Tonight I Can Write
## 1. Introduction: The Poet and the Poem Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, is one of the most widely read and beloved poets of the twentieth cen...
1. Introduction: The Poet and the Poem
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, is one of the most widely read and beloved poets of the twentieth century. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. His early collection Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), published in 1924 when he was barely twenty years old, remains his most popular work. The book is a unified sequence that traces the arc of a passionate love affair—from the first stirrings of desire through ecstatic union to the anguish of separation and loss.
“Tonight I Can Write” (in Spanish, “Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche”) is the penultimate poem in that collection, numbered Poem 20. It is immediately followed by “The Song of Despair,” which closes the book. Together, these two poems form the emotional climax of the entire sequence. While the early poems celebrate the beloved’s body and the natural world in lush, erotic imagery, Poem 20 marks the definitive end of the relationship. The speaker looks back at a lost love, acknowledging that he can now write the saddest lines precisely because he has gained the necessary distance from the pain—but that distance itself is agonising.
The poem is a landmark of modern love poetry. It manages to be intensely personal and universal at the same time. Every reader who has experienced a breakup recognises the contradictory feelings Neruda captures: the relief of being able to articulate sorrow, the ache of remembering, the futile attempt to hold onto a love that has slipped away, and the terrible realisation that forgetting will take far longer than the loving ever did.
For students of English Honours, the poem offers rich possibilities for close reading. It invites questions about the relationship between experience and art, memory and imagination, nature and emotion. It also demonstrates Neruda’s astonishing command of simple language to convey complex states of mind.
2. Complete Text
(Translated by W. S. Merwin)
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, “The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.”
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
3. Stanza-wise Summary and Analysis
The poem does not follow a rigid stanzaic pattern; it unfolds as a series of short verse paragraphs, often a single line or a couplet. The following breakdown groups related lines to trace the emotional and argumentative progression.
Section 1 (Lines 1-4): Declaring the Possibility of Sadness
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, “The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.”
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
The poem opens with a statement that is both an announcement and a discovery. The speaker has reached a moment where he is finally able to transform his grief into poetry. The word “can” is crucial—it suggests that previously the pain was too raw, too immediate to be shaped into words. Now, a certain distance allows artistic control. He immediately demonstrates the kind of lines he could write, offering a brief, imagistic sketch of the night. Notice that the stars are not just bright; they “shiver.” This personification injects a subtle chill, an emotional temperature that matches the speaker’s inner state. The wind “sings,” introducing an auditory element that, set against the vast silence of the night, intensifies loneliness.
Section 2 (Lines 5-8): The Complication of Memory
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
The refrain “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” returns like a wave. Now the poet fills in the reason: love, but love that was never perfectly symmetrical. “Sometimes she loved me too” is heartbreaking in its simplicity. The adverb “sometimes” undercuts the whole relationship; it was not an equal, constant devotion. Yet the memory of physical intimacy—“I held her,” “I kissed her again and again”—is vivid and set under an “endless sky” that makes human love seem both small and infinitely precious. The repetition of “again and again” mimics the obsessive quality of memory, the mind returning to the same moments compulsively.
Section 3 (Lines 9-10): A Glimpse of Reciprocity and Beauty
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Line 9 reverses the earlier formulation: now she loved him, and sometimes he loved her. This chiasmus (mirror structure) reveals the fundamental instability of the affair. Both parties were, at different moments, the one who loved less. The question “How could one not have loved her great still eyes” is rhetorical. It shifts from personal confession to a universal appeal. “Great still eyes” suggests a profound, calm depth—perhaps an unattainable inner world that the speaker could admire but never fully possess. The word “still” also hints at a kind of emotional distance in the beloved, an absence even when present.
Section 4 (Lines 11-14): The Heart of Loss
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
The refrain recurs for the third time, framing the central admission. The infinitive constructions “To think,” “To feel,” “To hear” create a litany of suffering. The poet distinguishes between intellectual acknowledgment (“think”) and emotional reality (“feel”); he both knows and suffers the loss. The night, already vast, becomes “still more immense without her,” an example of how subjective emotion magnifies the external world. The simile of the verse falling “like dew to the pasture” is extraordinary. Dew is gentle, silent, life-giving, and arrives in the darkness. Poetry, for Neruda, does not shout the pain; it settles softly into the soul, nourishing it even as it records grief. Art transforms suffering into something almost tender.
