Neruda

The City has been a source of inspiration for the poets since the beginning of time.  The city is where mankind is reduced to extremes.  In the city greatest feats of human innovation are accomplished.  The best and brightest of literature, art, music, theater, politics, find themselves moving to an urban environment where culture can be created.  But every city has it’s dark side.  A city can also be the place where humans experience the greatest loneliness, apathy and heart ache.  Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around” is a poem that follows a speaker as he confronts this dark side of the city as he finds the dark side of himself.

The poem begins on a note of indifference.  “It happens” the speaker declares.  He is not decisive, he is not an active participant in the story.  “It happens that I am tired of being a man” is all.  The world is a mess and so is the speaker.  The city is “all shriveled up” and the “smell of barber shops makes me sob out loud”.  But while the speaker tells himself he wants nothing but “repose” his mind still wanders to small pleasures, dark pleasures to be sure, but things that the speaker calls “delicious”.   

The middle section of the poem is a kind of revelation.  The speaker realized he is a “root in the dark/ hesitating, stretching out, shivering with dreams” (1423).  The speaker knows there is more to the world than the darkness he sees around him.  But still he is trapped under the earth.  While he is a root trapped in the city, with the possibility to flower, he is right now, trapped under the cement. 

The speaker is trapped in a place where the “Monday burns like oil” and “footsteps to the nightfall are filled with hot blood”.  The revelation doesn’t lead to change for the speaker.  He is still a root trapped in the city.  He can still see “birds the color of sulfur, and horrible intestines/ hanging from the doors of the houses which I hate”.  The speaker has become resigned.  He is the root trapped in the ground, and he “strides along with calm, with eyes, with shoes, with fury, with forgetfulness” in a world which “weeps slow dirty tears” (1424).  The speaker is a little mad.  The world is a little mad.  They are both capable of greatness. 

Neruda, Pablo.  Walking Around. The Norton Anthology of World Literature: New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013.  648-653. Print.