Love
Love - fact Summary
First Printed in 1924
This short lyric comes from Pablo Neruda's early collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (first published 1924). It portrays love as a violent, binding force that wounds and refuses release. The speaker alternates accusation and bewilderment, finding the beloved empty and indistinct despite intense physical history. The poem registers longing, frustration, and a repetitive, anguished questioning of why the relationship both attracts and destroys them.
Read Complete AnalysesWhat's wrong with you, with us, what's happening to us? Ah our love is a harsh cord that binds us wounding us and if we want to leave our wound, to separate, it makes a new knot for us and condemns us to drain our blood and burn together. What's wrong with you? I look at you and I find nothing in you but two eyes like all eyes, a mouth lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful, a body just like those that have slipped beneath my body without leaving any memory. And how empty you went through the world like a wheat-colored jar without air, without sound, without substance! I vainly sought in you depth for my arms that dig, without cease, beneath the earth: beneath your skin, beneath your eyes, nothing, beneath your double breast scarcely raised a current of crystalline order that does not know why it flows singing. Why, why, why, my love, why?
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