Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Tomatoes”

Pablo Neruda

It is hard not to love Pablo Neruda.  He is always lyrical, almost always accessible, and generously given to leaving his readers enriched and refreshed.

Nothing he has written, it seems to me, compares with the late ‘odes’ he wrote about simple objects.  I love these poems in praise of his socks, his suit, lemons, and other everyday objects.  They speak to me very powerfully about the wonderful world we inhabit.  His aim, as I say in the long introduction to his poem, was to speak to those he lived with about the shared wonder of our world.  He set out to speak not to intellectuals or ‘lovers of poetry,’ but to his neighbors in the small coastal town in northern Chile where he lived.  The language of his odes is simple, the imagery rich but drawn from the experience all humans share. In a century when too frequently poetry seems divorced from the concerns and language of everyday life, Neruda embraced the commonplace and made it uncommon, though still shared. 

Neruda’s love of the richness of the world was hard-earned.  He lived a full life, of sorrow and suffering as well as joy and love.  He was acquainted with alienation and oppression, with persecution and exile; he also knew the glories of tomatoes. 

One of his close friends was Salvador Allende, the socialist who was elected President of Chile and then overthrown by Chile’s right-wing military (with, tragically, the collusion of the American CIA).  Neruda, already ill with cancer, died shortly after Allende perished in the coup which ended both his presidency and Chilean democracy. 

Ode to Tomatoes 

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera,
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it’s time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth,
recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

    [trans. Margaret Sayers Peden]

Calibrations and Recognitions II

In the previous mailing I sent out Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” In situating that poem, I suggested that some poems calibrate or recalibrate the world for us so that we can orient ourselves to and within the lives we live, while other poems help us recognize the world which we inhabit.  “The Oven Bird” is a poem of the first sort.  I deferred to a later occasion a discussion of that other “miracle, similar but also usually unacknowledged, of human functioning, common to us all, so familiar as to pass without notice: our ability to recognize faces and voices.”  Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Tomatoes” is just such a poem of recognition, built on close observation and a wonderful use of metaphor.

When Neruda in 1954 published the first of his three volumes of Elemental Odes, he was already one of the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century.  A poet of love and loneliness, as well as one who tried to give a coherent identity to the entire continent of South America, he was quite possibly the most widely read and widely embraced poet of the century.   The Elemental Odes represented a departure from his earlier writing: no surprise, since the re-invention of his style and subjects had already characterized Neruda’s writing before he reached his late maturity. 

Let me begin this assessment of Neruda as a poet of recognition indirectly, following  Emily Dickinson’s counsel that we “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—/Success in Circuit lies.” 

Ten years ago, when I was a Fulbright Fellow teaching at Calcutta University, I spent an afternoon with one of India’s great modern poets, Jayanta Mahapatra.   Mahapatra had lived his entire life outside the mainstream of literary critics and publishing centers.  He taught physics at regional schools and colleges in the state of Orissa –  south of West Bengal, where Kolkata is located, and north of Andhra Pradesh, where Hyderabad is located.  Orissa, save for the 43 million people who live there, is rather off the beaten path.   For intellectual things, it is a backwater.

Nonetheless, though a physicist and a ‘provincial,’ Mahapatra would become an eminent and widely celebrated poet.  He wrote in English.  In India , a nation of over a billion people, a nation where each of the 29 states has a different language, English is the one common language, although the prevalence of Bollywood films has propelled Hindi into the forefront as well.   

Notwithstanding his earlier literary success, Mahapatra spoke eloquently to me of the situation that many writers of the developing world confront: by writing in the shared language of his nation, he wrote poems that were inaccessible to his neighbors, people who were brickmakers or weavers or farmers.  The language of Orissa is Oriya.  English is prevalent among intellectuals and the upper middle class, but if Mahapatra wanted to write for those around him – quite literally, the people among whom he had lived his entire life – he would have to write in Oriya.

And so, as he generously explained, he had made a decision that despite his preeminence as an English-language poet he would in the future write poems in Oriya.

This, I think, is what Neruda is doing in “Ode to Tomatoes.”   I don’t mean, of course, that he suddenly chose to write in Spanish.   A native of Chile, his first book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was written in Spanish.  It has remained  highly popular from its publication in 1924 to this day. 

