Pablo Neruda

Drunk as Drunk

Drunk as Drunk - context Summary

Part of 1924 Collection

This poem appears in Neruda's 1924 collection Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. It presents a youthful, sensual scene of lovers adrift, using intoxication and sea imagery to convey erotic intensity and languor. The speaker describes bodily closeness, dreamlike drifting between land and sea, and an arrival at mythical islands, evoking longing and the taste of return. As context within Neruda's early work, it reflects his preoccupation with passionate relationships and the vivid physical language that characterizes the collection.

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Drunk as drunk on turpentine from your open kisses, your wet body wedged between my wet body and the strake of our boat that is made of flowers, feasted, we guide it - our fingers like tallows adorned with yellow metal - Over the sky's hot rim, the day's last breath in our sails. Pinned by the sun between solstice and equinox, drowsy and tangled together we drifted for months and woke with the bitter taste of land on our lips, eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime and the sound of a rope lowering a bucket down its well. Then, we came by night to the Fortunate Isles, and lay like fish under the net of our kisses.

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