Virgilio is Listening to the Whispers of the Wind

LOVE SONNET LXXXIX

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:

I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands

To pass the freshness over me once more:

I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.

I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you

to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,

to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live

And you whom I love and sang above everything else

To continue to flourish, full-flowered:

So that you can teach everything my love directs

You to,

So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,

So that everything can learn for my song.

-Pablo Neruda

I find this poem by Pablo Neruda (one of my favourite poets) very moving because of the entwining of two universal themes: Love and death. This combination is potent and capable of moving the reader to tears.

This, for me, is one of the best love poems I’ve read in a long time. I don’t know how to explain what I felt when I read this poem several times. The only way to describe that feeling is to say that I’m deeply moved by its tenderness to the point where it punctures my mind and heart from time to time. I feel that my heart dances as it intersperses with aches in a display of ambivalent emotions that are in concert with love and death.

I felt sadness because of the element of death, of leaving behind the wife to face the crags of life alone. It’s hard just thinking of facing problems all by yourself without somebody to share them with you, to support and encourage you, to hold your hand and stroke your back, to tenderly massage your temple and nape, to give you a big hug, to reassure you that everything will turn out alright…I can go on and on.

I am personally touched by the first line of the first stanza:

“When I die, I want your hands on my eyes…”

There’s something about the touch of a hand. It’s personal and intimate and devoid of inhibitions. There's the presence of tenderness. Can you imagine the wife's bare hand lovingly closing the eyes of the husband for the last time as a gesture of a farewell send-off, of a non-verbal expression of imparting goodbye, before the person leaves (and will never come back)? Very heartbreaking. It breaks open the floodgates of my tearducts and brings forth the gushing of tears of grief and sadness.

“I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.”

My goodness, this line pierces the heart. It’s a sacrificial kind of love. For me, it means enjoy life even though the husband is no longer around. Don’t worry.

This is the kind of love that transcends death. It is more profound, deeper than the deepest sea. Neruda, the way I interpret the poem, is imparting this message: “Don’t worry if I’m no longer here in this world. My love will live on to see you through. We will see each other again in another realm of existence where there is no more death to separate us.”

This poem summons me to take a closer look at the way I express my love to my wife. It’s refreshing, cleansing, and uplifting. It nudges me to open that little door in the inner chamber of my heart to meet agape inside and get lost in its warm embrace.

Ah! Love…love…love…and what it is capable of doing. What more can I say? I’m lost for words. I’ll just close my eyes and allow my heart to sing, “Will you still love me tomorrow?”