All his poems were written in Spanish. 

But from those early love poems to long epics of South American history, his poetry was not something – to my mind – that could easily be shared by the carpenter or baker who lived in Isla Negra, the village by the Pacific where Neruda lived from 1939 until he died 34 years later.  

That these odes were first published in newspapers and not in literary magazines underlines the perspective I am suggesting: these poems of Neruda’s were written for ‘ordinary’ folks, and represent an attempt similar to Mahapatra’s, to speak to his neighbors.  And for them.  Listen to what he says about his subject and his audience in “The Invisible Man,” the first of the Elemental Odes:

…as I walk by, things
ask me to sing them….
I must write down what’s happening….
Give me
all the joys,
even the most secret,
for if not,
how will they be known?
I must tell of them,
give me
the daily
struggle, because these things are my song
and so we will go together,
shoulder to shoulder,
all men,
my song unites them….

“How will they be known?”  This is the poetry of recognition, revealing to us what we know, but do not know we know.  Poetry can shine a bright and revealing light on the things we live with, live with so continuously that they become part of the fabric of  daily life,  But: in becoming part of that fabric, they all too often lose their distinctiveness.  We take them for granted. 

It is possible I am proceeding by too much indirection here, and I ask you to bear with me as I veer even farther astray, into a key moment in twentieth century literary criticism.  Stay with me.  Neruda’s poem is not one of those poems that need extensive unpacking and explication.  As I have been trying to suggest, he is writing for his neighbors, in language they can understand, about things that they share.  Most especially, what Neruda and his neighbors, and Neruda and we readers here in the 21st century in the United States, share is this: the object world into which we are thrown at birth.  We live in a physical world[1].    

Here then is a second digression, after which we shall face the poem directly. 

In 1917, a Russian critic, Viktor Shklovsky, attempted to define what ‘art’ is, how it works, what it does.   In his essay “Art as Technique,” Shklovsky pointed out that in order to live in the world’s complexity and not be overwhelmed by a staggering multiplicity of choices, we reduce that complexity so that the world seems familiar to us.  Although the passage which follows sounds difficult, what Shklovsky is saying is simple and in my view right.   We cannot figure out, every time we want to rest, that a contraption with four narrow vertical columns (‘legs’) and a horizontal platform (‘seat’) and a vertical slab (‘back’) is a chair, and that we can sit on it without falling down.  We accept it as a chair, and we sit right down on it without thinking further.  Nor can we test every wall to make sure that it is truly solid and that we will be injured if we try to walk or run through it.  We simplify, based on our experience.  In fact, such simplification is called, in most cases, learning.  But such learning comes at a cost:

The process of 'algebrization,' the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature - a number, for example - or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.

To emphasize that last phrase, to illustrate his “not even appear in cognition,”Shklovsky proceeds to cite a passage from Leo Tolstoy’s diary.  It is, I agree with Shklovsky, a most remarkable passage.  Most remarkable! 

I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember - so that if I had dusted it and forgot - that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.

“Then it was the same as if I had not” dusted it.  Did he dust the couch, or didn’t he?  If he could not remember, if the experience had not registered, it was as if the experience had never existed.  And Tolstoy goes on to say, that if our lives, with all their complexity, “go on unconsciously,” then there is question as to whether our lives are really lived, or as he puts it, “Such lives are as if they had never been.” 

Tolstoy is arguing for a variant, much more tolerable and less patronizing than its predecessor, of Socrates’ great maxim, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  What Tolstoy is saying is, “The unaware life is not worth living: in fact, it is not even accurate to call it living.”

Thus we come to Shklovsky’s eloquent conclusion, commenting on the Tolstoy passage. 

And so life is reckoned as nothing.  Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. [italics added]

Shklovsky’s demand for difficulty in poems “to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception,” is to me disconcerting  Yikes.  One of the least appealing aspects of modern poetry is how difficult it is.  In the America of the nineteenth century, families gathered together and read or recited poetry; we call a generation of poets (Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier) the “fireside poets” because families literally sat by the fireside and read them.  The songs of Robert Burns, the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, the epics of Tennyson, inspired legions of readers in nineteenth century America .

