love. Sonnet LXXXIX comes in the ‘‘Night’’ sec-
tion and addresses their eventual separation
through death. The speaker makes it clear, how-
ever, that it is his body that will die but not the
love between them. Though love has its seasons,
it is not subject to death. As the poems unfold,
the love between the man and woman expands
to embrace nature and the suffering people of
the world.
In his earlier book of love poems to Matilde,
The Captain’s Verses, Neruda began to braid
together the themes of love and politics. There,
the speaker addresses his lover as his comrade in
the fight against the world’s injustice. In the son-
nets, he again asserts that his life stands for the
love and care of all humanity, and their personal
love will be the lasting testimony to that.
Death
The ‘‘Night’’ section brings up the inevitable
moment of separation through death. The lovers
must tie their hearts together to defeat darkness,
the speaker says, in Sonnet LXXIX. Several of the
sonnets assume he will die before she does, and he
tells her how to be the survivor. Sonnet LXXXIX
depicts the speaker’s death as a sort of sleep and
his beloved as his vicarious life. While he sleeps,
she must use her senses and live intensely for both
of them. Though the theme is death, the imagery
and tone are passionately alive, showing her how
she must be when he leaves her. All the sonnets are
focused on the physicality of the joys of love—her
body as the body of nature, for instance. The
lovers enjoy and fit into the cycles of nature,
even this one of death and separation. He contin-
ues to celebrate and tell her how to keep living for
their love. He does not want death to cause sad-
ness, but he also refuses to deny the difficulty of
separation of death by offering spiritual consola-
tion. It is only their love that sustains them in this
physical separation, as intheir life together. In
Sonnet XCV, he declares that no one has loved
as they did, and they must consume their life with
passion like a full fruit that falls to the earth. The
light of such a love endures.Continuity of Life
In the death sonnets, especially LXXX, LXXXIX,
XC, XCII, XCIII, XCIV, in which the poet imag-
ines either the beloved’s death or the speaker’sLovers walking on the beach(Image copyright iofoto, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
Sonnet LXXXIX