Residence on Earth

The book’s method is accumulation, and accumulation invites the subtractive test. In “Galope muerto” and “Sistema sombrío” the chains of simile could lose a third of their links and keep their sense; in parts of the first volume the prose poems and the minor lyrics, “Lamento lento” and some of the sonatas, restate the mood of the strong poems without advancing it, and a dozen poems could leave the book at little cost. Against that, the strongest poems are necessary in the strict sense. “Walking Around” builds its revulsion item by item until the list itself is the weariness, and “Sólo la muerte” needs each of its sinking images to arrive at death as a sound without sound. The cap is met; the axis is held here because the subtractive question has real answers inside the book.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Much of the book is mood, dread, ennui, erotic despair, the sense of wet rot, and the scale ranks mood below meaning. The question is whether the mood articulates a condition, and it does, more than its name for hermeticism suggests. It discloses a consciousness that has lost the place from which it could order things: the world presents itself as a decaying heap of matter, time arrives as wear rather than event, and the speaker of “Arte poética” stands “como un camarero humillado, como una campana un poco ronca”, like a humbled waiter, like a slightly hoarse bell. The colonial exile is never stated as politics, yet the consul among unread mail and monsoon is a true figure of the uprooted modern self. The material songs of the second volume state and hold a meaning: matter is where communion remains. The axis meets the summit’s bar exactly.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The elevation is almost uniformly dark and low-pitched, and in the weaker poems the sublime of dissolution becomes a manner, the same oceanic murk produced on demand. The height, when it comes, is very great, and it comes often. “Sólo la muerte” opens on solitary cemeteries, “tumbas llenas de huesos sin sonido”, tombs full of bones without sound, and climbs through death entering like a sound, a dress without a body, a broom licking the ground in search of the dead, to a terror as complete as any in modern lyric. “Entrada a la madera” descends into the dark of wood with a tenderness that becomes transport. “Tango del viudo” rises through grotesque domestic detail to real grief, and “Barcarola” and “El sur del océano” reach the oceanic sublime directly. Frequency and height set the figure just under the top of the scale; the uniformity of key keeps it there.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The first volume is notably anti-mythic. It refuses the inherited mythologies, Christian and classical, and the archetypes it touches, the sea, the descent, the widow’s lament, the ghost ship, arise as atmosphere and recurring image rather than as a structure. “El fantasma del buque de carga” makes a freighter a haunted underworld, and “Tango del viudo” gives the lost beloved a demon’s force, “Oh Maligna”, O Evil One; but these are myth evoked. What is built is a cosmogony of matter in reverse: a world returning to water, ash, wood and salt, in which the self is buried and then, in the material songs, reborn by entering it. “Entrada a la madera” is a true descent rite, and “Estatuto del vino” a festal one. The arc bears the book’s weight; it does not govern every poem, and that is what holds the axis below the gate.

