Free Sublime Blue: Selected Early Odes by Pablo Neruda by Pablo Neruda Page B

of this poem and its implications for modern poets and poetry.) Here Neruda saunters familiarly first through a landscape comprised of the literary clichés of certain unnamed predecessors. He chides “my poor brother,/the poet” for his blinding degree of self-absorption and for his isolation from the “dailiness of life,” to borrow from Randall Jarrell the phrase he once borrowed from a student. For Neruda, dailiness was a constant source of replenished vitality as the field of ordinary clover, rather than hothouse exotica, is sustenance to the honeybee. Then as he moves from the literary to the common world, declaring his characteristic intention to “transform [all the sorrow of the entire world] into hope” in song that reunites mankind in a spirit of celebration, he states and demonstrates a principle of self-effacement as similar in conception to Keats’ “negative capability” or Eliot’s annihilation of the personality as it is unlike either in execution.
    In “The Invisible Man” and elsewhere, he gives us the antidote to the “I” as all-devourer and to the private ego as self-reflexive, ersatz universe, stances he regarded as essentially Romantic, defunct responses inadequate to contemporary existence. “As an active poet,” Neruda recalled, “I fought against my own self-absorption and so was able to settle the debate between the real and the subjective deep within myself.”
    We also have here Neruda’s apostrophes to the atom, to numbers, to restlessness, to hope and gloom, all general subjects paradoxically amplified by the intimacy of their rendering. Among his more intriguingly personal poems, there is his “Ode to the Unwelcome One.” And in the odes to wine and the artichoke we have further evidence of his unquenchable capacity for inventive celebration. Of the blue flower also praised, his recollections from the
Memoirs
are revealing:
    Peasants and fishermen [in Chile] have forgotten the names of the small plants long ago, and the small flowers have no names now…. To be a hero in undiscovered territories is to be obscure; these territories and their songs are lit only by the most anonymous blood and by flowers whose name nobody knows. Among these flowers there is one that has invaded my whole house. It’s a blue flower with a long, proud, lustrous, and tough stem. At its tip, swarms of tiny infra-blue, ultra-blue flowers sway. I don’t know if all human beings have the gift of seeing the sub-limest blue. Is it revealed to a select few? Does it remain hidden, invisible to others? Has some blue god denied them its contemplation? Or is it only my own joy, nursed by solitude and converted into pride, gloating because it has found this blue, this blue wave, this blue star in riotous spring?
    Finally, his “Ode To The Popular Poets” is yet another exploration of how the natural poet—untutored in books but instructed by the history of the vulnerable heart—can prevail upon the most painful circumstances to manifest that universal vigor “repeated in the song.” Referring to certain of his fellow artists, Leonardo in his notebooks once complained of the growing tendency among aspiring artists to school themselves at the feet of their predecessors rather than in the academy of nature. He singled out as an exception Giotto, praising him for having begun his artistic career as a common shepherd sketching the objects he observed with charred sticks upon flat stones.
    On the other hand, Neruda notes, “It’s obvious that the poet’s occupation is abused to some extent. So many new men and women poets keep cropping up that soon we’ll all look like poets, and readers will disappear.” The myth of the “mute, inglorious Milton” can become a conceit harboring disdain for discipline and self-discipline, as in the Elvis Presley movie “Wild In The Country,”