I Like You When You Are Quiet
I Like You When You Are Quiet - context Summary
Composed in 1924
This poem (Poem XV) appears in Neruda's 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and belongs to his intensely autobiographical early work. It presents a speaker who prefers the beloved's silence because it creates an illusion of distance and absence that both aches and comforts him. The poem folds longing and consolation together: silence becomes a space where the speaker projects his soul, finds small consolations in gestures, and imagines the beloved as a solitary, star-like presence. Its mood captures youthful, romantic longing and the tension between intimacy and removal.
Read Complete AnalysesI like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent, and you hear me from far away, and my voice does not touch you. It looks as though your eyes had flown away and it looks as if a kiss had sealed your mouth. Like all things are full of my soul you emerge from the things, full of my soul. Dream butterfly, you look like my soul, and you look like a melancoly word. I like you when you are quiet and it is as though you are distant. It is as though you are complaining, butterfly in lullaby. And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you: Let me fall quiet with your own silence. Let me also speak to you with your silence clear like a lamp, simple like a ring. You are like the night, quiet and constellated. Your silence is of a star, so far away and solitary. I like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent. Distant and painful as if you had died. A word then, a smile is enough. And I am happy, happy that it is not true.
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