Score: 8.3 / 10

European surrealism and Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses were there to be inherited, and Vallejo’s Trilce (1922) had already broken Spanish syntax more radically. But the turn is Neruda’s own, and its cost was high. He walked away from his own Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) and from the rhymed and shaped lyric of modernismo into a hermetic, simile-drowned long line that his Chilean readers found opaque, and he did it in isolation, with no movement behind him. It is not automatic writing: the poems are composed, and their images keep to one physics. In Madrid he made the swerve a programme, setting an impure poetry stained by use against Juan Ramón Jiménez’s pure poetry, at the price of open enmity. The second volume swerves again, into the material songs and the ode to a living Lorca.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Substitute another form and the book loses what it knows. The knowledge is that consciousness has become a passive surface on which things deposit themselves without order, and the long line, with its enumerations and its chains of “como” in which the subject is lost among the likenesses, enacts that loss of hierarchy. “Galope muerto” opens on similes that never reach what they compare, “Como cenizas, como mares poblándose”, like ashes, like seas peopling themselves, and the syntax is the slow motion of the world it describes. “Walking Around” is a catalogue because the city arrives as one. The borrowed titles emptied of their forms are part of the meaning: the old orders survive as names. Where the form weakens, the method has become a habit, and the prose poems of the first volume are the book’s least necessary pages.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence rather than promise. Amado Alonso’s Poesía y estilo de Pablo Neruda (1940) made this book the occasion of one of the founding works of Hispanic stylistic criticism, and it has been re-examined for eighty-five years since without being exhausted: as surrealism and as its refusal, as colonial writing, as a crisis of the lyric subject, as the hinge between the love poet and the political poet. The Asian years and the Josie Bliss poems are now read also against Neruda’s own later admission, in his memoirs, of an assault on a Tamil servant in Colombo, which has reshaped the reading of those years. The poems yield on return: images that seem arbitrary at first cohere by the third reading into a physics of water, ash and rot. Once that law is grasped, the minor poems give back less than the major ones, and the figure stops there.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The field is poetry in Spanish of the twentieth century, Spain and the Americas together. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what a lyric in Spanish could hold, so that after it the poem could take in the unclean, the material, the industrial and the bodily with no decorum to rank them, and it stands with Trilce, Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York and Aleixandre’s La destrucción o el amor among the peaks of the Hispanic avant-garde. Neruda’s widest redirection was carried by a later book, the Canto general, and is kept off this figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Madrid in 1934 and 1935 the poets of the Generation of 27 hailed it, and Lorca’s public introduction of Neruda in 1934 and the joint homage that followed set it at the centre of Spanish poetry’s turn toward impurity; in English, through Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin and James Wright, “Walking Around” and “Sólo la muerte” fed the deep image poetry of the 1960s.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Ninety-one years since the complete book of 1935, ninety-three since the first volume. Form: the text is whole, authorised and stable, and nothing is lost. Presence: read, taught and translated continuously in every major language, and “Walking Around” and “Sólo la muerte” are among the most anthologised Spanish poems of the century. But the widest presence belongs to Neruda’s other books, the Veinte poemas and the Canto general, and this one is read above all by poets and in the academy, which holds it off the top of its band. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the colonial setting is incidental to a condition that has outlived it. Fabric: nothing to charge.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Neruda’s Spanish. The command of the line is great: the long free-verse period that breathes in waves and lands on a concrete noun is Neruda’s invention and his instrument, and in “Sólo la muerte” and “Entrada a la madera” the ear is exact, the vowel music and the stress on the closing word as controlled as in any rhymed verse. The images, however strange, are made from hard particulars: celery, wet clothes, coffins, dentists, the hair of a widower’s beloved. The craft is uneven. Some poems of the first volume are slack, their enumerations padded and their similes interchangeable; “Desespediente” and some shorter pieces of the second volume manage less; and the opacity is at times not a meaning but a fog, in lines where the method writes the poem.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the hermetic, almost voiceless “Débil del alba” or “Significa sombras” of the first volume, and the public, warm “Oda a Federico García Lorca” of the second, addressed to a living friend in a voice that names streets and comrades. One law joins them: the world is matter in process, decay and rebirth, and the self is something matter passes through. The ode weeps for the living poet in the same images of water, coffins and flowers that govern the poems of the East, and the prose poems, the tango, the material songs and the elegy for Alberto Rojas Giménez keep the same physics. The cost is that the second volume’s turn toward communion and toward other people loosens the closed world of the first, so the law bends where the book turns. That is the book’s history rather than a contradiction, but it is felt.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged as a book of lyric poems, and not punished for the form. What it holds: consciousness and its dissolution; eros and its aftermath, in the Josie Bliss poems, “Agua sexual” and “Material nupcial”; death; the family, in “Melancolía en las familias”, “Maternidad” and “Enfermedades en mi casa”; the city of commerce and labour, in “Walking Around”; the natural order, sea, wood, vegetable and wine; friendship and the deaths of friends. These are integrated, not listed: the city, the sea and the bed are the same rotting matter. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent by design: history and the state, which enter only in Neruda’s later books, and the sacred, present only as its absence.

Score: 7.8 / 10