own, the focus is not on decay, absence, or sorrow.
It is on the continuity of life. They will go back
to the earth, but their love, his poetry, and human-
ity that they both have loved so dearly, will all
survive. The celebrated parts of life must con-
tinue, even if through other hands and lips.
Even in death, the poet wants to pass on the
legacy of hope.
In ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX,’’ he says if he dies
first, he will wait for his wife; she is the surviving
testament to his poetry. In the ‘‘Night’’ section of
the sonnets, the speaker focuses on death and
also remembers the people he will leave behind.
He asks for bread for the workers he loves and
happiness for his beloved. He warns her if she
mourns, he will die a second time. She must
continue to uphold their love after he dies for
the sake of others. He compares their love to a
beacon fire on the mountain or a river that will
continue to flow, to which others will add. In
Sonnet XCII, he tells her that they must be grate-
ful they found one another and that the meadow
of infinity they shared for a while, must now be
given back, even though the love is not ended.
One way he establishes the continuity of life is
to compare death to night. During the night the
lovers sleep together, and they are resurrected as
someone new the next day. They have passed
through the shadows of time together. In the
death sonnets, the speaker can take this one
more step to assure her that similarly, there will
be continuity of life after death, perhaps not per-
sonal continuity, but of a more general kind. It
may not be their hands and faces, but they have
added to the reservoir of love for the benefit of all
who come after. Another way he creates continu-
ity is through the paradox of presence in absence.
He always feels her when she is absent, and it will
be like that in death; she must inhabit his absence
like a house (Sonnet XCIV).
Style
Sonnet
The sonnet, or little song, became popular in the
later Middle Ages as it was used by Italian lyric
poets such as Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Aligh-
ieri. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) immortalized
the form in hisCanzoniereto his beloved Laura
(perhaps Laura de Noves, 1308–1348). Poets in
every European country in the Renaissance used
the sonnet for love poetry and for discussions of
other topics, too. The Italian sonnet is fourteen
lines, divided into an octave and a sestet, in which
a topic is introduced in the first eight lines and
then takes a turn in direction in the last six. The
English variation on this is a sonnet of three qua-
trains and a concluding couplet.
Neruda uses the Italian sonnet with a basic
division of eight and six, but he does not follow the
established rhyme scheme. The lines are short free
verse in this loose, modern adaptation of the son-
net form. Neruda divides the octave into quatrains,
and the sestet is divided into tercets (three-line
stanzas). In the octave, he introduces some thought
or imagery or scene, and in the sestet he reflects on
the meaning of it. In ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX,’’ the first
eight lines are instructions to the beloved about
what to do when he dies. The last six explain why
he wants her to do what he has asked.
As is traditional with love sonnets, the poet
addresses the poems to his ideal lady. Neruda
glorifies Matilde, not as Petrarch glorified Laura
as a type of the Madonna, but as an earth mother
who takes care of the garden, all living things,
and the poet himself.
Chilean Literature
Spanish poet Alfonso Ercilla y Zu ́n ̃iga had writ-
ten an epic about Chile in 1888 calledLa Arau-
cana, romanticizing the country and its native
people. This was a model for Neruda’s later
Canto general(1950), which attempts to define
his country’s origin and character. Chilean liter-
ature began to blossom on the world stage,
however, in the 1920s with Neruda as part of a
founding group of poets in Santiago, who broke
from the old romantic models to champion
modernism.Twenty Love Poems and a Song of
Despair(1924) made Neruda famous, with its
daring lack of meter, surrealist imagery, and
frank sexual content. Vincente Huidobro was
another of this circle of avant-garde writers, urg-
ing poets to forget tradition and invent their own
reality in verse.
Two of Chile’s poets have won the Nobel
Prize: Gabriela Mistral (1945) and Pablo Neruda
(1971). Contemporary Chilean novelists are
also read internationally, such as Isabel Allende,
whoseHouse of the Spirits,Of Love and Shadows,
andEva Lunahave been bestsellers. Luis Sepu ́l-
veda’sThe Old Man Who Read Love Stories,and
Jose ́ Donoso’s novelCurfew,Antonio Ska ́rme-
ta’s novelBurning Patience(about Neruda) are
other well-known works of Chilean literature.
Sonnet LXXXIX
