The Fickle One - Analysis

Desire as Something That Leaves the Speaker

The poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s erotic attention is wildly mobile, almost involuntary, yet it is ultimately pulled toward a deeper, steadier beloved. Neruda makes this instability physical from the first line: My eyes went away from me. Attraction isn’t a choice so much as a bodily abduction; the self is split into parts that run after passing figures. Even the syntax pushes that feeling of pursuit: the eyes follow, then the speaker follows after them, as if he’s always arriving a beat late to his own longing.

This also sets up the title’s sting. The fickle one may be the speaker, but it may just as much be desire itself: a force that hijacks eyes, mouth, blood. What’s fickle isn’t a moral weakness so much as a physiology—attention that latches, releases, and reattaches.

The Dark Girl: Lure, Fruit, and Flame

The first woman is described through dense, dark materials: black motherofpearl, darkpurple grapes. She’s precious and edible at once—gemstone and fruit—which turns desire into both hunger and dazzlement. The most startling detail is that she lashed my blood with her tail of fire. Whether that tail is hair, dress, or pure metaphor, the image makes attraction feel punitive and ecstatic, like being whipped into vitality. The speaker’s body doesn’t merely admire; it reacts, heats, and hurts.

After this comes the refrain-like confession: After them all I go. It sounds like surrender, but also like a verdict. He is not choosing one over another; he is condemned to chase whatever passes.

The Pale Blonde: Gold, Sway, and a Violent Kiss

The second woman is rendered in a different palette and motion: A pale blonde went by Like a golden plant Swaying her gifts. She is bright, vegetal, offering, and the verb swaying makes her both inviting and unreachable—something you can see moving but not hold still. The speaker’s response is even more overtly bodily: my mouth went Like a wave and then discharging onto her breast Lightningbolts of blood.

This is not gentle romance. The kiss is described as impact, discharge, and electricity. Blood keeps returning as the poem’s main currency, suggesting that desire spends the self. The speaker’s fickleness has a cost: each new passing figure pulls out another piece of him—eyes, mouth, blood—leaving the rest of him scrambling behind.

The Turn: But to you and the Strange Fidelity of Stillness

The poem pivots sharply at But to you. For the first time, the speaker stops moving: without my moving, Without seeing you, distant you. This is the hinge: the earlier women are immediate and visual (went by), but the final you is absent, perhaps not even physically present, and yet more powerful. The earlier desire is chase; this desire is magnetism. Instead of eyes and mouth running outward, my blood and my kisses go to her on their own.

That reversal creates the poem’s main tension: the speaker is aroused by variety, but he imagines commitment as something that happens at a deeper level than attention. The fickle body follows passing beauty; the deeper self sends blood and kisses to one person even in stillness.

A Beloved Made of Contradictions: Dark and Fair, Ugly and Beauty

The final portrait is deliberately impossible: My dark one and my fair one, My broad one and my slender one, even My ugly one, my beauty. The beloved becomes a container for opposites, as if the speaker is trying to end fickleness by building a figure who can absorb every preference. Instead of choosing between the dark girl’s heat and the blonde’s gold, he gathers both into a single you.

The materials list expands into a kind of myth of totality: all the gold, all the silver, all the wheat, all the earth, and finally all the water Of sea waves. The women who went by were particular; this beloved is elemental. And yet the poem refuses to leave her as an abstraction: she is Made for my arms, Made for my kisses, Made for my soul. The speaker wants her to be both the world and a body held close.

The Poem’s Unsettling Bargain

There’s a risky implication in those repeated Made for lines: the beloved is imagined less as a separate person than as a destiny tailored to the speaker’s need. If fickleness is a problem of appetite, his solution is to invent a beloved so comprehensive that no passing figure can compete. The poem’s beauty comes with that unsettling bargain: it reaches for devotion, but it frames devotion as possession—an attempt to gather all desire into one name.