Neruda

In the poem “Walking Around” by Pablo Neruda there appears be several underlying themes of losing and almost near insanity. In the first stanza, Neruda sets up the reader to almost personify with the narrator of the poem, a man who is not lost with nowhere to go. Neruda writes, “it happens that I am tired of being man-It happens that I go into the tailor’s shops and the movies-all shriveled up, impenetrable, like a felt swan navigating on a water of origin and ash”(Neruda 1423). The city emerges in the first stanza as over populated yet homey sort of place. I am not sure as to why I feel that way, I can relate to the man who in the city as I have lived places where everyday seems to go with the next. I think it important to realize that this man comes off as crazy, yet as I read each stanza of the poem I do not see him as crazy. I see him as a man who has had enough of his present place and longs for something more exciting.

In the sixth stanza a reader sees an even darker place of the city. I would have describe after reading the stanza as the endless black hole because it almost (being the city) appears a trap with no way out. “I do not want to go on being a root in the dark-hesitating, stretched out, shivering with dreams, downwards, in the wet tripe of the earth, soaking it up and thinking, eating every day”(Neruda 1423-1424). I think the sixth stanza is the most important part of the poem because it shows the city as an ordinary city anywhere, and a man caught up in the daily grind of life who is merely grown tired of his mundane life.

 

                                                                                Works Cited

Neruda, Pablo. “Walking.” The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Ed. Martin Puchner, et al. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2013. 1423-1424. Print