Walking Around by Pablo Neruda
"Walking Around" is a poem by Pablo Neruda that explores themes of alienation and existential dissatisfaction. The poem opens with the speaker expressing fatigue with the human condition, feeling disconnected and "withered," symbolized by a swan adrift on a sea of ashes. This imagery reflects a rejection of superficial societal norms, as the speaker critiques the mundane aspects of life, from barbershops to the parts of himself he finds unappealing.
As the poem progresses, the speaker experiences a shift in perspective, contemplating the thrill of defiance against established institutions like bureaucracy and the church, suggesting a desire for liberation and joy amid despair. The poem paints a vivid, often grotesque picture of modern existence, depicting a world filled with decay and absurdity, where even the ordinary objects of life seem to suffer, as represented by weeping mirrors and clothing.
Despite the speaker's rage and desire to escape, there remains an undercurrent of compassion, as the everyday items lament their own existence. Ultimately, "Walking Around" captures a complex emotional landscape, blending frustration with a poignant recognition of shared human suffering.
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Walking Around by Pablo Neruda
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1935 (collected in Residence on Earth, and Other Poems, 1946)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Walking Around” opens casually: “It happens that I am tired of being a man.” The poem’s visionary experience starts with a painful awareness of alienation.
In the first eleven lines, bracketed by the phrase “It happens that I am tired,” the first-person speaker sees himself as “withered” and “impenetrable” like a swan made of felt on a sea of “origins and ashes” when he goes to tailor shops or to cinemas. Both establishments concern appearances instead of realities. The swan afloat on an ocean of ashes implies the rejection of conventional poetic attitudes. The speaker also rejects the pleasant aromas of barbershops, gardens, merchandise, eyeglasses, and elevators, an almost random assortment of nouns associated with various aspects of being human. The speaker even turns against his own feet, fingernails, hair, and shadow.
In the next fourteen lines the speaker pivots: “Yet,” it would be “delightful” to “scare a notary with a cut lily” or to “kill a nun with a jab to the ear.” That is, he could still get some joy from shaking up the bureaucracy (by threatening it with a flower, something antithetical) or by taking on the church (a more demanding task). It would be nice, he says, to “walk down the street with a green knife/ and whooping it up till I die of the shakes.” He insists he does not want to live “like a root in the dark,” as an underground man in a “cellar of corpses,” cold and stiff.
In the next fourteen lines the speaker says Monday burns like oil when it sees his jailbird’s face showing up again. The speaker sees himself as a prisoner of time and routine. The first working day of the week turns against him. “Something,” perhaps time, shoves him into “damp houses” and hospitals “where bones fly out the windows.” In such places sulfur-colored birds loom at doors hung with “horrible intestines.” In this nightmare world dentures are forgotten in a coffee pot and mirrors weep in shame to be reflecting the ugliness of life.
Amid the umbrellas, poisons, and belly buttons, the speaker determines, in the last six lines, to pass on calmly in his “rage and oblivion.” Arguably, however, the speaker cannot simply forget what he sees (if he could, the poem would not exist), for the last image is of “underpants, towels and shirts which weep/ slow dirty tears.” The ordinary things of the human world cry out to him, and despite the speaker’s anger, he cannot help being compassionate.
Bibliography
Agosín, Marjorie. Pablo Neruda. Translated by Lorraine Roses. Boston: Twayne, 1986.
Dawes, Greg. Verses Against the Darkness: Pablo Neruda’s Poetry and Politics. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2006.
De Costa, Rene. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Duran, Manuel, and Margery Safir. Earth Tones. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1980.
Feinstein, Adam. Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Felstiner, John. Translating Neruda. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980.
Handley, George B. New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Longo, Teresa, ed. Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Santi, Enrico Maria. Pablo Neruda: The Poetics of Prophecy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Teitelboim, Volodia. Neruda: An Intimate Biography. Translated by Beverly J. DeLong-Tonelli. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.