#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.