Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

PABLO NERUDA AT MACHU PICCHU 195

landscape teeming with life—giant bristling rauli trees, dripping ferns, scents of
wild herbs, an enormous red spider, a golden beetle, red copihues (bellflowers),
butterflies, a decaying tree trunk encrusted with blue and black mushrooms.
“Nature gave me a kind of embriaguez”—intoxication, euphoria—as in some
profuse paradise. But she wasn’t always benign. “Summer is scorching in Cau-
tín,” he remembers from age ten, settling into the present tense.

I go through the countryside in search of my poetry, walking and walking.

Around Ñielol hill I get lost, me pierdo. Estoy solo, I’m alone, my pocket filled

with scarab beetles. In a box I’ve got the hairy spider I just caught. Overhead

the sky’s blocked out. The forest is always damp, I slip, suddenly a bird cries

out, the weird cry of the chucao. It comes up from under my feet like a terrify-

ing omen. The copihues look like drops of blood, barely visible. Passing

under giant ferns I feel tiny. A ringdove flies past my mouth, the dry sound

of wingbeats. Higher up other birds are mocking me with harsh laughter. I

can hardly find my way.

Solo, perdido stamp his childhood memories.
Immersing in germinal nature, Neruda brings a son’s and lover’s need, just as
he would find a “mother of stone” and “sunken bride” at the Incas’ hidden city of
Machu Picchu. Add to this twofold need the image of his father, a trainman open-
ing up Chile ’s southern frontier, his “golden beard,” “his engine ’s / whistle /
piercing the rain.” Along with endemic machismo, Neruda’s robust voice stems
from fuerte tierra virgen, in his words, the south’s strong virgin earth.
From the boy who gathered gaudy spiders, one vowel-rich image catches
Neruda’s ambivalence at nineteen: Las arañas oscuras del pubis en reposo, “The
darksome spiders of the pubis at rest.” By the time he published Twenty Love
Poems and a Despairing Song (1924), destined as a breviary for countless Latin
American lovers, Neruda’s stance had firmed up, though he was no less struck
by woman’s earthly presence. Ah, las rosas del pubis! “My rough peasant ’s body
digs down in you / and makes a son leap from deep in earth.” This rough peas-
ant was studying French in Santiago by then.
Like the Bible ’s Song of Songs, he yokes his beloved to nature: “your hands
are soft as grapes.” More often she ’s fused by a primitive magic: she “is” the
twilight, the rivers sing “in her.” At times it ’s both.

Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos,

te pareces al mundo en tu actitud de entrega.

Body of woman, white hills, white thighs,

you look like the world spread out in surrender.

Surrender is problematic enough, while Neruda’s bravado lets commas tie
“woman” to “body” and “hills.” But do feminist ethics clash with ecology
here? Aren’t we part of nature, rather than not?