Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1924

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Loneliness of Unchanging Night

The poem takes place at night, the time of day thematically associated with loneliness. People leave public places and go home, or they spend time with loved ones. A person who has a loved one might find this time of day romantic, but a person who is alone feels their loneliness magnified. The speaker of the poem notes that nature itself feels distant. The stars are “blue and shiver in the distance” (Line 2). The speaker hears laughter, but that is also far off in the distance. The night feels “endless” (Line 8), powerful in its immensity.

The speaker notes that this is the “same night whitening the same trees” (Line 20) that they and their lover used to enjoy together. The colors of night in this poem are white and blue. Blue typically denotes sadness and cold. The fact that night “whitens” the trees most likely indicates that moonlight is falling on them. However, the choice of the word “whitening” instead of “lighting” indicates the trees are losing color rather than gaining light. It suggests a light that makes the trees less rich, more vacant of the color that indicates life. The night itself becomes an emblem of loneliness and absence, an unyielding force of nature that is unaware of the changes in humans’ lives.

When the speaker remembers their past lover, the speaker feels the night become “more immense” (Line 13), its effect magnified. Now that the speaker has lost her, the memories only exacerbate the sensation of being alone in the night with nature’s indifference.

The Mutability of Love

While nature remains constant and predictable, feelings, especially love, are mutable. The speaker and their love, for instance, change, yet the night remains constant. The speaker repeats in the poem that they did love her and that they sat together under the same sky the speaker now sits under. Yet they and their former lover are not the same.

The speaker hints that their love may have been fickle before the final separation. They say, “I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too” (Line 6), followed by, “She loved me, sometimes I loved her too” (Line 9). The “sometimes” (Lines 6, 9) suggests that the speaker and the former lover were not always equally in love at the same time.

The speaker uses the term “have” (Line 12) as though the woman they loved were a possession. With property, when a person “has” something, they get control over it, yet later the speaker acknowledges that they no longer have her. They state, “She will be another’s” (Line 25), as though ownership has been transferred, presumably, without the speaker’s consent. The line “What does it matter that my love could not keep her” (Line 15) suggests that they were still in love with her when she left, and that they may have once believed that love would “keep” her with them, the way a law of possession “keeps” objects with their owners. Yet, if ever the speaker did believe that, they know now that love does not work the way ownership works.

In the later couplets of the poem, the speaker says, “I no longer love her, that’s certain” (Line 23) but follows up with “I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her” (Line 27), suggesting that love can come and go. This ambiguity points to the difficulty in defining love, holding it, and knowing if it is there or gone. A person also cannot control when or if it returns.

Importantly, the speaker never suggests why they and their lover separated. It seems that their break-up was inevitable. The speaker is less concerned with why it happened and more concerned with the fact that it does happen, that it is even possible. This puts the emphasis on the strange quality of loss itself, and how much things can change from one night to another. Though the night itself is eternal and appears to be regular, predictable, and unchanging, comparing the speaker’s internal state in the present to their internal state in the past reveals their feelings are not so certain. This makes the speaker feel at the mercy of love, since it is something they cannot control.

The Power of Emotional States for Creativity

In “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines,” Pablo Neruda presents a picture of a person consumed by love and its loss. The speaker claims that because they feel so intensely, they can write the saddest lines of poetry. The speaker’s intensity is reflected in the images they focus on, which include stars, sky, and wind—natural elements that connote immensity and grandeur. The sky covers all of Earth and is present every day. The wind can travel the entire Earth and out into the heavens. The stars, from a human perspective, last into eternity.

In this way, the speaker also makes of love, and its subsequent loss, an emotional power that both feeds him (and perhaps stunts him) creatively. By starting the poem with “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” (Line 1), they not only declare that they are feeling sad, but that they can harness that sadness into something that represents that aching. Because of their great love, “the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture” (Line 14). This suggests that the poetry comes to the speaker naturally, the way that dew forms as a matter of course every dawn. It also suggests, however, that the speaker is not entirely in control of this writing force, and if they indeed succeed in writing the saddest lines, it could be due to the sheer emotion of loss that leaves much of the speaker’s language relatively short and bare (“The night is starry and she is not with me. This is all” (Lines 16-17)), rather than due to a purposeful and deft manipulation of lines.

Either way, it is because of the largeness of the feeling that the speaker is able to write and to write the “saddest” lines. It is because of the strength of the speaker’s love that they are now able to feel the strength of such despair.