Pablo Neruda's Ode to the Happy Day

Jun 9, 2010
Maria Jacketti

Pablo Neruda's - Public Domain of Germany

In Neruda's first collection of odes, Elemental Odes, he expresses his desire to prolong happiness in a world that appears to attack it.

Neruda's "Ode to the Happy Day" is a many-layered love poem. While expressing affection for his beloved, the poem also praises gifts of nature surrounding and sheltering the couple. A sense of evanescence pervades the work, as the poet realizes he cannot freeze time; it will surely pass. Yet, he wishes to preserve some fragment of the experience. He uses poetry to eternalize the moment, much as Shakespeare does in his sonnets. However, it is the influence of Walt Whitman that overshadows the Shakespearean desire to preserve experience for eternity. Many of the lines of this poem mirror portions of Song of Myself.

"Ode to the Happy Day" by Pablo Nerudatranslated from the Spanish by Maria Jacketti

This time,

let me be happy –

nothing has happened to anybody –

I am nowhere special

I am only

happy

through the four chambers

of my heart, I am strolling,

sleeping, or writing.

What canI do? I'm

happy.

I am more uncountable

than the meadow grass –

I touch the skin of a wrinkled tree,

and the water below ,

and the birds above,

and the sea, like a ring

around my waist.

The Earth is made of bread and stone.

The air sings like a guitar.

You, by my side in the sand,

you are the sand.

You sing, and you are song.

Today the world

is my soul,

song and sand;

today, the world

is your mouth.

Let me be happy

on the sand, touching your mouth.

Let me be happy

to be be happy, because yes, because I am breathing,

and because you are breathing,

happy, because I am touching

your knee,

and it is as though

I am touching the blue skin of heaven

and its pristine air.

Today let me

happy

with everybody – or without them,

with the deep green meadow,

and the sand,

with the air and earth,

happy

Similes and Metaphors in "Ode to a Happy Day"

While the air "sings like a guitar" and he touches his beloved, she takes on the persona of an Earth goddess. This touch is like the "blue skin of heaven."

Ultimately, "Ode to a Happy Day" expresses the plight of deeply conflicted man. His desire to live close to the Earth and experience romantic love becomes fractured by his ability to lead a country to a difficult, transient reality through poetry. Realizing he is an instrument of this evolution, one that will devour him to his last days, he speaks what seems almost a prayer, "to be happy."

As is the case in his four books of odes, Neruda emphasizes the paradox of "nothing special" being completely precious and self-actualizing. He eschews materialism in this aspect of his poetry and finds spiritual roots in the Earth that is made of "bread and stone." As in many of the odes, his Eden is spoiled by a call back to the city and political imperatives. The poet, for his part, cannot resist the voices of his compatriots and the communist promise of a Chile in which all would have a share of the planet's daily bread.

Source:

"Ode to the Happy Day," translated by Maria Jacketti

from Neruda's Garden, An Anthology of Odes. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1995

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