Love calls us to the things of this world, say Augustine and Wilbur.
Pablo Neruda says the same thing. Perhaps we would rather escape the earth or transcend it or ignore it. But (MacNeice this time) the earth compels.
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Pablo Neruda
Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.
Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.
You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.
[trans. William O’Daly]
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Neruda wrote only in green ink – color of earth’s plants – so we’ll do that too… Here you have a hard-hearted person, dead to the light of the world, estranged from his own memories, living under a dull pelting rain. Let’s say he’s the poet himself, impervious to what used to be the sources of his aesthetic energy.
Confusingly and compellingly, however, the earth’s outburst on this day amounts to a kind of visitation: the bell-like rain now echoes with the remembered rain of the poet’s childhood, and this sets going a welcome, tentative, awakening in him. As opposed to the old morning/noon/night story the sun begins each day to tell, there’s a particular “slant” here, an edginess that’s the poet’s own. Now can he live and write?
Not quite. Kissed awake by the kiss of mud the rain kicks up, the poet concludes with a love song to the earth, mysterious origin of his physical and spiritual life. But how to love this dark lady? The sun’s old clarity might be a bore; but this deeper, truer, carbon-coated body, this muffled vehicle of song, frustrates and exhausts the muse.
So the muse simply has to keep at it. The earth compels. “I must still uncloud my earthly duties.”