Neruda

Latin America’s most important twentieth century poet, Pablo Neruda, was a social justice advocate and important political figure, who “adopted the role of public poet, putting his writing at the service of the people” (Puchner 1421). Neruda is part of the modernist literary movement, which is characterized by breaking away from conventional poetics. Modernists sought new ways to portray the experiences of a rapidly changing human experience that included great technological improvement as well as increasingly destructive weaponry and world war. “Walking Around” exposes urban poverty and suffering, creating an image of the city as desolate, dirty, and filled with suffering.

“Walking Around” shows “the marked influence of surrealism: the surprising juxtapositions, the shocking associations, the pursuit of disordering states of consciousness” (Cosgrove 22). Neruda conveys great sadness and emotional exhaustion with the poem’s opening: “It happens that I am tired of being a man” (1). Walking through the city, the speaker goes into “the tailor’s shops and the movies / all shriveled up, impenetrable, like a felt swan / navigating on a water of origin and ash” (2-4). This is a strange image suggesting that great loss has caused the speaker to withdraw into himself. Felt is made from applying heat, moisture, and agitation to wool, which could symbolize the experiences that have brought the speaker to this place of hopelessness. The water of origin and ash may refer to scientific theories around earth’s formation through collisions with asteroids which would create both water and ash. Swans are beautiful, elegant birds, but here beauty is an illusion.

The speaker talks of death, darkness, and “shivering with dreams” (19) and declares the he does not want “to continue as a root and as a tomb, / as a solitary tunnel, as a cellar full of corpses, stiff with cold, dying with pain” (23-25). Loneliness and suffering are inescapable in this city, where even death is no escape from the “images of shame and horror” (38) that should make a mirror weep, but which society ignores. By the end of the poem, the speaker’s attitude shifts just a little, to include anger, but quickly returns to forgetfulness:

I stride along with calm, with eyes, with shoes,

with fury, with forgetfulness,

I pass, I cross offices and stores full of orthopaedic appliances,

and courtyards hung with clothes on wires,

underpants, towels and shirts which weep

slow dirty tears (40-45).

Ordinary things, like clothes hanging out to dry, convey the hopelessness of Neruda’s poem with their dirty tears. These images reflect the social environment. Even though the speaker sees all that is wrong and reacts with anger to society’s inequity, he quickly forgets and continues walking. “Walking Around” ends with the same hopelessness with which it begins, leaving the reader with a dirty image of urban misery with no hope for change.

Works Cited

Cosgrove, Ciaran. “A Poetry of Unpompous Circumstance.” The Poetry Ireland Review, no. 18/19, 1987, pp. 10–25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25576497. Accessed 19 July 2020.

Neruda, Pablo. “Walking Around.” The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Edited by Martin Puchner, Shorter 3^rd ed., vol. 2, W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. pp. 1423-1424.

Puchner, Martin. “Pablo Neruda.”  The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Edited by Martin Puchner, Shorter 3^rd ed., vol. 2, W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. pp. 1421-1422.