Neruda

             Pablo Neruda was an author of mixed Indian and Spanish ancestry who became one of Latin America’s most important twentieth century poets (Puchner, 1421).  He used his voice to publicize social problems in his home country Chile such as poverty as well as everyday life and politics.  In his poem “Walking Around”, he tells the tale of a man who is tired of his life and the everyday.

 A view of the city as a captor emerges in Neruda’s poem.  It appears to trap him with its shops, its people and its narcissistic trappings.  He feels the constant need to become “impenetrable” to its smells and ugly sites.  The poet describes the life of the person in the poet as someone who lives in a city of excess which drives him to the brink of madness and perhaps murder when he says “it would be delicious to scare a notary with a cut lily or knock a nun stone dead with one blow of an ear”(lines 12-14). The narrator feels a hate that manifests itself through physical symptoms, the main being exhaustion, mental and physical.  He states “I am tired of being a man” (line 1), “tired of my feet and nails” (line 9).  He views his death as an escape when he says “It would be beautiful to go through the streets with a green knife shouting until I died of cold” (lines 15-17).

Neruda portrays the city as something that needs to be escaped in order for him to find the beauty in his life.  While Baudelaire mixed the wonders of the big city with its hidden underbelly or seediness and death, this poet shows the city as the aftermath of a party that has left him hung over and used.   He wants to “weep with shame and horror” (line 32) just as the clothes on the line which “weep slow dirty tears” (lines 44-45).  If the city is not escaped, it will swallow a person up in its materialistic and disgusting waste.

Works Cited:

Neruda, Pablo. "Walking Around." The Norton Anthology of World Literature, 1650 to Present. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. 1423-1424. Print.

"Pablo Neruda, 1904-1973." Puchner, Ed. Martin. The Norton Anthology of World Literature, 1650 to Present. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. 1421-1422. Print.