Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto better known by his
pen and later legal name as Pablo Neruda was born on 12 July 1904. He was a
Chilean poet-diplomat and politician. He became a known poet at the age of 13,
he wrote his poems in different styles including his passionate love poems such
as the one in his collection Twenty Love Poems and A Song Of Despair.
He won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1971. Pablo Neruda
occupied many diplomatic positions in various nations during his lifetime and
once served as a senator for the Chilean communist party.
Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and
influential worldwide. Here is a collection of some carefully selected love
poems from this famous poet.
Don't Go Far Off, Not
Even For A Day - Pablo Neruda
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because
Because… I don't know how to say it: a day is long
And I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
When the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
Then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
The smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
Into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
May your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,
Because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
When I Die I Want Your
Hands On My Eyes - Pablo Neruda
When I die I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
To pass their freshness over me one more time
To feel the smoothness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep,
I want for your ears to go on hearing the wind,
For you to smell the sea that we loved together
And for you to go on walking the sand where we walked.
I want for what I love to go on living
And as for you I loved you and sang you above everything,
For that, go on flowering, flowery one,
So that you reach all that my love orders for you,
So that my shadow passes through your hair,
So that they know by this the reason for my song.
One Hundred Love
Sonnets - Pablo Neruda
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
Or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
Secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
The light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
And thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
From the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to
love,
Except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
So close that your eyes close with my dreams.
Tonight I Can Write
The Saddest Lines - Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
And the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost
her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the
distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
And these the last verses that I write for her.
Perhaps Not To Be Is To
Be Without Your Being – Pablo Neruda
Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
Without your going, that cuts noon light
Like a blue flower, without your passing
Later through fog and stones,
Without the torch you lift in your hand
That others may not see as golden,
That perhaps no one believed blossomed
The glowing origin of the rose,
Without, in the end, your being, your coming
Suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
Blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
And it follows that I am, because you are:
It follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
And, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be.
I Do Not Love You
Except Because I Love You – Pablo Neruda
I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love
you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
See also: Short Cute Sayings For Lovers
And Because Love
Battles – Pablo Neruda
And because love battles
Not only in its burning agricultures
But also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
To those who between my chest and your fragrance
Want to interpose their obscure plant.
About me, nothing worse
They will tell you, my love,
Than what I told you.
I lived in the prairies
Before I got to know you
And I did not wait love but I was
Laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.
What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
And they will then associate the danger
Of my life, which you know
And which with your passion you shared.
And good, this danger
Is danger of love, of complete love
For all life,
For all lives,
And if this love brings us
The death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
As when I kiss them,
Will then close with pride,
Into double pride, love,
With your pride and my pride.
But to my ears they will come before
To wear down the tour
Of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
And they will say: “The one
You love,
Is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
You could find one more beautiful,
More serious, more deep,
More other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
And what a head she has,
And look at how she dresses,
And etcetera and etcetera”.
And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
Love, Like this I love you,
As you dress
And how your hair lifts up
And how your mouth smiles,
Light as the water
Of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.
To bread I do not ask to teach me
But only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
It comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
Explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.
You came to my life
With what you were bringing,
Made of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
And Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
And to those who want to hear tomorrow
That which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
And let them back off today because it is early
For these arguments.
Tomorrow we will only give them
A leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
Which will fall on the earth
Like if it had been made by our lips
Like a kiss which falls
From our invincible heights
To show the fire and the tenderness
Of a true love.
Here I Love You – Pablo
Neruda
Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.
The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.
The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
Want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.
I Remember You As You
Were – Pablo Neruda
I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.
Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
The leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.
I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off:
Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
Towards which my deep longings migrated
And my kisses fell, happy as embers.
Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.
Love, We're Going Home
Now – Pablo Neruda
Love, we're going home now,
Where the vines clamber over the trellis:
Even before you, the summer will arrive,
On its honeysuckle feet, in your bedroom.
Our nomadic kisses wandered over all the world:
Armenia, dollop of disinterred honey:
Ceylon, green dove: and the YangTse with its old
Old patience, dividing the day from the night.
And now, dearest, we return, across the crackling sea
Like two blind birds to their wall,
To their nest in a distant spring:
Because love cannot always fly without resting,
Our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea:
Our kisses head back home where they belong.
Love is perfect when spiced with sweet words from the heart of a lover. love conquers fear and heals the broken. I know you enjoyed this collection from the great poet Pablo Neruda, feel free to comment your thoughts and visit lovehealings.blogspot.com for more love poems and love quotes.
Related Post: Short Classic Poems From Famous Poets
Follow on Instagram