The Portrait in the Rock
The Portrait in the Rock - context Summary
Exile and Persecution
The poem recounts a speaker’s memory of a persecuted friend who is hunted, beaten by police and forced to wander in exile across Europe. After the friend disappears, the speaker later sees his likeness carved into a mountain, a stone portrait that makes exile tangible and permanent. The transformation into rock registers survival, mourning, and the claim of belonging to homeland. It reflects Neruda’s recurring concerns with exile and political violence.
Read Complete AnalysesOh yes I knew him, I spent years with him, with his golden and stony substance, he was a man who was tired - in Paraguay he left his father and mother, his sons, his nephews, his latest in-laws, his house, his chickens, and some half-opened books. They called him to the door. When he opened it, the police took him, and they beat him up so much that he spat blood in France, in Denmark, in Spain, in Italy, moving about, and so he died and I stopped seeing his face, stopped hearing his profound silence ; then once, on a night of storms, with snow spreading a smooth cloak on the mountains, on horseback, there, far off, I looked and there was my friend - his face was formed in stone, his profile defied the wild weather, in his nose the wind was muffling the moaning of the persecuted. There the exile came to ground. Changed into stone, he lives in his own country.
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