the same concern for nature, humanity, and love
as all of his work. He called poetry the bread of
the masses and himself a poet of love. ‘‘Sonnet
LXXXIX’’ in the One Hundred Love Sonnets
gives the poet’s wife instructions for when he
dies. The sonnets are available in a University
of Texas Press edition translated by Stephen Taps-
cott (1986).
Author Biography
Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, Pablo Neruda’s
birth name, was born on July 12, 1904, in Parral,
a town south of Santiago, Chile. His father
worked on the railway, and his mother was a
teacher who died as soon as he was born. He
was raised by a stepmother with his half brother
and sister in Temuco, where he began publishing
poetry, prose, and journalistic articles as a teen-
ager. At the age of twenty, he adopted the name
of Pablo Neruda after Jan Neruda (1834–1891),
a favorite Czech poet. He went to Santiago to the
University of Chile to become a French teacher
but wrote poetry instead. In 1923,Crepusculario
was published, and the next year,Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair(1924). The latter
was both famous and controversial because of its
eroticism, but it made his reputation as a daring
and talented poet.
In 1927, Neruda accepted a post as Chilean
consul first in Burma, then Ceylon, Java, and Sin-
gapore. Lonely and repulsed by the climate of the
Far East, he wrote poems of existential despair,
which would becomeResidence on Earth,pub-
lished in two volumes in 1935. Out of his first
marriage in 1930 to Maria Antonieta Hagenaar
was born Neruda’s only child, Malva. With his
second wife, painter Delia del Carril, he went to
Spain as consul in 1934 and was changed by wit-
nessing the Spanish Civil War.SpaininMyHeart
(1937) is a tribute to the war-torn country and his
friends who were killed there. In 1945, Neruda was
elected as Chilean senator, and he joined the Com-
munist Party. He won Chile’s National Prize for
Literature the same year.
The Heights of Macchu Picchu was pub-
lished in 1945 (some claim it as his masterpiece),
The Third Residencein 1947, andCanto generalin
1950, a tribute to the working masses and the
history of South America. In 1948, Neruda had
to go into hiding in Chile when Communists were
outlawed. He remained in exile for many years.
In 1950, he won the Peace Prize in Warsaw, and
in 1953, the Stalin Peace Prize in Moscow. Ner-
uda carried on a clandestine relationship with
singer, Matilde Urrutia, who would become his
third wife, the love of his life, to whom he wrote
The Captain’s Verses(1952) andOne Hundred
Love Sonnets(1959). In the 1950s, Neruda pub-
lished three books ofOdes, poems celebrating
simple everyday objects and pleasures. At his
home in Isla Negra in Chile during the 1960s,
Neruda wrote hisMemoirs, published in 1974.
In 1970, Neruda was diagnosed with cancer.
That same year he helped Salvador Allende’s social-
ist government get elected and went to France as
ambassador. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1971 and died of heart failure on September 23,
1973, days after his friend, Allende, was assassi-
nated or committed suicide, and the dictator, Pino-
chet, began a reign of terror. Eight posthumous
books of poetry were published in 1973. Neruda
has been called one of the great poets of the twen-
tieth century.Poem Summary
When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and wheat of your beloved
hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep. 5
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want
you
to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.Pablo Neruda(Sam Falk / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
Sonnet LXXXIX