and without further analysis (the lover is making the speaker happy). But repeating them a second time creates a sense of regret—for some reason, the speaker doesn’t want his sadness or solitude to be driven away. The meaning of the exact same words changes throughout the poem, which adds a compelling dynamic and contrast. It’s pretty cool that the same words or phrases can adopt multiple meanings depending on where they’re used and how frequently.
My takeaway: Repetition is a powerful tool that’s easy to implement. It takes less work to create than a simile or metaphor since you’re not coming up with a comparison or vivid descriptions but just repeating words or phrases at key times. It forces the reader to focus on your words and infuses more emotion into your poetry.
Try using common images across poems
In a similar vein, repeating images and ideas across poems is impactful. Water, the sea, and the color blue are central motifs in numerous poems from Neruda’s collection and represent the speaker’s love interest.
Adding connections across poems helps readers understand aspects of your poems that they might not have otherwise understood. If readers know from one poem that a blue hyacinth represents the speaker’s lover, they can better understand other poems that mention the color blue or a hyacinth. It also makes the reader more invested; they feel intelligent for making connections.
My takeaway: If you create a strong motif, feel free to repurpose and repeat it in other poems without the idea getting stale. It adds another layer to your poetry. Test out using the same object, image, or motif in several poems to create a common thread.
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