Your Laughter - Pablo Neruda

Wednesday, 15 September 2021 8:06 AM

To be able to Look back

A Discussion of "Tu Risa (Your Laughter)"
By Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda
• Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto
• July 12 1904 - September 23 1973
• Chilean poet-diplomat and politician ---> communist
• Won nobel prize for lit 0971
• Start to become known at age of 13
• Surrealist poems, historical epics, overly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and
passionate love poems
• Twenty Love Poems; song of Despair

• After highschool, he publishhed local papers and Santiago magazines and won literary
competitions
• 1921 -Left Chile for santiago to attend school to become a french teacher

TU RISA
• Part of a collection of poetry The Captain's Verses
• 1972
• One of his late poems

LIT 1 Page 1
•

•
• How to read poem
○ Find the persona: the lover, man, hopeless romantic
○ Addressee: the beloved, woman
○ 1: Food and Air - life giving; Laughter ; Willing to sacrifice everything for her smile
○ 2:
▪ Rose - beauty of the beloved; beauty of an ideal woman
▪ Lanceflower
▪ Joy
▪ The sudden wave of silver born in you: tears
○ 3: Lover is tired
▪ Confessional poem written while he was in exile
▪ His revolutions an d reforms are not progressing
○ 4:
▪ "If suddenly you see my blood staining the stones of the street" - he possibility of
death
○ 5:
▪ Ineexplain niya yung effect ng laughter po ni beloved in every instance
▪ Autumn: Foamy cascade - sea foam; something that ppl look forward to in autumn
because it is warm
▪ Spring: he is like a gardener;
□ " Rose of my echoing country" - voice of the people
○ 6:
▪ At night, day and moon: laugh;
▪ Clumsy boy: mature enough to admit; fool for her
• Ideal woman: an amalgamation of all woman he loved in his life
• Written in free verse
○ Conducive to the lyrical quality of his love poems
○ The translations do not merit too much comment on rhyme scheme
• Rhetorical device of metaphor
○ Metaphor - figure of speech
A is equal to B
○ Beloved is comapared to many things which rise to vivid images
▪ Rose his beloved has plucked
▪ Silver wave of joy on her face when she laughs
▪ Sharp word that his beloved's laughter gives him for him to continue on his fight
▪ Of the sea-foam whose shape it takes

LIT 1 Page 2
LIT 1 Page 3