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RILLORAZA - FINAL OUTPUT Literary Analysis

The document analyzes Pablo Neruda's poem "Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines". It discusses how the poem expresses the agony of lost love through lyrical language and vivid imagery of a shattered night. The poet is overcome with sadness as he realizes his lost love is now "another's" and forgetting her has been long and difficult despite their love being short-lived. The document examines how the poem captures profoundly universal human emotions of love, loss, remembrance and forgetting that many readers can personally relate to.

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Martin Rilloraza Jr.
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82 views

RILLORAZA - FINAL OUTPUT Literary Analysis

The document analyzes Pablo Neruda's poem "Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines". It discusses how the poem expresses the agony of lost love through lyrical language and vivid imagery of a shattered night. The poet is overcome with sadness as he realizes his lost love is now "another's" and forgetting her has been long and difficult despite their love being short-lived. The document examines how the poem captures profoundly universal human emotions of love, loss, remembrance and forgetting that many readers can personally relate to.

Uploaded by

Martin Rilloraza Jr.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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MARTIN A. RILLORAZA JR.

| 18-09228

Isa Lang
By: Arthur Nery

The most recent single “Isa Lang” is in Filipino. It


roughly translates to “only one” in the English
language. So with that foreknowledge in mind, we know
that we’re most likely approaching a love song. By the
looks of things, the lyrics to this particular song
are pretty poetic. This coupled with the language
barrier, certain intricacies of what Arthur is putting
forth have obviously been lost in translation.

But the basis of what he’s asserting seems to be that


he is looking for a serious, committed, monogamous
relationship, most specifically with the addressee.
And likewise, the vocalist desires to be the “only
one” said individual deals with in a romantic
capacity. This is apparently where the title “only
one” is coming from.

And again, there appears to be more going down here.


It is as if perhaps the two parties involved have some
type of prior association or perhaps discontent in
their relationship. But the abovementioned would be
the gist of the primary sentiment being presented,
i.e. the singer desiring to get more serious with the
addressee.
MARTIN A. RILLORAZA JR. | 18-09228

Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)


By: Pablo Neruda [1914-1973]

Lines 1-7
It does not seem as though he realized what it was to
love until he starts writing about her. In fact, it is
the idea of love that he loves more than the woman,
and thus he can write “the saddest lines”. Such
sentiments immediately charmed the young people who
were themselves experiencing similar emotions, and
they were able to identify with Neruda and appropriate
his words in their own love affairs. This is what
makes Neruda so much a poet of the common people. As
the poor fisherman’s son who brings him his letters in
the movie II Postino petulantly tells him, poetry does
not belong to the poet composes it; it belongs to
those who need to use it, especially lovers seeking to
win the beloved through words.

Lines 8-13
Neruda’s poems are full of easily understood images
which makes them no less beautiful. To hear him talk
about “verse (that) falls to the soul like dew to the
pasture” makes the whole process of writing poetry so
comprehensive. Similarly, the deliberate repetition of
certain words and images such as: My sight searches
for her…/My heart looks for her. Emphasizes the over-
wrought condition of the crazed lover. The poet is a
jealous lover who imagines that “She will be
another’s”. However, the ordinariness of this love
affair that almost anyone can identify with surely
reaches a profoundly universal level when he
confesses: Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
The woman can be seen as the condescending one and the
personification of poetic inspiration. The poems in the
collection were the outcome of two actual love affairs where
Neruda’s focus shifts between one who is beautiful and the one
who is distant and threatening. From the conventional poet that
he was in his first two books, Song of the Fiesta (1921) and
Crepuscular (1923, here in Twenty Love Poems he is certainly
breaking away from tradition and attempting to find a new
voice. The tone is modernista –simple, evocative, and, at
times, meditative. The collection has a personalized theme of a
man who is not a hero, nor yet a public figure.

Lines 15-22
There is a growing feeling of solitariness in the poet that,
although nature and the environment have remained unchanged
over the years, he has lost the woman he once loved. The
expression is intensely lyrical and full of agony when he
says:… The night is shattered/and the blue stars shiver in the
distance. The poignancy of the situation is further heightened
when he realizes: I loved her,/and sometimes she loved me too.
And equally, she loved me,/sometimes I loved her too./How could
one not have loved her great still eyes.

Lines 23-32
Now that the poet experiences the pangs of separation, the
night is “shattered” and the stars seem to be shivering. The
night wind “revolving” around the sky is whistling a sad tune.
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines.” The saddest lines are
about his lost love… “she is not with me” and My sight searches
for her as though to go to her./My heart looks for her, and she
is not with me. “This is all”, the poet sumps up his present
situation. But is this really all? The poet misses her: The
same night whitening the same trees./We, of that time, are no
longer the same.

She is now “another’s” and he still misses “Her voice. Her


bright body. Her infinite eyes.” He might have loved her for a
short time, but forgetting her has taken too long; his soul
still searches for her, the pangs of separation still pierce
his heart; and the poet vows that this is “the last time” he
writes for her. He doesn’t appear to be so sure, however, nor
are we. And this lends universality to ‘Tonight I Can Write’.

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