4.04 AVERAGE

emotional inspiring reflective sad

I am so not into poetry but this was genius!
dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced
emotional hopeful sad fast-paced
emotional fast-paced
emotional reflective medium-paced
emotional fast-paced

It's a very romantic collection 
emotional reflective sad fast-paced

Quiero hacer contigo
lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos.

The summary on the back of his edition (which had an admittedly gorgeous cover) regales it as "one of the most celebrated and admired books of erotic poetry published in the last one hundred years." True, the poems are good. But unless they are a lot more allegorical than I read them to be, I would classify most of the works here as more sensual than erotic. Even by fairly conservative standards, I would say. They are a riot of very evocative natural and domestic imagery, rife with longing and sadness and celebration of intimacy. But I would not really call them erotic- not the way that Whitman is, and certainly not the way many of the poets in the US were writing at the exact same time as Neruda was penning this.

My favorite line?
I want / to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Or perhaps the immortal: "love is so short, and forgetting so long. "