Section 5 (Lines 15-16): Futility and Presence
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
The speaker tries to adopt a tone of resignation. “What does it matter” is a rhetorical shrug, but the second line betrays the first. The beauty of the starry night, which earlier inspired a poetic image, is now a painful reminder of absence. “She is not with me” is a simple declarative sentence that carries enormous weight. The line echoes the earlier “The night is starry” but adds the crushing negation. The same external reality now signifies loss.
Section 6 (Lines 17-20): Distance and Dissatisfaction
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
“This is all” attempts to close the emotional wound prematurely, as if the speaker wants to stop writing, stop feeling. But the distant song pulls him back into longing. The phrase “In the distance” is repeated, mimicking an echo and emphasising how far away everything comforting or beautiful seems. The soul’s dissatisfaction is stated plainly. Then, the senses and emotions are personified: “My sight tries to find her,” “My heart looks for her.” The speaker’s entire being is engaged in a hopeless search. The beloved is absent, yet the very act of seeking keeps her psychologically present.
Section 7 (Lines 21-22): The Irreversible Change
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
These two lines are among the most philosophically profound in the poem. Nature remains identical—“the same night whitening the same trees”—a stable, cyclical backdrop. But the human beings who once stood within that landscape are irrevocably altered. The phrase “We, of that time” separates the past selves from the present selves. Neruda captures a truth about loss: it does not merely remove the beloved; it changes the lover into someone who can never again be who he was. The passing of time is not just chronological; it is ontological.
Section 8 (Lines 23-24): The Paradox of Loving and Not Loving
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
The speaker now asserts that his love has ended, but the exclamatory “how I loved her” undercuts the certainty. The “but” is the fulcrum on which the whole poem balances. The second line is densely metaphorical. The voice—the medium of his poetry—attempts to merge with the wind, an invisible, far-travelling element, in the hope of reaching her ear. It is an image of desperate, magical thinking: if his words can become as omnipresent as the wind, maybe she will hear him. It also prefigures the poem’s own ambition to reach beyond the personal, to be carried into the world like the wind.
Section 9 (Lines 25-26): The Other
Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
The fractured syntax of “Another’s.” isolates the word, making it a brutal, single-syllable blow. Then the sentence expands: “She will be another’s.” The speaker faces the reality that the beloved will move on, that she belonged to someone else before him and will again. The list of her attributes—“Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.”—is a catalogue of sensory memories. The adjective “infinite” applied to her eyes recalls the “endless sky” earlier and suggests that her mystery and allure were always beyond his grasp. The very things he loved are now the things that torment him.
Section 10 (Lines 27-30): The Famous Paradox and the Recapitulation
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
The admission “but maybe I love her” completely subverts the earlier certainty. Neruda exposes the mind’s inability to settle on a single truth about deep emotion. The paradox “Love is so short, forgetting is so long” has become one of the most quoted lines in all of love poetry. It condenses the entire experience of heartbreak into ten simple words. Love, the intense, lived experience, passes quickly; forgetting, the passive process of healing, drags on interminably. The speaker then circles back to the memory of embrace and the soul’s dissatisfaction, creating a spiral rather than a linear argument. He is trapped in the loop of recollection.
Section 11 (Lines 31-32): The Final Ambiguity
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
The poem ends with a concession clause that hovers between hope and despair. “Though this be the last pain” is a wish as much as a statement. The poet wants this poem to be an exorcism, a final ritual that will release him. But the word “though” leaves the outcome uncertain. Will this really be the last pain? The subjunctive mood (“this be”) signals a desired rather than a guaranteed future. Similarly, “these the last verses” is an attempt to close the book on the relationship, but the reader knows that the poem itself is proof of how hard it is to let go. The ending is not resolution but a poignant, open-ended sigh.
4. Poetic Devices and Stylistic Features
Anaphora and Refrain
The line “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” acts as a refrain, recurring four times. It structures the poem rhythmically and psychologically, each repetition marking a deeper layer of grief. The device is both an anchor and a drumbeat of sorrow.
Paradox
“I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.” The poem is built on paradoxes that capture the contradictory nature of post-love emotion: one can simultaneously feel over someone and still deeply attached. “Love is so short, forgetting is so long” is the ultimate compressed paradox.
