Walking Around - Analysis

A disgust that starts in the body

Neruda’s central claim is blunt and intimate: the speaker’s misery isn’t an abstract sadness but a physical nausea at being human. The poem opens on a sentence that sounds like a shrug and a confession at once: It so happens I am sick. That phrasing matters because it’s both casual and fated, as if this sickness is ordinary weather. The disgust quickly attaches itself to specific, embarrassing parts of the self: my feet and my nails, my hair and my shadow. It’s not just society he rejects; it’s the fact of having a body that sheds, grows, casts a silhouette. The city spaces he enters—tailorshops and movie houses—don’t entertain or clothe him; they dry him out. He moves through them dried up, waterproof, like someone sealed off from feeling.

The “swan made of felt”: elegance turned dead

The poem’s early surreal image—a swan made of felt—tells you what kind of despair this is. A swan suggests grace and beauty, but felt is artificial, matted, absorbent: a swan that can’t swim. The speaker “steers” this fake elegance through a water of wombs and ashes, a liquid made from beginnings and endings, birth and cremation. That phrase makes the city feel like a biological and funerary soup, where everything is either being born or being burned. Even ordinary smells become too much: The smell of barbershops makes him break into hoarse sobs. A barbershop is where men are groomed into social acceptability; here, that ritual of maintenance is unbearable, as if it reminds him he is trapped inside a role called “man.”

Wanting the peace of objects, not the life of people

Against this sensory overload, the speaker’s desire is startlingly simple: lie still like stones or wool. Stones don’t have needs; wool has been shorn and neutralized. The wish is not for happiness but for non-participation—a quiet that doesn’t require a self. That explains the litany of refusals: no more stores, no gardens, no elevators. These aren’t random places; they’re sites of consumption, display, upward motion, improvement. Even “gardens,” usually restorative, are rejected as another curated spectacle. The poem creates a tension here: the speaker craves inertness, but his mind keeps producing intense images and longings. His refusal is energetic; his exhaustion is loud.

Violence as a fantasy of feeling something real

Then comes a turn: the wish to disappear flips into the wish to shock. Still it would be marvelous, he says, imagining terrifying a law clerk with a cut lily or killing a nun with a blow. The targets—bureaucracy and sanctity—are symbols of social order, clean rules, moral bookkeeping. The weapons are oddly symbolic: a lily is purity, but “cut” it becomes a severed emblem; the violence is not strategic but theatrical, like a desperate attempt to puncture a world that feels numbingly proper. The speaker’s dream of walking with a green knife while yelling until I died of the cold mixes aggression and self-erasure. Even the fantasy of power ends in an image of exposure and death: he wants intensity, but he also wants it to finish him.

The root under the city: living as burial

Mid-poem, the speaker offers his most sustained metaphor for his condition: I don't want to go on being a root. This is a life lived underground—in the dark, shivering with sleep—a plant’s existence without sunlight, reduced to mere absorption. The language turns anatomical and humiliating: he is going down into the moist guts of the earth, taking in and thinking, eating every day. Daily survival becomes an animal function, not a meaningful routine. The metaphor intensifies into death-in-life: a root and a tomb, a warehouse with corpses. A warehouse is storage, not mourning; it implies accumulation, inventory, the bureaucratic handling of the dead. The contradiction tightens: he is sick of being a man, yet what terrifies him is a life reduced to mere matter—root, tomb, storage—where the self still persists, alone, but stripped of dignity.

Monday as a predator: time shoves him into the world

Instead of choosing to re-enter life, he is forced back by time itself. That's why Monday becomes an antagonist that recognizes him—my convict face—and responds by flaring up like gasoline. Monday is not just a day; it’s the social machine restarting, the week’s demand for usefulness. It howls and leaves tracks of warm blood, as if the ordinary schedule injures him on contact. What follows is a series of pushes into degrading spaces: moist houses, hospitals where bones fly, shoeshops that smell like vinegar. The world is experienced as dampness, sourness, fracture—streets hideous as cracks in skin. The city becomes a diseased body, and the speaker is swallowed inside it.

Grotesque inventory: the city’s secret organs

The poem’s most memorable passage is its catalog of repulsive objects: sulphur-colored birds, hideous intestines over doorways, false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot, mirrors that ought to have wept. These details feel like the world’s private shame brought into public view. False teeth in a coffeepot is domestic life turned uncanny—nourishment contaminated by decay and pretense. Mirrors “weeping” suggests that even reflection, the tool for composing a socially acceptable face, is complicit in horror. And then come umbrellas, venoms, umbilical cords: protection, poison, and birth-tissue all jumbled together. The city is presented as a place where the boundaries between outside and inside, clean and filthy, living and dead have collapsed.

A serene walk with rage in its pocket

The ending doesn’t resolve the despair; it complicates it. The speaker says, I stroll along serenely, yet he lists what he carries: my eyes, my shoes, my rage. Serenity and rage coexist, suggesting a numb calm that is not peace but a kind of dissociation. He passes through office buildings and orthopedic shops, places associated with administration and repair—systems that manage bodies rather than understand them. The final image is devastatingly quiet: laundry in a courtyard—underwear, towels and shirts—from which slow dirty tears are falling. The world is crying, but through fabric and grime, not through a human face. It’s the poem’s last twist of the knife: even cleanliness is stained, even drying is a form of weeping, and the speaker’s “serene” walking is simply moving through a city that has learned to cry without anyone admitting it.

What if the disgust is also a form of conscience?

The poem keeps insisting that the speaker is repelled by stores and goods and the weekday machinery called Monday. If that’s true, then his nausea may not be mere self-hatred; it may be a sensitivity to how modern life turns bodies into objects—feet and nails, teeth and shoes, bones and inventories. The question the poem leaves hanging is uncomfortable: when he imagines violence against a law clerk or a nun, is he attacking cruelty, or just trying to feel powerful inside a world that has reduced him to a warehouse?