Pablo Neruda

Patsy Kline said “You want me to act like we've never kissed, you want to forget; pretend we've never met, and I've tried and I've tried, but I haven't yet... You walk by, and I fall to pieces.” “If You Forget Me,” by Pablo Neruda it’s sort of the opposite of this quote. This poem makes you ask yourself whether you can forget a person simply because they’ve forgotten you. The poem is kind of a way of protecting your heart. In it, the author states, “If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you.” He goes on about forgetting about the other person, but only if she has already forgotten about him. At the end he changes his story and basically says that if she still loves him, then he will forever love her. Pablo Neruda used a lot of imagery in this poem. He talked about things as though he was painting them for the reader. He talks about the crystal moon and the wrinkled body of the log. These images are strong enough to be imprinted in your mind. He says, “…my love feeds on your love…” which almost shows you how strong his love is. It’s like he’s saying I will love you as long as it’s returned. The words were very vivid and gave the poem a reality that’s almost heartbreaking. There’s also a couple of lines where he talks about having roots and if she doesn’t choose him, the roots will seek another land. The images that are drawn up in my mind make his words come alive for me. It makes me think of all the corny love stories I’ve seen. It just conjures up pictures of lost love. There’s a lot of personification in “If You Forget Me.” Pablo Neruda took mundane things and changed them into things that you can feel or almost see. There are a lot of sentences that don’t take much imagination to see the picture that he was trying to draw. He talks about “the winds of banners that pass through my life.” In my mind, I pictured a person seeing their life flash by and he means that this person is going to flash by in the