Personification
“The stars are blue and shiver,” “the night wind revolves … and sings,” “the verse falls to the soul like dew,” “my soul is not satisfied,” “my sight tries to find her,” “my heart looks for her.” Neruda animates both the natural world and the speaker’s faculties, suggesting a universe saturated with feeling and intentionality.
Simile
The most striking simile is “the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.” It equates the creative process with a natural, gentle, and necessary phenomenon. Dew nourishes silently; so does poetry for the wounded soul.
Imagery
The poem’s imagery is predominantly nocturnal and cosmic: starry night, blue stars, endless sky, immense night, wind, dew. This vast, elemental backdrop dwarfs the human drama and yet perfectly mirrors it. The infinite sky becomes a metaphor for the enduring presence of memory and loss.
Juxtaposition and Contrast
Neruda continuously juxtaposes presence and absence (“The night is starry and she is not with me”), past and present (“We, of that time, are no longer the same”), and love and indifference. These contrasts create a tense, vibrating emotional field.
Enjambment
Lines flow into one another without terminal punctuation, especially in the opening. This technique mimics the continuous, unbroken stream of memory and feeling, refusing to let the reader—or the speaker—pause and rest.
Chiasmus
“I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too” / “She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.” The mirror reversal demonstrates the unstable power dynamics in the relationship and the speaker’s attempt to be fair in his remembering.
The “Dew” Simile and Meta-Poetry
The line “And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture” is a meta-poetic moment: the poem reflects on its own effect. It suggests that the act of writing is not a violent catharsis but a quiet, assimilative healing.
5. Major Themes
The Relationship Between Love and Writing
The entire poem is an exploration of the conditions under which love can be turned into art. The speaker needs distance (“Tonight I can write”) but discovers that writing does not erase the love; it only transforms it into a different kind of presence. The poem becomes a substitute for the beloved and a proof of the enduring pain.
Memory and Its Traps
Memory is both a solace and a prison. The speaker is “not satisfied” even after remembering; recollection only intensifies the sense of loss. The night triggers memories, and the memories trigger poetry, but none of it brings back the woman. Neruda shows how memory circles rather than progresses.
The Paradoxical Nature of Love
Love is presented as fundamentally contradictory. It can exist and not exist at the same time. One can stop loving and still love. This theme reaches its apex in the line “Love is so short, forgetting is so long,” which suggests that the emotional time of love is radically different from the chronological time of recovery.
Nature as a Mirror of Emotion
The night, stars, wind, and dew are not mere backdrops; they are active participants in the speaker’s grief. The natural world provides both consolation (the gentle dew, the singing wind) and amplification (the immense night without her). This technique, sometimes called the “pathetic fallacy,” is used by Neruda with such sincerity that it never feels artificial; instead, it seems the universe itself shares his sorrow.
Identity and Change
“We, of that time, are no longer the same.” Loss shatters the self. The speaker is now defined by absence—what he no longer has, what he no longer is. This theme connects to broader modernist concerns with fragmented identity, but Neruda grounds it in the deeply personal.
Solitude and the Night
The night is the traditional time of solitude, introspection, and vulnerability. The poem’s setting strips away the distractions of the day. In this pure darkness, the speaker must confront his feelings without evasion. The “immense night” becomes a symbol of the vast, empty space inside him.
6. Critical Perspectives
A Landmark in Modern Love Poetry
Critics frequently place “Tonight I Can Write” among the greatest love poems ever written. René de Costa, in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, argues that Twenty Love Poems “revolutionised the language of love in Hispanic poetry” by shedding the ornamental rhetoric of modernismo and adopting a direct, colloquial intensity. Poem 20 is the culmination of that new voice.
The Double Perspective
Manuel Durán and Margery Safir, in Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, note the poem’s masterful shifting of perspective. The speaker simultaneously acts as the suffering lover and the detached poet observing that suffering. This dual consciousness allows the poem to be both emotionally raw and artistically controlled. The line “Write, for example…” breaks the fourth wall, reminding us that the sadness is being crafted, not merely reported.
