Summary and analysis of 'Tonight I can Write the Saddest Lines' by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda is a much acclaimed writer from Chile. This poem was written in Spanish in 1924 and later
translated into English in 1969. This poem is celebrated for its imagery and symbols to present the pain
of jilted lover. It is about memories of a lost love and the pain they can cause. Throughout the poem the
speaker recalls the details of his love that is now broken. He continually juxtaposes the past with his
ladylove with the loneliness he experiences in the present. It is written in the style of monologue with the
repetition of the line “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” three times to emphasise his sorrow.
The first line of the poem leaves the readers with a curiosity to know the reason for the poet’s
sadness. The images like shattered night and shivering of the blue stars in the distance indicate his
melancholic mood. He decides to write a poem at night which brings a dark imagery and his sad mood.
The shattered night and the shivering stars project the turmoil the poet experiences in his life. The night
wind becomes his companion as it revolves in the sky and sings. Moreover the night enables him to write
which he could not write till then. He confesses that he loved her and the unnamed woman also loved him
for some time. His memory takes him back to a similar night when he held her in his arm. He admits that
he was in love with her deeply and says that her great still eyes will make anyone to fall in love with her.
The writer feels that he can write the saddest lines that night as he knows that she is no longer
with him. Without her the night seems to be immensely lonely. But his writing replenishes his soul like
dew drops to the pasture. He feels upset that in spite of everything, his love could not have her and without
her his soul is lost. The night is traumatized as she is not with him. He hears someone singing in the
distance, which also indicates that he is alone as he could hear it from the distance. Now he mentions his
longing to get reunited with his ladylove as; his sight searches for her, to go to her and his heart too looks
for her. Again he mentions that night is similar to the other night when they were together. Suddenly he
declares that he does not love her but he loved her greatly earlier. He even tried to send the wind to touch
her hearing. But she is another’s now and to express his pain of losing her, the poet states it that her voice,
body and infinite eyes will be another’s. Again he declares that he no longer loves her but contradicts
himself by stating that he may love her. His words, love is short but forgetting is long, reveals his love for
her. The night leaves him with the memory of his ladylove and her loss leaves his soul disturbed. He
concludes the poem with a determination that this is the last pain she gives him and this is the last poem
he writes for her. He hopes that with this painful attempt of writing he wishes to get out of her memory.
Themes

Love, Memory, and Heartache

Neruda’s poem explores the pain and heartache following a break-up. The speaker, with one eye on the
past and another on the present, tries to make sense of the fact that a relationship that seemed filled with
endless love has, in fact, ended for good. Standing alone under the same star-filled night sky he used to
share with his ex-lover, the speaker bitterly contrasts the love he once had with his current sadness and
solitude. In doing so, the poem showcases the sorrow and confusion that accompany love’s loss—and
how memories of that love make it all the more difficult to move on.
The change in the speaker’s romantic situation seems to have altered everything around him. Just as
love once made the world seem full of joy, bliss, and intimacy, love’s absence makes the world
suddenly cold, barren, and harsh. The speaker and his ex-lover used to be together through nights just
like the one on which the poem is set. Those nights—and their love—seemed like they would last
forever. The sky was “endless,” the speaker’s lover’s eyes were “infinite,” and they kissed each other
“again and again.” It seems almost impossible, then, that this has all come to an end.

Now, however, the stars themselves “shiver” as if lonely and cold. The sky’s endlessness no longer
speaks of the limitlessness of love, but of an “immense” and stark emptiness. The world itself, of
course, hasn’t changed. Rather, the lovely prism through which the speaker perceived his life and his
surroundings has been shattered. Heartbreak, the poem thus suggests, makes the world feel menacing
and alienating.

Still, the speaker can’t seem to stop comparing two moments in time—then and now—as if to make
sense of how a love that seemed endless can so suddenly be destroyed. He keeps circling back to the
bare facts of his loss: he had a love, and now it’s gone. It’s as though through the plain repetition of
these facts the speaker hopes, in vain, to dispel the emotional power that the break-up holds over him.

The speaker even tries to rationalize the loss, noting that his ex was with someone else before him and
will be with someone new after him. But these efforts are hardly convincing precisely because the
speaker is so utterly fixated on the break-up. He contradicts himself, too, saying at one point that he
doesn’t love her any longer before admitting that “maybe” he does.

In trying to make sense of his loss, the speaker is just returning again and again to the very memories
that fuel his heartache. So long as he can’t let go of the past, the poem implies, he can’t move on—
hence the poem’s most famous line: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” To this, a third might be
added: “understanding is impossible.” It baffles the speaker to think that two people so passionately in
love could ever stop loving each other, but it’s a mystery that the speaker can’t solve. That’s why,
ultimately, all the speaker can hope to do is try to forget his lover over time. Like a wounded animal, he
has to wait for the healing process to run its course.

The Power of Poetry

The poem finds its speaker in emotional turmoil, suffering the pangs and pains of a recent break-up.
Though the speaker would probably give anything to be back with his lover, the poem suggests that
 there is, at least, a valuable by-product of all this heartache: poetry. That is, the poem itself implies that
strong emotion inspires rich, authentic, and beautiful poems.

The speaker is the first to admit that he’s sad, drowning in a pool of sorrow, confusion, and self-pity.
Such are the consequences of love, the poem suggests. But the speaker also hints that these emotions
grant him a new power, one that links suffering to creativity.

Take a look at the poem’s main refrain: “Tonight I can write the saddest lines.” The key-word here is
“can”; like some special power-up in a video game, the separation has perhaps unlocked a new level of
sadness with which the speaker can compose his poetry. And after writing a number of painfully honest
lines, the poem re-states the idea that difficult emotional experience helps to make these lines possible.
Illustrating this, the speaker compares the relationship between emotion and poetry to a natural process,
through, appropriately enough, a deeply poetic image: “And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the
pasture.” Emotion and poetry, the simile implies, go together as naturally as dew and grass.

That said, just because the speaker is mainly saying that he can write the “saddest lines,” that doesn’t
necessarily mean that he will or even that he should. It’s up to the reader whether the lines actually in
this poem are these “saddest lines” that the speaker mentions; the speaker himself places one of these
lines in quotation marks, as if these are only an example of what he’s talking about. Perhaps that line—
"The night is starry / and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance"—is meant to gesture to a style of
writing that, while valuable, doesn’t quite do full justice to his sorrow.

Looking at it this way, the speaker testifies to his newfound ability while subtly undermining it with a
hint of irony. The poem is remarkably raw and bare in the way it expresses itself, as if the speaker wants
to simultaneously poeticize the break-up—turn it into a work of art—and question whether there is
much point in doing so. Even if the speaker can write sad lines, it’s up for debate whether those lines
can ever fully capture the pain of his loss.

Symbols

The Wind/Singing

The wind in the poem represents the speaker's lonely longing for his ex-lover. It spins restlessly in the
sky, twirling and turning about in a way that evokes the speaker's own confusion and conflicting thoughts.
 The speaker also notably links the wind to the human voice throughout the poem, again suggesting that it
represents his desire to call out to his beloved. He even mentions his "voice" trying to "find the wind" in
order to reach his ex-lover's ears, to no avail.

The wind doesn't carry the speaker's voice to his lover, but it does carry someone else's voice to the
speaker. In line 17, the speaker hears—or imagines—an actual person singing:

[...] In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

This "singing" recalls the "singing" of the wind mentioned at the beginning of the poem, and thus again
evokes the speaker's loneliness and longing. The fact that this singing is so far away, however, highlights
that this singing is not for the speaker. It's not like this is his lover calling out for him; it's a totally
unrelated event. This makes the speaker feel small and irrelevant, now stripped of the sense of grandeur
and beauty that accompanied his previous love affair.

Where this symbol appears in the poem:

 Line 4: “The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.”

 Line 17: “In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.”
 Line 24: “My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.”

The Night Sky

Poets have long used the night sky as a backdrop for scenes of romance, desire, and longing, and the
speaker leans into that symbolism here.

The night is associated with lovers' liaisons, its glinting stars providing just a hint of light to shine on their
kissing faces. And that's what the night once symbolized for the speaker, too: his love itself, which
seemed as endless, as infinite, and as comforting as the star-filled sky above.

This is why he's so baffled, then, to be standing under the same sky while feeling so alone. Now, the night
sky is like an echo chamber in which the speaker hears the lonely tones of his own heartache. Even the
stars seem to shiver in the distance, representing the speaker's new emotional distance from his lover. The
sky is endless, but not in the way that love once seemed endless. Rather, its endlessness and immensity
now represent the feeling that his heartache will never go away.
 Of course, the speaker repeatedly emphasizes that the sky itself hasn't literally changed; he's the one
who's different, and the surrounding world looks as it always has. The shifting symbolism of the night
sky, then, speaks to the way that love—and its loss—can entirely shift one's perspective.

Where this symbol appears in the poem:

 Lines 2-3: “"The night is starry / and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."”
 Line 4: “The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.”
 Line 8: “I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.”
 Line 16: “The night is starry and she is not with me.”