And then along came T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens.  Great poets all, but read almost entirely in classrooms, with teachers to explain, blackboards on which to elucidate, footnotes.  (Perhaps the most important poem of the first half of the twentieth century, Eliot’s The Waste Land, came with its own footnotes!)  Thiacmodern self-consciously wrought ‘difficulty’ in poems, I am convinced, distanced poems from readers.  It created a gulf between poetry and people that exists pervasively, even in our own day.

But, and this is a real ‘but,’ Shklovsky is right.  Poetry must make objects unfamiliar.  If they are too familiar, we look at them but never see them.  They are either part of what I earlier called the tapestry of the everyday, or they are so taken for granted that we do not even recognize their existence in any form.

Is there a way to make ‘stones stony,” to recover the object world from the unconsciousness that Tolstoy so worries about?  I believe there is, and that Neruda is in pursuit of it in “Ode to Tomatoes.” and in his other odes. 

There is difficulty in this poem  – it is so rich and luxurious and easeful that we ignore its difficulty, or perhaps even embrace it in an abundance of love for tomatoes and the wonderful exuberance with which Neruda describes them – its extensive use of metaphor.  The metaphors don’t seem slow us down, but they do.  We’ll take a close look at many of these metaphors in what follows.  The wonder of the metaphors is that they are all, I think, immediately available to the people who were Neruda’s neighbors, the people who he was writing for.

There is not just one way to recover objects or experiences from the unconscious fabric of our everyday lives, of course.  William Carlos Williams, whom we saw write so eloquently about eating plums, found an alternate way.  But Neruda found his own way to convey “the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”  He did not make common objects unfamiliar, as Shklovsky theorized must be done: he held those common objects up to our attention, and by observing them not only carefully, but with a deeply loving gaze, convinced his readers to reconsider objects such as lemons, artichokes, soup, bicycles, socks and dictionaries.

That was a lot of reading for you, and we haven’t got to the poem yet.  It is time.  Here we go. 

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.

Already in the first sentence we find a simile, the sunlight like a halved tomato, falling on both sides of the street.  And a metaphor, sunlight like the juice that drops from a sliced tomato, a sunlight that floods the streets. 

As it proceeds, this poem will not let you down.  The metaphors will themselves flow, like that juice from the halved tomato, like sunlight pouring down in summer.  Such joyful abandon, metaphor after metaphor: did anyone, ever, revel in comparing as Neruda does in this poem, and his other odes?  I think the answer is a resounding ‘No!’ 

We will look at the figurative language in the poem, but unlike President Ford, of whom Lyndon Johnson once said unforgettably, “He could not walk and chew gum at the same time,” we can do several things at once.  So, though we will look at how the poem is constructed, don’t let our analytical work cause you to  you forgo bathing in the sea of glorious metaphors in the poem.  Let them wash over and around you . . .

My wife Buff is from South Carolina and in love with tomatoes, which grow easily and in great profusion there.   If you want a lot of tomatoes in Vermont, vine-ripened, you have to grow them yourself. So every year until I moved to Washington I grew 60-80 tomato plants.  August, the month when tomatoes ripen in Vermont, brought an abundance of tomatoes.  On every counter in our kitchen there were platters and baskets of red spheres, keeping Buff supplied with tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

As juice runs easily from a sliced tomato, so the summer light runs over the street at the beginning of the poem– a conflation of the great quantity of tomatoes, and the overabundance of summer sunlight. 

This profusion of red fruits, profoundly seasonal, provides the opening to “Ode to Tomatoes,” as the poet walks through the market, “the street/ filled with tomatoes.”  Reading this in the northern hemisphere we recall that in the calendar of the Southern hemisphere mid-summer is reversed.  So it is in December that Neruda finds tomatoes in the markets “unabated.” 

In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.

No wonder, with such richness available, that the “tomato invades the kitchen.”  But this is a friendly domestic invasion, quite the opposite of a military foray (as might be the case if it were termites, or fleas).  The tomatoes enter at lunchtime because they have been bought on his just-described morning trip to the street market.  The tomato “takes its ease” among other items of daily life: glasses, crockery, salt shakers.  The poem of recognition, as I have been pointing out, seeks to pull the ordinary and the quotidian out of the fabric of daily life, and call our attention to it.  We’re in the most utilitarian room of the house, the kitchen.  It is also the most friendly and relaxing, and here the tomato is as much a ‘regular’ in the summer kitchen as the butter dish and glasses.

