Pablo Neruda

Rising from the narrow country stretching along South America's western edge: Chile Pablo Neruda is a  poet-diplomat and politician who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles such as erotically charged love poems as in his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos.  

Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language", and the critic Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon. Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope. 

To me reading his poem for the first wasn't enough to understand the deep meanings hidden inside each line. Neruda using simple language makes an incredible writing, which at first might confuse the reader, but observing carefully gives the new craze for poems. Even after english not being his mother tongue Neruda has made a outstanding contribution to english literature. 

Common themes found in Pablo Neruda's poems include love, sex, history, nature and daily life. Neruda even wrote about ordinary objects such as onions, lemons and cats. The themes of Neruda's poetry evolved throughout his years of writing and greatly reflected the changes in his thinking and life experiences.

Neruda's father opposed his son's interest in writing; nevertheless Neruda found support in his school teachers. At age 15 Neruda met Gabriella Mistral who was a teacher in the local girl's school. She introduced him to the work of European poets and particularly Russian literature which influenced him the most. With all the support he got from his teachers Neruda started publishing his work but wanted to keep it a secret from his father so adopted the pen name which later became his official name " Pablo Neruda". Even after facing a lot of challenges throughout his journey Neruda never gave up writing, which shows us the passion he had for writing. All his effort has paid him with the noble prize for Literature. Even after his death in 1973, Pablo still continues to lives through his poems and all his encouraging work which he written. 

  

Short Poems By Pablo Neruda

 Always  

by Pablo Neruda

  I am not jealous
of what came before me.


Come with a man 
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
to the eternal surf, to Time!
which flows down to the wild sea,

Bring them all
we shall always be you and I
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
to start our life! 
alone on earth

Tower Of Light  
by Pablo Neruda
 O tower of light, sad beauty
that magnified necklaces and statues in the sea,
calcareous eye, insignia of the vast waters, cry
of the Oceanian wind, O separate rose
of the mourning petrel, tooth of the sea, wife
from the long stem of the trampled bush
alone in your lonesome dynasty,
that the depths, converted into archipelago,
O natural star, green diadem,
like one drop, like one grape, like the sea
still unattainable, elusive, desolate

Self-Love

when asked, why do you love yourself?

" ….. There are some days which speak, some days which listen

some which show and others which hide 

and in all these days.. my only company is ME . ..…. "

-AK

The changing faces of love and marriage in the 14th to 17th centuries.

During the 12th and the 13th century, the concept of love was seen as "Courtly Love" also called Refined Love. This had nothing to do with marriage. In fact, most accounts state that it wasn't possible to experience courtly love with your spouse. This does not mean married people were excluded from courtly love; they just experienced it with someone 'outside' their marriage.

courtly love was all about romance (the cheesier the better), but sexual contact typically had nothing to do with it. Most of us consider sexual acts to be something shared between lovers. But at medieval court, the term 'lover' referred to the person with whom someone danced, giggled, and held hands; procreation was a spousal duty. To do otherwise was to break the rules of etiquette.

 In the Middle Ages, Europeans saw love and marriage as two important, but very different, parts of life. noble marriages were often arranged by the parents in order to increase the status and wealth of each family. They were about political and financial gain, rather than how the couple felt about each other. Once a strategic marriage was arranged and consummated, courtly love brought romance into the courts and people's lives without vows of fidelity being broken.

 During the Renaissance, Poets described love as an overpowering force, both spiritual and sexual. For most people, however, marriage was a more practical matter. As the basic building block of society, it involved the expectations of families and communities, not just the wishes of two individuals. Although marriage was the normal state of life for most people, many remained unmarried for either practical or religious reasons.  

he idea of romantic love took shape in the centuries leading up to the Renaissance. The literature of the Middle Ages developed the concept of courtly love, as mentioned above treated the beloved as a pure ideal. Two Italian writers of the 1300s, Dante Alighieri and Petrarch drew on this tradition in their poetry. Each of them presented a beloved woman as a source of inspiration and a symbol of female perfection. European poetry in the following centuries followed their lead, treating love as an experience above and beyond ordinary life. Some poets saw sexual desire as a vital part of love, while others presented love as pure and selfless emotion.  

Renaissance thinkers viewed "platonic" love as the highest and noblest form of love. This concept of love was based on the ideas of the Neoplatonists, a group of philosophers who had given new interpretations to the works of the ancient Greek thinker Plato. They saw love as a path to the divine, which was the source of the beloved's beauty. Italian writer Baldassare Castiglione discussed Platonic love in the fourth part of The Book of the Courtier (1528).

