Love from the heights of Machu Picchu

In a blog that has been around for over 2 years now it is very very surprising that not a single post is dedicated to Pablo Neruda. Neruda is one of my favorite poets and it is my firm belief that his poetry can inspire those warm fuzzy feelings of love in the most unfeeling brute.

Suffice to say I don't think the readable length of a blog post will ever do any justice to the peans I wish to sing for this man and hence I shall refrain from making any such attempt. Instead, here are four lines from his first compilation of poems "Twenty love poems and a song of despair" , that, incidentally, he wrote when he was 20.

The love poems are earthy and full of passion and express love in a such a direct way that it makes one glow just thinking of a love like that. However, since I am the melancholy-loving kind, my favorite in the collection is the one "song of despair".

Is it weird that I wish someday I am able to love someone so much that the thought of not being with them brings me despair such as the poem describes?

Anyway , moving on. The full poem can be found in a here

The most poignant four lines are these:

In you the wars and the flights accumulated
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

I am not going to spoil it by interpreting in horrible sounding words of my own :)

God bless Neruda's trabslators