It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.

That summer sunlight Neruda referred to in the fifth line?  The tomato sheds a light of its own.  It too is globular like the sun, majestic like the sun – but benignly so.  “Benign majesty” alludes the hospitality of the tomato, which will delight us, which can bring us (unlike at moments, the sun) no harm.  And to the tomato’s status: for those who love them it is the king of fruits. 

That benign tomato?  No sooner do we notice it in the kitchen than we plunge a knife into it, piercing its skin and penetrating its flesh.  Murder, regicide:

Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera,
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible

populates the salads
of Chile,

Murder.  Cut open,. the convolutions of its inner walls are revealed, looking (a metaphor here) like red viscera, as if the knife were plunged into the tomato’s belly and its innards were revealed.  This is a metaphor, and one that would readily be understood in all its visual brilliance by his neighbors, literate or illiterate. 

But no sooner has Neruda compared cutting open a tomato to murder than he is in retreat from the harshness of the metaphor. The tomato is once again, for the third time, a sun, now cool as opposed to the Chilean sun of summer, though like the sunlight it is profound and inexhaustible – or seemingly so.  That “inexhaustible” brings us back to the abundance of tomatoes with which the poem began. 

Having been cut into halves, the tomato – murdered, it is reborn – “populates the salads/ of Chile.” (The translation here is felicitous, as the translator picks up on a hint of what would be literally translated as ‘fills’ to note that filling is the opposite of the diminishment that was occasioned by the ‘murder’ of the tomato.’ Llena, ‘fills,’ is translated as ‘populates’.)  I wrote earlier that Neruda will take the everyday, what we are so familiar with that we may not notice its actuality, and put it before our attention.  In these two lines, he indicates that everywhere in his nation, a salad of tomatoes can be found.  It is part of the daily life of summer. 

And now, my favorite part of the poem, with one of my favorite lines of poetry coming up:

happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,

parsley

hoists

its flag

One of Neruda’s odes is entitled “Ode to Conger Chowder” and it is, pretty directly but without measurements and proportions, a recipe for how to make Chile’s national dish.  Here, in the lines just cited, Neruda tells us how to make a tomato salad: cut a tomato, drizzle it with the richness of olive oil, add some sliced onion, sprinkle with pepper and salt – Neruda adds a wonderful adjectival noun to reveal a special quality of salt, to which we are so attracted:  “its magnetism.”  And then, oh wow:

it is the wedding
of the day

Oh wow.  Everything has come together.  The ‘majestic juicy red flesh’ of the tomato, the pungent onion, the fruity oil of olives, aromatic pepper, magnetic salt.  “It is the wedding/of the day.”  Despite the murder several lines earlier, everything has come together (as in comic drama, as in comic opera) in a grand wedding, symbol of unification and ongoing fruitfulness.

Is the parsley part of that wedding, the marriage of green and red?  Or is it the garnish for the potatoes which are boiling in the pot?  Perhaps one, perhaps the other, perhaps both.

potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it’s time!
come on!

The parsley serves as a transition from the tomato, now in a salad, to the meal – meat and potatoes are on the menu.  You know how the smell of roasting meat, as it browns and nears readiness, infiltrates a house?  Ah, here “the aroma/of the roast/knocks/ at the door.”  It is time to eat, to partake of the bounty of what is in the kitchen, tomatoes, potatoes, roast.

That aroma seems to say – or is it the poet calling to us that it is mealtime –  or is it both?  “It’s time! Come on!” 

In the previous poem I sent out, “The Oven Bird,” Robert Frost proclaims that the bird is “Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird.”  Here Neruda – with quite a different tone, represents summer not with a bird reminding us of loss and diminishment, but with a cool, red, regal, stellar fruit: the tomato “at the midpoint/of summer.”  For though the potatoes may bubble and the roast may send forth its aromas, it is the tomato which is central.

and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
star of earth,
recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance.

