Perhaps Not to Be Is to Be Without Your Being
Perhaps Not to Be Is to Be Without Your Being - context Summary
From Cien Sonetos De Amor
This sonnet appears in Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de Amor and is dedicated to Matilde Urrutia. It imagines absence as a negation of the speaker’s existence: without the beloved’s presence, light, and gesture, the speaker would not be fully alive. The poem moves from hypothetical non-being to a settled assertion that mutual love creates and affirms identity, ending with a collective future of being together.
Read Complete AnalysesPerhaps not to be is to be without your being, without your going, that cuts noon light like a blue flower, without your passing later through fog and stones, without the torch you lift in your hand that others may not see as golden, that perhaps no one believed blossomed the glowing origin of the rose, without, in the end, your being, your coming suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life, blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze: and it follows that I am, because you are: it follows from 'you are', that I am, and we: and, because of love, you will, I will, We will, come to be.
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