The Problem of Translation
The standard English translation by W. S. Merwin is widely praised but inevitably alters some nuances. In Spanish, “Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche” uses the superlative “los más tristes,” the saddest—implying a competition, as if all the sad lines ever written could be ranked, and tonight the speaker could win that sorrowful contest. The Spanish “shiver” is “tiritan,” a word that contains a slight chattering, a physical coldness stronger than the English. Critics such as John Felstiner have discussed how Merwin’s free-verse, stripped-down English captures the spirit of Neruda’s simplicity, though some sonic qualities of the Romance language are lost.
Feminist and Gender Readings
Some contemporary critics interrogate the poem’s treatment of the absent woman. The beloved is never named, never given a voice; she is entirely constructed through the male speaker’s memory and desire. Her “infinite eyes” and “bright body” make her a kind of elemental force rather than a fully realised person. Scholar Patricia Vilches, in Neruda’s Love Poetry: A Feminist Perspective, argues that while the poem beautifully expresses male grief, it also enacts a symbolic erasure of the female subject. She exists only as the cause of pain. This does not diminish the poem’s artistic value but opens up important questions about the politics of representation in romantic lyric poetry.
The Poem as Ritual
Critic Christopher Perriam (in The Cambridge Companion to Pablo Neruda) reads Poem 20 as a ritual of farewell. The repeated refrain and incantatory rhythms create an almost liturgical quality. The poem tries to “write out” the pain, to perform a symbolic burial of the relationship. However, Perriam notes the failure of the ritual: the subjunctive “Though this be the last pain” admits that the exorcism may not succeed.
Universality and the “Sentimental”
Neruda once said that he wrote Twenty Love Poems to “speak to the simplest hearts.” Some early critics accused the collection of being too sentimental. However, later scholarship vindicates Neruda’s directness. The poem’s enduring popularity testifies to its capacity to articulate universal feelings without resorting to cliché. Critic Jason Wilson argues that Neruda’s genius lies in making the personal appear archetypal: every reader feels the poem was written for them.
7. Key Quotations for Examination
| Quotation | Significance |
|---|---|
| “Tonight I can write the saddest lines.” | Refrain; establishes the theme of poetic creation from grief; marks emotional distance. |
| “I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.” | Honest, painful asymmetry of love; simple language, devastating effect. |
| “The night is starry and she is not with me.” | Juxtaposition of cosmic beauty and personal loss; the external world becomes a reminder of absence. |
| “And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.” | Meta-poetic simile; art as gentle, natural healing. |
| “We, of that time, are no longer the same.” | Philosophical insight; loss transforms identity. |
| “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.” | Central paradox; captures the contradictory nature of post-love emotion. |
| “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” | Most famous line; epigrammatic compression of the entire theme of heartbreak. |
| “My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.” | Refrain-like repetition; emphasizes the unsatisfiable nature of grief. |
| “Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer / and these the last verses that I write for her.” | Open-ended ending; desire for closure versus the reality of enduring pain. |
8. Conclusion: The Enduring Power of a Sad Verse
“Tonight I Can Write” endures because it refuses to offer false consolation. It does not pretend that writing the poem heals the wound; rather, it shows the wound being transformed into something beautiful and permanent. The speaker begins believing he can control his sadness through art, but the poem ultimately demonstrates that art and sadness feed each other. The very act of writing the saddest lines keeps the beloved and the pain alive.
For students, the poem is a masterclass in how simplicity can carry profound complexity. Its language is accessible, its images are concrete, and its emotion is immediate. Yet beneath the surface lies a sophisticated meditation on time, memory, identity, and the paradoxical nature of human affection. Whether read as a confession, a ritual, or a philosophical lyric, it invites us to reflect on our own experiences of love and loss.
As you prepare for your examinations, remember that the best readings of this poem honour both its emotional directness and its artistic craftsmanship. Notice how a single line—“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”—can contain a whole philosophy of time and feeling. Notice the careful architecture of the poem: the refrain that comes and goes, the spiralling rather than linear progression, the way the ending gestures toward closure without achieving it. These are the marks of a poet in complete command of his medium, even as he sings of the loss of command over his own heart.
Recommended further reading:
Neruda, Pablo. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Translated by W. S. Merwin.
De Costa, René. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda.
Durán, Manuel, and Margery Safir. Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda.
Felstiner, John. Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu.
The Cambridge Companion to Pablo Neruda, edited by Jason Wilson.