Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda
by Pablo Neruda
The book of love poems Pablo Neruda published at nineteen, and the most read book he ever wrote.
Pablo Neruda was nineteen when Editorial Nascimento published Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada in Santiago in June 1924. The book holds twenty numbered love poems and a longer closing poem, the Song of Despair. The poems were frank about desire, and some critics attacked the book on moral grounds. Young readers took to it at once. Chile's National Library now calls it the most published and probably the most read of all Neruda's books, translated into many languages, including Indigenous languages of Chile.[1]
Neruda had come to Santiago from Temuco in 1921 to train as a French teacher at the Instituto Pedagógico. On 18 April that year he met a fellow student, Albertina Rosa Azócar. The Fundación Pablo Neruda names her as the woman behind several of the poems.[2]
Some of the poems were printed in magazines before the book existed. The University of Chile's chronology notes that Poem XX first appeared in the student magazine Claridad on 24 November 1923, under the title Tristeza a la orilla de la noche, meaning sadness at the edge of the night.[3]
Neruda spent the summer of 1924 on the coast at Bajo Imperial, in southern Chile, and wrote part of the book there. In his memoirs he said the wharves in the Song of Despair are the old wharves of Carahue and Bajo Imperial.[2]
The first edition came out in June 1924. The National Library's copy is a slim book of forty-five unnumbered leaves.[4] In August 1924, stung by the reviews, Neruda published a letter in the Santiago paper La Nación explaining how he had written the poems. He called it Exégesis y soledad, meaning explanation and solitude.[2]
Twenty short love poems, numbered in Roman figures, and then the Song of Despair. The poems speak to a woman the speaker desires or has lost. Neruda said they mixed his most tormented teenage passions with the overwhelming nature of the south of Chile.[1]
Poem XX is the one most readers know. The poem opens on the line Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche, meaning tonight I can write the saddest lines, and keeps coming back to it.[5]
The Song of Despair is longer and darker. The speaker stands at a harbour at dawn and addresses a woman he has loved and lost. The phrase in you everything sank comes back again and again, and the poem ends on the hour of departure.[6]
The book's openness about sex was the problem in 1924. The National Library of Chile says part of Chilean society and part of the press rejected it, and that critics dressed their objections up as moral ones. Young readers bought it anyway.
Neruda kept working on the text. Editorial Nascimento published a second, final version in July 1932, after he came home from his consular posts in Asia. By 1961 the book had reached its millionth copy.
Neruda himself later described it in his memoirs as a painful, pastoral book. Chile's National Library now counts it as the most published of all his books, with translations into many languages.
The closing poem is set at a harbour. W. S. Merwin's translation opens with the memory of a woman rising out of the night, and a river pouring its complaint into the sea. The third line is "Deserted like the wharves at dawn."
Those wharves were real. Neruda wrote in his memoirs that they are the old wharves of Carahue and Bajo Imperial. He spent the summer of 1924 on that stretch of coast, writing part of the book.
The poem builds from shipwreck images: a diver, a pilot, a sailor at the prow. After each one the speaker says the same thing to the woman, that in you everything sank. The last line returns to the harbour and the hour of departure.
When Neruda received the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm in December 1971, the Swedish Academy's Karl Ragnar Gierow started his account of Neruda's work with this book. He described the love poems as the meeting of two people's desolation in the shadow of destruction.
Gierow treated the book as Neruda's starting point, a poetry of isolation. In his account, the later books move away from that loneliness toward what he called harmony with Man and the Earth.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness, / and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one.
Pablo Neruda was nineteen when it came out. Chile's National Library calls it the most published and probably the most read of all his books.
Twenty short poems and one longer one. A reader can finish it in a sitting and go back to single poems for years.
Neruda said the wharves in the Song of Despair were the old wharves of Carahue and Bajo Imperial, on the southern Chilean coast where he wrote part of the book.
W. S. Merwin's English version, first published in London in 1969, is printed by Penguin Classics facing the Spanish text.
The most famous poem in the book. A man sits up at night thinking about a woman he no longer has, and keeps returning to the line about writing the saddest lines. The poem first appeared in the magazine Claridad in November 1923 under another title.
The long closing poem. A speaker at a harbour at dawn addresses a woman he has lost, and repeats that everything sank in her. Neruda said its wharves were those of Carahue and Bajo Imperial.
1921
Pablo Neruda moves to Santiago to study French and on 18 April meets Albertina Rosa Azócar, who inspired several of the poems.
1923
Poem XX appears in the magazine Claridad on 24 November under the title Tristeza a la orilla de la noche.
1924
Neruda writes part of the book on the coast at Bajo Imperial. Editorial Nascimento publishes it in Santiago in June.
1924
On 20 August Neruda answers his critics in a letter to La Nación titled Exégesis y soledad.
1932
Nascimento publishes the second, final version of the text in July.
1961
The book reaches its millionth copy.
1969
Jonathan Cape publishes W. S. Merwin's English translation in London.
1971
Presenting the Nobel Prize in Literature to Neruda, Karl Ragnar Gierow of the Swedish Academy begins with these love poems.
2003
Penguin Classics publishes the Merwin translation facing the corrected Spanish text, with sketches by Pablo Picasso.
One Hundred Love Sonnets
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Pablo Neruda's other famous book of love poems, written thirty-five years later for Matilde Urrutia.
Read our takeResidence on Earth
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The book that came next in importance. Neruda wrote most of it alone in Asia, and it is far darker.
Read our takeMemoirs
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Neruda's own account of the Santiago student years and the southern coast where these poems began.
Read our take
Langston Hughes's first book of poems, published in 1926. Hughes was also in his early twenties when his first book made his name.
Read our takeTwenty-one: twenty numbered love poems and a longer final poem, the Song of Despair.
He was nineteen when Editorial Nascimento published the book in Santiago in June 1924, a few weeks before his twentieth birthday. Some of the poems had appeared in magazines in 1923.
The Fundación Pablo Neruda names Albertina Rosa Azócar, a fellow student Neruda met in Santiago in April 1921, as the inspiration for several of the poems. The book never names her.
The poems were open about sex. Chile's National Library says part of society and part of the press rejected the book, and critics framed their objections as moral ones. Neruda answered them in a letter to La Nación in August 1924.
W. S. Merwin's translation is the standard one. Jonathan Cape first published it in London in 1969, and Penguin Classics prints it facing the Spanish text.
In Santiago, where Neruda was a student, and on the southern Chilean coast. He spent the summer of 1924 at Bajo Imperial and said the wharves of the Song of Despair were the old wharves of Carahue and Bajo Imperial.
Not directly. The poems belong to Chile. Neruda first saw Paris for a few days in July 1927, three years after the book came out, on his way to a consular post in Burma.
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View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, its publication, and its place in literary history.
The University of Chile's chronology: Poem XX in Claridad in 1923, later editions, and the millionth copy in 1961.
Catalogue record and cover of the 1924 Nascimento first edition, forty-five unnumbered leaves.
Full-text search confirming the Spanish opening line of Poem XX across printed editions.
Authorized complete text of the Song of Despair in W. S. Merwin's translation, the source of the quotations.
Karl Ragnar Gierow's 1971 presentation speech, which opens its account of Neruda with this book.
The Swedish Academy's bibliography: the 1924 Nascimento first edition and Merwin's 1969 Cape translation.
Publisher's page for the Penguin Classics editions: ISBNs, dates, page counts and contents.
Open Library edition records, used to confirm each ISBN listed.
The primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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