Touchstone: Neruda

I love Pablo Neruda's poetry. His phrases, insights, and images haunt me, give voice and form to my own thoughts and feelings. That's one of the gifts of poetic expression, perhaps one of the burdens. Even when I can't quite keep up with his leaping, sweeping, picturesque imagery, I love being along for part of the wild ride. I expect the more I read Neruda, the more able I'll be to keep my seat in that saddle. And, much of what Neruda wrote is so accessible, so open and available, so touchable and true. He's never just simple, never simplistic, but he has the capacity for clarity, oh yes. Passionate, reflective, exuberant, and clear: Isn't that an ideal poet?

Reading Neruda and Lorca always makes me aware of a lack or loss, makes me wish I would just revive my old high school Spanish, would just take some classes to learn the language properly instead of just shifting back and forth between the translation in English and the Spanish original. I can work through many of the passages, but I am blind and deaf to so much nuance, tone, flavor. (And, wouldn't it be wonderful to speak Spanish anyway, to converse with so many of the people I know and meet in the original language of their hearts?)

Here's a poem I recently rediscovered. I was looking for "The Sea Urchin" because I am teaching Martin Wells' Civilization and the Limpet, a collection of marine biology essays, in my English 1A. I wanted to bring another enthusiast of the natural world to my students, and Neruda both pays attention to the world in front of him and brings the human world into contact with that nature's denizen, animate or inanimate, whether sea urchin, octopus, crayfish, starfish, seaweed, chunks of granite, bits of jade, figureheads transformed by years of wind, sand, sun, and tide, even a mermaid's heart . . . . Perhaps Neruda and I are too focused on the human, too ready to bring human and nonhuman together. I will ponder the issue of whether I am failing to pay due respect to the sea urchin or limpet or kelp as itself, only itself, but right now, I don't care. Read the poem, as I will reread it.

The Sea Urchin

The sea urchin is the sun of the sea,
centrifugal and orange,
full of quills like flames,
made of eggs and iodine.

The sea urchin is like the world:
round, fragile, hidden:
wet, secret, and hostile:
the sea urchin is like love.

---Pablo Neruda

Translated by Maria Jacketti and Dennis Maloney
Neruda, Pablo. Isla Negra. Ed. Dennis Maloney. Buffalo New York: White Pine Press, 2001.