Another idealized view of love appeared in pastoral* poetry, which focused on the loves of shepherds and nymphs*. Poets presented the countryside as a place of simple pleasures and honest feelings, far removed from the ambitions and deceptions of urban life. However, not all Renaissance literature portrayed love as idealized or romantic. Opposing views appeared in bawdy* stories, which focused on crude sexuality, and in writings that attacked women as wicked temptresses who led men astray. 

Sometimes, various conflicting views of love appeared in a single work of literature. The Decameron, a collection of short stories written by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio around 1350, contains many tales about love, ranging from stories of deep devotion to lively accounts of sexual affairs. In a similar collection from the 1500s called the Heptameron, by Margaret of Navarre, the storytellers reflect on the meaning of love, its effect on Christian virtue, and its relationship to marriage. 

In the view of marriage, Love had little to do. Most people believed that the perfect love of the poets could not exist alongside the everyday concerns of marriage. The reality, of course, was more complicated. Although practical matters played a major role in marriage, some rebels insisted on marrying for love.

Love in poetry during the Renaissance often expressed sexual or romantic passion, but it could also serve a variety of political, social, and religious ends literature and poetry evolved still further and took on a decidedly romantic aura. A more personal style developed, and poems clearly became a way for a poet to reveal his feelings to the one he loved. In the mid-to-late 16th century, there was a virtual flowering of poetic talent in England, influenced by the art and literature of the Italian Renaissance a century before. examples of such poetry are Christopher Marlowe's "Who Ever Loved That Loved Not at First Sight?", Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Silent Lover, Part 1" and Ben Jonson's "Come, My Celia".  

Conclusion 

during the pre Renaissance period there existed Courtly Love which was most often practiced outside marriage, then during the renaissance the concept of love evolved into more of sexual desires, this also gave a bad idea about women with claims that they were the leading factors responsible to lead men astray, and trap them in lust.    

Refrence: 

https://www.thoughtco.com/renaissance-love-poems 

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/love-and-marriage 

https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/love-poetry-in-renaissance-england

https://www.eng-literature.com/2018/12/show-ideas-of-love-marriage-during-Renaissance.html

The Blindfold of Society: Stereotypes

 

Stereotypes....what do you think about it? 

A stereotype is a prejudgment we have toward a particular behavior, dress code, people, place or thing, its a prejudice we keep toward them, though stereotype largely falls towards the negative side, I should admit that there are some positive stereotypes. In a general sense this might seem a rather unpleasant topic to be dealing with, but we should know that we are all bond within it 

Stereotypes are like parasites, they feed on our ignorance and grow in making us arid humans, this is evidently seen in the Indian society where  the society raises a girl in a blindfold of stereotypes weaken her inner being and gradually killing her innocent  self. 

Stereotypes as whole can not be looked down, there are some stereotypes which benefit some people for instance the stereotype that black men are dangerous can be counter attacked with another stereotype that gay men are more femanin, thus the black gay men escape the stereotype of being dangerous, though this might seem beneficial, at the same time, it is restricted to only a small number of people.  

Though we are entangled by stereotypes, there has been measure taken to untie this blindfold. A stereotypes mainly gets imprinted in our mind due to our ignorance, one way of fighting it would be reasoning the stereotypes, and constantly trying to prove it wrong, the stereotype that women are weaker than men is somewhat proved wrong with fact that women have conquered every field in todays world , be it ,military, science  or technology.  today, women are no longer called weak but stand equal to men. 

Education is another major field which can help us to do away with stereotypes, one tends to come to conclusion when one doesn't know more about that something, through education one become more learned and exposed to hidden truths and would  try to avoid making baseless conclusions.   

Quotes

 " She breathes smoke, because She spits Fire "     -AK

 

We are responsible for the circumstances we are in, a very simple example to understand this quote would be ' Sam was punished by the teacher because he did not do his homework, as he played all day long '  

One doesn't need to totally agree with me, not always its our fault that we are in certain circumstances, but it's also our choices that add to either betterment or worsening of the situation

A little insight into the author of the quote  AK :                                                                                                                                          AK stands for Amanda Kim, she is a student, currently doing her Bachelors in Arts, she touches me with creativity which I would like to share with you'll. kindly note both AK and Amanda Kim are pen names used by the author, her real name remains unknown. 사랑해요 어드라 !