Gentleman Alone - by Pablo Neruda - Essay Example

In the poem, Gentleman Alone, Neruda has explicitly talked about sex and lovers and the whole theme of the poem is preoccupied with the sexual content. The poem starts with the illustration of people who are surrounding the speaker. They include homosexual men, pregnant house wives, young girls, cats in their heat, all of whom are surrounding the house of the speaker and making love. The speaker’s tone shows that he is desperate about his loneliness when the whole world around him is making love.

Sex and passion seems in the air and everybody in the poem is shown drenched with the lust of bodily experiences. People of all ages are getting involved in sex. The speaker talks about a beach paradise which is lined with palm trees, a scene that is depicting the summer season, and which is perfect for lovers. The poem then talks about a low salaried clerk who has been sleeping with his neighbor and has seduced her to making love. He takes her to the movies and continues to fill his desire of lust.

The poet talks about his own despair when he sees that the husbands, students, priests and animals, all are occupied with sex and lovemaking. Hence, the message that we can figure out from this poem is that despite the fact that one is surrounded with people who are enjoying and having fun and are doing whatever they like, one is bound to live in despair if his heart is not happy just the same. When one is sad from within, then no matter how much enjoyment is going on around him, he will continue feeling sad and nothing in the world will seem pleasurable enough to soothe him.

The poet is feeling lonely instead of the crowd surrounding him. People are making love and there is nobody to love him and thus he feels deserted. As far as the poetic devices used in the poem are concerned, the overall tone of the poem is melancholic depicting the speaker’s frustration that he feels inside him when he sees the world having fun. There is no alliteration and assonance observed in the stanzas. However, the poet has intensively made use of imagery and has described things that create vivid mental pictures using any of the five senses.

For example, he has used imagery in phrases like ‘palpitating sexual oysters’ (line 5), ‘fat and thin and happy and sad couples’ (line 12), and ‘bees smell of blood’ (line 28). Metaphors have been used, for example, when the poet compares the women’s breasts with glistening eyes, heroes with horses and passionate princes, and beds with ships. The poet has been able to give human qualities to many inanimate objects by using personification in phrases like ‘my solitary home’ (line 6), nights of hunters and husbands ‘burying’ the poet (line 25), and ‘breathing forest crushes me’ (line 36).

Onomatopoeia has also been used when the poet uses words like buzz to imitate sounds like in the phrase ‘and the flies buzz cholerically’ (line 28). The poet has used the first person narrative with him being a character in the story telling it from his perspective like in phrases ‘cross my garden at night’ (line 4), ‘enemies of my soul’ (line 7), and ‘bury me’ (line 25). There is no repetition of words, lines and stanzas. Every line seems independent of the one preceding it and there is no rhyming scheme as well.

The poem has also not been divided into stanzas. The poet has sometimes used hyperbole to make