Quotes About Poetry

My duty moves along with my song: I am I am not: that is my destiny. I exist not if I do not attend to the pain of those who suffer: they are my pains. For I cannot be without existing for all, for all who are silent and oppressed, I come from the people and I sing for them: my poetry is song and punnishment.

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world, lying in surrender.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines...Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

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 snow like dew to the pasture.

Your house sounds like a train at midday, the wasps buzz, the saucepans sing, the waterfall enumerates the deeds of the dew . . .

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood? Que diran de mi poesia los que no tocaron mi sangre?

Under your skin the moon is alive.

Hay algo más tonto en la vida Que llamarse Pablo Neruda? (is there anything more insane in this life than being called Pablo Neruda?)

But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel. You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves. Behind the nocturnal mountains, white lily of conflagration, ah, I can say nothing!  You were made of everything.

Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano.

Hay una estrella mas abierta que la palabra 'amapola'? Is there a star more wide open than the word 'poppy?

Why is it so hard, the sweetness of the heart of the cherry? Is it because it must die or because it must carry on?

Some poems survive it to become poems in another language," he argued, "but others refuse to live in any language but their own, in which case the translator can manage no more than a reproduction, an effigy, of the original.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and 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 I loved her too. How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

las personas más razonables les costaría mucho ser poetas, quizás a los poetas les cuesta mucho ser razonables.

In my poems I could not shut the door to the street.

La poesía es siempre un acto de paz. El poeta nace de la paz como el pan nace de la harina.

veo el mundo enteramente rosa y azul.

I have named you queen. There are taller than you, taller. There are purer than you, purer. There are lovelier than you, lovelier. But you are the queen. When you go through the streets No one recognizes you. No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks At the carpet of red gold That you tread as you pass, The nonexistent carpet. And when you appear All the rivers sound In my body, bells Shake the sky, And a hymn fills the world. Only you and I, Only you and I, my love, Listen to it

Lovely one, your eyes are too big for your face, your eyes are too big for the earth. There are countries, there are rivers, in your eyes, my country is your eyes, I walk through them, they light the world through which I walk, lovely one. — Pablo Neruda, from "Lovely One," The Captain's Verses: Love Poems . (New Directions Publishing Corporation; Bilingual edition July 2004) Originally published 1952.

El agua anda descalza por las calles mojadas.

Cementerios de besos, aún hay fuego en tus tumbas, aún los racimos arden picoteados de pájaros

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle, and even your breasts smell of it. While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth. — Pablo Neruda, from "XIV [Every day you play with the light of the universe.]," Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despai r, in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda , ed. Ilan Stavans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003)

while inside, a ferocious love wound around and around me-till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword, slashing a seared road through my heart 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott