Ordinary Things Tattoo Our Lives

Today marks the day that Nobel Prize Winning Poet Pablo Neruda passed from this world to the next. Neruda's poetry influences many writers' work, including mine. Below is an article I wrote about two of his poems.

“All had been washed in black, tattooed everything All the love gone bad, turned my world to black, Tattooed everything I see, everything I am, everything I’ll be.” - Pearl Jam, Black

Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda was initially a love poet who delighted with his surrealist views on romance. Some of his most memorable imagery is found in his love poems. Lines like “I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz/or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off/I love you as certain dark things are to be loved/in secret, between the shadow and the soul”(Neruda) are so memorably tied to his romantic works. In his early career, he went out of his way to remain apolitical even stating “I hate proletarian, proletarianising art. In any period, systematic art can tempt only the lesser artist… I continue to write about dreams” (Becker, Feinstein 90). All of that changed in 1936 with the murder of his friend, Spanish poet and playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca. Neruda was deeply affected by this tragedy, and it is here we see a shift in Neruda’s work. This event colored his poetry for the rest of his career, and we can see this change evident in both his “I’m Explaining a Few Things” and “Ode to Tomatoes”.

Pablo Neruda’s poetry becomes political, and he announces this shift in the beginning lines of “I’m explaining a Few Things”. The opening stanza on the surface seems to be discussing ordinary things like flowers and birds, but a close reading reveals Neruda to be eschewing those things that once seemed more significant. The opening lines read:

“You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs? and the poppy-petalled metaphysics? and the rain repeatedly spattering its words and drilling them full of apertures and birds?”(Neruda 2195, 1-5)

Neruda’s questioning anticipates the confusion perhaps an avid reader of his love poems might ponder. Where are all the flowers? Where is all the romantic imagery? In a journal article about Neruda’s political stance, Erin Becker explains that Neruda “relegates his former love poetry and surrealism to ‘metaphysics,’ disconnected from anything tangible, inconsequential like flowers” (Becker). Seemingly ordinary, everyday objects have lost all meaning. They are blacked out by the violence and war that consumes Spain.

The world has changed for Neruda with the murder of Lorca. He invokes Lorca’s name in the poem and a grief settles over the rest of the imagery, tattooing all Neruda experiences. The lines "Federico, do you remember/from under the ground" haunt the reader and makes us feel the bitterness of his grief. The remainder of the poem is charged with that grief. It seems to overwhelm Neruda as he describes that old life he once knew before the murder, before the war. He writes:

“Everything loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises, pile-ups of palpitating bread, the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake: oil flowed into spoons, a deep baying of feet and hands swelled in the streets, metres, litres, the sharp measure of life, stacked-up fish, the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which the weather vane falters, the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes, wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down to the sea”(2196, 21-33).

The imagery of the market brings us to a lively, energetic feeling. Neruda’s personification of the food lends to the robustness of life in the past. The bread is “palpitating”, the hake (fish) swirls, the oil flows, and the tomatoes are “rolling down to the sea”.

The concept that the ordinary is tattooed by the awful experience that is war is reinforced further in the poem when the ordinary things from peacetime recur but in a different way. Neruda’s house is no longer brimming with life but is dead. The streets are drowning in blood instead of bathing in sunlight. In this poem, we see Neruda express how ordinary things become changed by violence and war.

Neruda uses personification in “Ode to the Tomato”, as well. Ordinary tomatoes take over a kitchen much in the way an army might. The tomato “cuts loose”, “invades”, “takes over”. The personification continues as the tomato marries the onion in a salad, celebrated by olive oil and attended by pimento and salt. This poem showcases the tomato in several situations. It portrays how the simplest, most ordinary things can have a beautiful essence and make a difference. It seems the tomato is the perfect metaphor for a person. People can affect and flavor others’ lives, and even though they make seem ordinary, the change they bring to others can be extraordinary. The tomato tattoos the salad, changing its flavor and making it completely different than it would have been without it. While the ode is not as intense in nature as “I’m Explaining a Few Things”, the ordinary nature becoming transformed into something extraordinary by an event or action.

Pablo Neruda’s politically charged poem “I’m Explaining a Few Things” pulls the reader into how an event like war can change how we see everyday life. Neruda’s vision of things like bread, fish, potatoes, and even his home are transfigured forever. Even the ordinary things in life we take for granted can become affected. In “Ode to a Tomato” Neruda personifies the tomato to place emphasis on how ordinary people can flavor our lives and make a difference in them. In this way, the tomato changes the salad and the individual can change society. Nothing remains unchanged by the influence of coming together. Our lives are tattooed by our experiences.

Works Cited

Becker, Erin. “Colored by Passion: The Political-Poetical Intersect in the Life and Work of Pablo Neruda.” The People, Ideas, and Things Journal. 2010. Web. 10 Dec 2013. < http://pitjournal.unc.edu/article/colored-passion-political-poetical-intersect-life-and-work-pablo-neruda>

Feinsten, Adam, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life.London: Bloomsbury. 2004. Print.

Neruda, Pablo. "I’m Explaining a Few Things." Trans. Nathaniel Tarn. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. Gen. ed. Sarah N. Lawall. New York: Norton, 2006. 2195-2196. Print.

Neruda, Pablo. "Ode to the Tomato." Trans. Nathaniel Tarn. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. Gen. ed. Sarah N. Lawall. New York: Norton, 2006. 2204-2206. Print.

Neruda, Pablo. "Sonnet XI." Trans. Stephen Tapscott. Poem of the Week. n.d. Web. 10 December 2013. < http://poem-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2008/09/love-sonnet-xi-by-pablo-neruda.html>

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