‘If You Forget Me’ poem by Pablo Neruda
An Interpretation
The title of the poem is, “If You Forget Me,” which Pablo Neruda wrote when he was in exile. You can find the poem online here. It is a lyric poem where the poet expresses his personal expression. The below interpretation is my own.
The poet narrator is the inner child of the reader who has grown up and is an adult now. The child tells the adult that if he forgets him, then the following is going to happen.
In the beginning, the child says to the grown-up, ‘I want you to know… one thing.’ He has only one message for the adult, or for the reader.
In the second stanza, the child reminds the adult that he knows how this is. How things are, or how they are still playing the same old game of hide and seek. He says that he used to be a lover of nature, and even now when the adult looks at the crystal moon, and the red branches of autumn trees, he remembers how as a child, such visions had captured his imagination. Here, the poet uses plenty of visual imagery such as the crystal moon, the red branches of autumn trees, the window, the ash, and the wrinkled body of the log.
The reader can imagine the setting where the adult is seated, probably in the autumn season, by a window in a room where there is a fireplace, and he has lit the fire. He is sitting near the fire and looks outside the window to find the red branches of autumn and the crystal moon. The time is nighttime. If he touches the impalpable ash near the flame, or the wood that is burning, everything he feels, he does so via the senses of the child that he once was.
As an adult, he is trying to find the child not within himself but within a lover. As though everything that exists, sails towards the isles of the adult. He was a child once, years ago, but he really doesn’t exist any longer, he has grown up. But the adult is real just like the isles of his body, and with the adult, there is a lover who also exists. And in these existing things such as the man, the aroma, light, and metal, the child has no existence. The child only exists within the adult, who doesn’t see him there, but he misses being the child, so he looks for the child as a lover instead.
He personifies the log of wood by calling it the wrinkled body of the log. This symbolizes his changing body with his changing age, the older he grows the more wrinkled his body will become. All material things will come to an end.
In the third stanza, the child says that if the adult stops loving the child little by little, then the child too will stop loving the adult little by little.
In the fourth stanza, the child says that he is like a mirror to the adult. If the adult forgets him, then the child would have forgotten him already. If the adult thinks it is long and mad to remember the child and become childlike once again, and if the adult chooses to forego the child in him, then the child too will let go of the adult and vanish, and never come to see him again. Even though the child is rooted in the same body as the adult, the child says that it is possible that the child will completely disappear, and seek another land, if the adult chooses to forsake him.
He uses the metaphor long and mad wind of banners to show us banners flapping in the wind that pass through his life. This signifies the many changes that a person goes through in his lifetime, that is, he changes from one banner to another in different periods of time. He uses the metaphor of his heart where he has his roots, and his heart has a shore implying that his heart is next to an ocean or a lake and that his heart is a beach where his roots are. He is like a tree or a plant growing on a beach.
In the fifth stanza, the child says, ‘If the adult keeps the child alive by seeking him in his lover, then the child will always stay with him, in his arms.’
The poet uses several hyperboles in the last stanza, with lines like “if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me…in me all that fire is repeated, in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten.” The child speaks in hyperboles about his emotions conveying that all that happened in the past is true, the past is your destiny, something to be remembered.
He uses an image of a flower by saying, “If each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me.” But he does not say what kind of flower, nor the color of the flower. The child says that his voice still exists in the adult, and if the adult chooses, he can speak with the voice of the child, or allow the child in him to express himself in the form of speech.
His last lines are “in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine.” The child says that he remembers everything and his love feeds on the love the adult affords him. He concludes by saying that as long as the adult lives and loves the child, the child will continue to exist in him.
References:
‘If You Forget Me’ by Pablo Neruda (https://allpoetry.com/if-you-forget-me)
