Perhaps she can give him a sense of life one last
time. This ends the first quatrain presenting the
scene of the moment of his death.
Line 5
The second quatrain instructs the lover about
what to do with her life once he is gone. She
must go on and live while he waits for her. He
is asleep and she will be awake; she must carry on
for both of them.
Line 6
He still wants her ears to hear the wind. He
imagines the life in her by putting attention on
her sensory experience. It implies that it is the
sensory experiences of earth he will miss. She
must sense them for herself and for him.
Line 7
He wants her to smell the sea because they loved
to do that together. Elsewhere in the sonnet
series, the couple’s love is compared to the sea,
wild and uncontained. In references to the sea,
the poet may be drawing upon images from his
life in Isla Negra, where his home had good
views of the ocean.
Line 8
The lover should continue to walk on the sand
they walked on together. This line ends the sec-
ond quatrain.
Though the poem is about death, the speaker
does not refer heaven or an afterlife somewhere
else. He does not explain where he will wait for his
lover. The emphasis is on the physical senses and
the present moment, on thelover’s continuing life,
since she will use her own sense of smell, touch,
hearing, and sight for him as well. She is the part of
him that will survive, since they are one. He will be
as if asleep, but she must continue to feel life
because it is a way to continue their love.
Line 9
The speaker explains that it is his wish that what
he loves should continue to live, so therefore she
must live.
Line 10
She has been the one he loved and wrote about
the most. Earlier in the sonnet series, the speaker
has given his lover credit for rekindling his poetic
gift in the last years of his life, and many of the
poems he wrote were love poems for her.
Line 11
He wants his beloved to continue, not in sorrow,
but to bloom in fullness. This flower image is
appropriate since she makes the garden live by
touching the soil and plants with her hands.Line 12
She has to bloom in order to grasp everything his
love has pointed to for her, to gather the gift of it.
The lover has been like an earth goddess in the
poems, full of life. She has to continue this role
and example.Line 13
If she does this for him, his shadow can be there
with her in her hair. The speaker reduces his
presence after death to a mere shadow around
her full life, but he imagines that will be enough
for him. This is the afterlife he imagines, nothing
supernatural. He will remain as a trace in her
hair, again a sensuous image. He has celebrated
her hair in many sonnets, and he now imagines
his essence after death entwined in her hair.Line 14
If she does as he asks and is full of life after his
death, then everyone will understand his song
about her. The speaker implies that the poems
have celebrated life, not death. The poet charac-
terizes the lover as one who as she carries on
alone is a living testimony to the couple’s love.
Neruda was a spiritual man who loved his wife,
his people, and the earth. He was not, however, a
religious man. So instead of picturing a religious
version of the afterlife in heaven, he names the
things on earth that will last: the love has shared
with his wife, their love of nature, and his poetry.
In Sonnet LXXXX, the speaker says that he
leaves only his lover behind, and only her love is
strong enough to defeat death. In Sonnet XCII,
he says that their love is immortal, like a river
that keeps flowing, but with other lips and in
other lands. They love, therefore, not only for
themselves, but as a legacy for all times.Themes
Love
One Hundred Love Sonnetscelebrates the rela-
tionship between Pablo Neruda and Matilde
Urrutia. Matilde was Neruda’s third wife and
his greatest love for the last twenty-five years ofSonnet LXXXIX