Naked You Are as Simple as One of Your Hands
Naked You Are as Simple as One of Your Hands - meaning Summary
Simple, Sensuous Human Intimacy
This poem presents the beloved’s nakedness as plain, intimate, and simultaneously cosmic, comparing the body to hands, nails, grain, moonlit nights, and summer light. Neruda compresses sensuality and everyday domestic imagery to show how nakedness reveals essential form and returns to ordinary acts. The poem’s closing image links vulnerability and routine, suggesting love’s cyclical movement between revelation and concealment. It belongs to Neruda’s romantic, sensuous work in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
Read Complete AnalysesNaked, you are simple as one of your hands, Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round: You have moonlines, applepathways: Naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat. Naked, you are blue as the night in Cuba; You have vines and stars in your hair; Naked, you are spacious and yellow As summer in a golden church. Naked, you are tiny as one of your nails, Curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born And you withdraw to the underground world, as if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores: Your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves, And becomes a naked hand again.
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