Some Beasts
Some Beasts - meaning Summary
From Color to Predatory Night
The poem surveys a twilight-to-night cascade of animal life in rich, sensuous detail. Neruda catalogs creatures—iguana, guanaco, llama, monkey, alligator, jaguar, puma—each presented through vivid physical and sensory traits that suggest motion, appetite, and elemental presence. The sequence moves from color and delicate activity into darker, predatory force, portraying nature as a continuum of beauty, desire, and latent violence rather than a static scene.
Read Complete AnalysesIt was the twilight of the iguana: From a rainbowing battlement, a tongue like a javelin lunging in verdure; an ant heap treading the jungle, monastic, on musical feet; the guanaco, oxygen-fine in the high places swarthed with distances, cobbling his feet into gold; the llama of scrupulous eye the widens his gaze on the dews of a delicate world. A monkey is weaving a thread of insatiable lusts on the margins of morning: he topples a pollen-fall, startles the violet-flight of the butterfly, wings on the Muzo. It was the night of the alligator: snouts moving out of the slime, in original darkness, the pullulations, a clatter of armour, opaque in the sleep of the bog, turning back to the chalk of the sources. The jaguar touches the leaves with his phosphorous absence, the puma speeds to his covert in the blaze of his hungers, his eyeballs, a jungle of alcohol, burn in his head.
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