The Original "Your Body is a Wonderland"

Though Pablo Neruda has dabbled in Communist poetry, the Chilean is predominantly a romance poet—which is usually a sure-fire way to get me to stop reading whatever you write. One whiff of sap and I’m running the other way faster than you can cry, “Mark Twain!” But I always make an exception with Neruda’s works. There’s just something about his writing that makes me not only tolerate, but enjoy murmuring his words beneath my breath—even the Communist vocabulary! The guy wrote 100 love sonnets! He should be my worst nightmare of a poet. But, he’s not. What keeps me reading Neruda, I have come to realize, is his imagery. “One Hundred Love Sonnets (V)” is a great example of Neruda’s craftsmanship and why I devour his poems.

Neruda fertilizes “One Hundred Love Sonnets (V)” with primal images of earth and of thriving life. In the first quatrain, the speaker notes “the clay and resins” of his beloved and the “sweet water” that gives so much life to apples, they swell. “The truth of the fruit in clusters” suggests overabundance and excessive life. Neruda only supplies images that are tangible; note that in the first line of the poem, the speaker rejects considering anything intangible about his lover: “I did not touch your night, or your air, or dawn: only the earth...” The speaker, and ultimately the reader, only cares about the palpable aspects of the woman, which makes sense as his “place” is best defined and most easily recognizable by its physical appearance. In essence, the first quatrain functions to aid the audience in understanding how elemental and innate the speaker perceives his lover, his “place” to be.

In the second quatrain, the speaker begins to unveil a more personal connection with his lover. He uses imagery and possessives to insinuate a sort of ownership. He goes so far to say that “your feet were made for me” and, shortly after, “you are my dark familiar clay.” Now not only is Neruda giving images of nature but also of intimacy. He furthers the connection between personal intimacy, nature, and life with the image of touching her hips and touching “the wheat in its fields” at the same time, as wheat and hips are symbols related to giving life. With these connections made through imagery, the speaker can further the concept of his “place” in the third and fourth quatrains.

In my mind, I warp the third quatrain and the first line of the last bit of text into one group and form a couplet with the last two lines. I think it’s odd that Neruda grouped the two quatrains the way they are grouped because lines 8 - 12 are the only lines in the poem that don’t revolve around images of earth and life. The grouping may work out better in Spanish, but I don’t really know. Anyway, those lines drastically deviate from the previous images in the poem. There is nothing natural about the image of a heart remembering a mouth and the earth has very little to do with “a man wounded.” There is nothing about intimacy or thriving life in those images. But because of the first two quatrains, the audience can make what, upon inspection, seems like a leap into more of a little hop. The first two quatrains, through their imagery, give the third quatrain and line 12 meaning. The poem has become wholly personal. We the audience are taken from admiring a lover from afar to understanding the source of the speaker’s love without feeling much of a bump. The last two lines return to the predominant imagery of the poem while adding in the new personal perspective the audience has learned. Intimacy (“kisses”), earth/life (“volcanoes”), and the speaker (“my place”) are rolled into one spot.

Neruda uses imagery to take the audience step by step through a complex idea without losing it along with way. With each image, Neruda takes your arm and shuffles you just an inch or two at a time into the idea as if you were an old lady crossing a street. And, I’ll be honest, I’ve never been so happy to be an old lady.

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