Quoted: Pablo Neruda (Again)

I'm pretty swamped work-wise for the next two weeks, so I'll leave you with one of my favourite poems until I can come up with blog posts that are a bit more scintillating.

Love Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, a topaz
or an arrow of carnations that spread fire:
I love you like certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you like the plant that does not bloom
and carries in itself, hidden, the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love,
the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives darkly in my body.

I love without knowing how, nor when, nor from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you this way because I know no other way to love,

only in this way in which I am not and you are not,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my sleep.

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Quoted: Pablo Neruda

I've got too much on my mind after what happened this long weekend, beginning with Friday at work, so I'm not in the mood to do a nice fashion blog post. Instead, I humbly offer you this most perfect of quotations from one of love poetry's greats, Pablo Neruda, just as he humbly offered his 100 sonnet cycle to his wife:

"My most beloved wife, I suffered greatly in writing these misnamed 'sonnets,' which pained and cost me dearly; but the joy of offering them to you is vaster than a prairie. When I set myself this task I well knew that along the side of each sonnet, through their elective inclination and elegance, the poets of all times laid out rhymes sounding like silver, crystal or cannonfire. With much modesty, I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of this pure and opaque substance, and they must reach your ears thus. As you and I walked through forests and beaches, lost lakes, ashen latitudes, we picked up fragments of wood, of timber exposed to water and the weather. From such soft relics then, with an ax, a blade, a pocketknife, I built these woodworks of love and I raised small houses of 14 boards each, so that your eyes which I adore and sing to, may live in them. With my reasons for love established, I give you this century: sonnets of wood that were only able to arise because you gave them life."

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Quoted: Heartbreak

And surely I could give him - a sort of contentment?

That isn't enough to give. Not for the giver. [...]

I love you, I love you, I love you.

- Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

I want what I love to stay alive
and you I loved and I sang above all things,
so go on blooming, beflowered,

so you may reach all that my love commands,
so that my shadow may saunter through your hair,
so that all may know the reason for my song.

- Pablo Neruda, Love Sonnet LXXIX

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