The tomato, earlier a sun, now is a star.  The star of the show.  The star in the sky[2].  We recall that the sun, whose light was so prominent at the opening of the poem, is also a star.  Sun, star, tomato: each is a sphere which sheds its own light “”recurrent and fertile.”  We may also recall the stars we all drew as children, five- or six- pointed objects that like the cut tomato had their own geometric complexities. Again like a star (we know this from the sun) it has convolutions and canals, as the sun, seen magnified and through a filter so we can observe its surface, has swirls and currents; or as a planet, also round, also out in space, has striations and ‘canals’[3]. 

What earlier stunned us – the “red viscera” of the murdered tomato, is now full of wondrous visual richness.  The seeds (“fertile”), the curved segmentation (“convolutions”) and the liquid “juice” with which the poem commenced (filling the “canals”): the interior of the tomato is here brought before our vision, as earlier the round, red, shining exterior qualities of the tomato were delineated. 

no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

As if the “wedding/ of the day” were not enough, Neruda concludes by revealing that the tomato is miraculous.  The ordinary is transformed – not by any magic, but by the sheer act of looking, of recognizing what is actually in front of us as we sit down to dinner.  For the tomato is revealed as something entirely apart from the ordinary: not only remarkably abundant, but “no pit,/no husk,/no leaves or thorns:” a more than ample, totally accessible fruitfulness. 

It is there, the tomato, a gift that life brings us.  The poem helps us to see how wonderful it is, bright red like a sun and complete unto itself, a “gift/of fiery color/and cool completeness.”  Noris it just the tomato that is wonderful.  It is life itself, even (especially) the everyday life that we take for granted.  The life in which we sit down to a lunch of tomatoes. 

In this poem Neruda talks to his neighbors, both in Isla Negra and to all of us who share the planet with him, about the glory one of one the objects which we experience.  He does not take it for granted, and understands that to those who prepare but also to those who eat the tomato it is a wonder and a miracle. 

The tomato is an essential part of “the wedding of the day.”  Tomatoes are part of our shared reality: calling attention to them underlines the brotherhood and sisterhood of men and women as well as the miraculousness of being human and existing in our physical world. 

Unlike the food which MacDonald’s serves us, hamburgers wrapped in yellow paper, Neruda does not allow our daily meals to slip by us as if they too were wrapped in paper and ingested without attention.  We see what we eat.  One of the enduringly wonderful things about this poem is how visual it is.  This poem is not, after all, about how tomatoes taste, but how they look.  Neruda’s poem allows us to see, with vibrant and rapt attention, the tomato on our plate. 

“Ode to Tomatoes” is a paean to this red fruit that graces our salads and sandwiches and tables.  It enables us to recognize the fruitfulness of our lives by bringing our attention to this “remarkable” fruit that weds us to the world.  The tomato is, in the words of this poem, a “union” between what the poet sees and writes about, on the one hand, and the readers of the poem.  The poem itself, it seems to me, is like the tomato salad the poet describes, “the wedding/ of the day,” in which we and the object world, life and art, words and things, poet and reader, come together in enduring partnership[4].

Footnotes 

[1] As Walt Whitman wrote in one his greatest poems, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” we all are cast into a physical world, and are ourselves physical beings.  (That tough “struck from the float forever held in solution” in the magnificent lines I am about to cite, is both our emergence into our own bodily identity as we leave the amniotic fluid where we floated in utero, and the individuality we obtain when we -- at birth -- are differentiated  from the enormous sea of the undifferentiated ‘being’ we call the universe).  

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv'd identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I  should be of my body.

[2] Neruda uses both senses of star.  In Spanish:

astro de tierra,

estrella

repetida

y fecundas

with ‘astro’ meaning star (as in celebrity) of the earth, and ‘estrella’ referring to the astronomical object

[3] Is this getting away from the simple language and imagery that would be easily accessible to Neruda’s neighbors?  I don’t believe so.  The light emanating from the tomato in its glorious redness, the complexity of its structure when cut open, the seeds within it which are not just a symbol of fertility but the actuality of its capacity to be planted again: these are not at all inapprehensible to all of Neruda’s neighbors.  Suns, planets: that astronomical knowledge is a plus, but it is not necessary to comprehend the poem.

[4] For those who are interested in other of Neruda’s Odes, I recommend the fine translation by Margaret Sayers Peden, Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, (with the Spanish facing the English translation).