#sonnet lxvi

[thediaryofaluminousmind]

Maybe January light will consume My heart with its cruel ray.

Pablo Neruda, from Sonnet LXVI

[soracities]

and I will die of love because I love you, because I love you, my love, mercilessly, crazed.

Pablo Neruda, from ‘Sonnet LXVI’, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

[hamletisms-blog]

favourite poems: Sonnet LXVI by William Shakespeare

[revellious]

A thing that I find really interesting and that I think about a lot is Pablo Neruda's Sonnet LXVI: I Do Not Love You, Except Because I Love You. I studied it in college (age 16/17) and I recently found my workbook and notes from that class and I had written that this poem is "NOT LOVEY" - my study was focused on Neruda's love poems and I decided this one was not, necessarily, love poemy enough so I didn't use it.

Which is fascinating to me now (age 20/21) because it is, undeniably, a love poem. It feels like it was written in the heart of long-term semi-happiness, which was not a place I had been in college but a few years on it is definitely a place I have been and I feel every word of that poem in my soul when I read it and think back on the last few years.  

Another interesting part of this is that my English teacher never once called me out on it which I think is really cool. Like at the time it didn't fit with my lived experience of love so I decided that it wasn't a love poem (I was (am?) very head-in-the-clouds about love and it seemed so... not. Perhaps it's the line "I hate you deeply" that spoiled it for baby me) and instead of telling me that it Definitely Is a love poem my teacher just let me do my thing. I wonder if that's good or bad? Are teachers obliged to tell you when you're wrong about stuff like that? Can you be wrong about poetry?

[listentothelaughterofleaves]

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,-- As, to behold a Desert a beggar born, And needy Nothing trimm'd in jollity, And pureset Faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded Honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden Virtue rudely strumpeted, And right Perfection wrongfully disgraced, And Strength by limping Sway disabled, And Art made tongue-tied by Authority, And Folly, doctor-like, controlling Skill, And simple Truth miscall'd Simplicity, And captive Good attending captain Ill: Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

William Shakespeare

[peggyinthetwilight]

Te quiero sólo porque a ti te quiero

Pablo Neruda, Sonnet LXVI

[anonymousi]

En esta historia sólo yo me muero y moriré de amor porque te quiero, porque te quiero, amor, a sangre y fuego.

[growing-orbits-blog]

I do not love you--except because I love you; I go from loving you to not loving you, from waiting to not waiting for you my heart moves from the cold into the fire. I love you because it's you I love; I hate you no end, and hating you bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Pablo Neruda, from "Sonnet LXVI" (Evening), in One Hundred Love Sonnets, translated by S. Tapscott