Life &Poetry Entropy | 05 Apr 2009
Gift of poetry
Here is a story about the essential gift of poetry. In an essay called “Childhood and Poetry” Pablo Neruda links an odd event from his boyhood to the affirmative impulses of lyric poetry itself. Neruda grew up in Temuco, a far outpost in southern Chile. He remembers playing in the backyard behind the family house and suddenly discovering a hole in a fence board:
I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared– a tiny hand of a boy about my own age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white sheep.
The sheep’s wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I looked back through the hole but the boy had disappeared. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pinecone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep.
I never saw either the hand or the boy again….
Neruda carefully goes on to link this episode to the origin of his poetry to the humane impulses of the lyric.
“To feel the love of people a whom we love is a fire that feeds our life,”
on 06 Apr 2009 at 6:27 pm 1.hetal takia said …
Many people try to analyse life but few are lucky enough to have the knack to put it down in writing and these are few, it is good to know that some where some r the ones who let us know in words what we r thinking . may be alittle
why not every one connects sometime in life
on 09 Apr 2009 at 12:55 pm 2.Nimesh Dadia said …
Like Neruda’s work itself , this instance from his life is a slice of Magical Realism of Life.
Beautifully put.