The Insect
The Insect - meaning Summary
Erotic Journey in Miniature
Neruda's 'The Insect' imagines a speaker who likens himself to a tiny creature exploring a lover's body. Using a diminutive perspective, the poem maps sensual topography—hills, mountains, craters and spirals—across legs, knees and toes until it reaches the bed and the sexual "fiery crucible." The tone mixes wonder, hunger and devotion, turning erotic desire into a concentrated voyage of observation and longing.
Read Complete AnalysesFrom your hips down to your feet I want to make a long journey. I am smaller than an insect. Over these hills I pass, hills the colour of oats, crossed with faint tracks that only I know, scorched centimetres, pale perspectives. Now here is a mountain. I shall never leave this. What a giant growth of moss! And a crater, a rose of moist fire! Coming down your legs I trace a spiral, or sleep on the way, and arrive at your knees, round hardness like the hard peaks of a bright continent. Sliding down to your feet I reach the eight slits of your pointed, slow, peninsular toes, and from them I fall down to the white emptiness of the sheet, seeking blindly and hungrily the form of your fiery crucible!
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