Pablo Neruda

Epoch

Epoch - meaning Summary

A Summoned Past Refuses Rest

The speaker summons a troubled past like a bell, awakening memories and the echoes that have separated from living hands. They refuse to rebuild lost gestures or rehearse old griefs. The poem links personal loss to a broader historical violence, calling for an end to a brutal century that taught killing and survival. It expresses both the burden of memory and the desire for definitive closure from collective suffering.

Read Complete Analyses

Here it does not rest, a past I summoned with a bell so that things awaken and the rings gather around me, which have separated from fingers obeying death: I did not want to reconstruct the hands or the sadnesses: after everything, once and for all shall die this century of agony that taught us to assassinate and to die of survival.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0