The poem Poetry was introduced to the audience at the last part of the movie Il Postino. Based on the movie, the poem was written by Mario Ruoppolo, the main character of the story. However without taking into account the movie, the persona of the poem can be described as someone who just recently discovered a passion or love or likeness towards poetry, and this can be concluded from the first line of the poem. Basically, the entire poem is telling us about how the persona realized that he is starting to like poetry and how it “touched” him, and what happened during the first time that he started writing poems.
The first line of the first stanza tells us directly what the poem is all about; Neruda personified poetry and made it seem as though poetry approached the persona and inspired him. The persona tries to explain to the readers how he began to be inspired by using negatives, meaning he is stating all the places where poetry did not come from. He describes this event as something life changing by giving the readers an image of something bright coming to a very dark place, and that brightness is poetry.
The first half of the second paragraph started with the persona telling the readers his reaction and feelings he had after discovering his love for poetry. He was captivated deeply as it was described that he felt it even in his soul. This just goes to show how much the persona was overtaken by poetry because a person’s soul doesn’t really feel anything, and the exaggeration is placed here to make the readers feel the intensity of the situation.
The second half of the stanza tells the readers the experience of writing the very first line of poetry, how it is senseless yet wise at the same time. Senseless because the persona was new to poetry, and wise because even though he was new to poetry, he could realized he could write poems, and he presents to us his experience by giving us images of the universe and heavens, etc. , which can be associated with something big and endless. The last stanza tells us of the persona’s feelings of being able to write poems. Basically, it tells us the persona,
someone extremely small compared to the universe, felt so big that he can match up to the size of the sky where he can be a part of the stars. Neruda’s Poetry uses formal words throughout the poem, although it is not really hard to understand, because it’s direct and straight to the point. Underneath the literal meaning of the poem, I guess the poem is trying to tell the readers what it feels like to be captivated by something unexpected, and how this can turn out to be life-changing and how it can affect your entire world.
