#PoemReview: “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda
Emeka Nwakobi
Well I want you to know
One thing.
The Nobel Laureate begins as though addressing a person right before him, and advising the person to get ready for this all important revelation. Neruda goes on to inform his lover of the universality of his love, its boundlessness; how well it permeates through nature and reach across, like lovers on different continents, who only needed to outstretch their hands and right there is there partners hand waiting. He goes thus;
You know how this is
If I look
At the crystal moon, at the red branch
Of the slow autumn at my window,
If I touch
Near the fire
The impalpable ash
Or the wrinkled body of the log,
Everything carries me to you,
As if everything that exists,
Aromas, light, metals,
Were little boats
That sail
Toward those isles of yours that wait for me
The Nobel Laureate wastes no time in reminding his lover of the reciprocal nature of love, its complementary nature. He informs his lover of his willingness to let everything slide, to move on as though they were never so in love, if his lover eventually stops loving him or loses interest in their affair. He sounds his note of warning thus;
Well now,
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
You forget me
Do not look for me,
For I shall already have forgotten you.
The poem comes to a slow grinding halt, as the Nobel Laureate reveals his conditions of eternal love to his lover. Love is indeed a relationship of inter-dependency he reveals thus;
But if each day,
Each hour
You feel you are destined for me
With implacable sweetness,
If each day a flower
Climbs up to your lips to seek me,
Ah my love, ah my own,
In me all that fire is repeated,
In me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
My love feeds on your love, beloved,
And as long as you live it will be in your arms
Without leaving mine.
Neruda makes the form so simple, yet it sings, yet it leaves one with the strong message which is the intent of this poem. The diction is powerfully simple, not bogus or overly flamboyant, yet it gets to the point which it sets out of reach. The Nobel Laureate does it in a way only he can.
Pablo Neruda is a Chilean poet, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
