Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is loved around the world for his love poems and his odes to everyday things like onions, socks and the sea and continue to stay relevant even today.The quiet power of good poetry is that it doesn’t ask permission to enter your life. It just arrives, and you often end up remembering it, sometimes half remembered and half believed.You may have felt this yourself: a sentence seems to describe someone you love, or a feeling you could never name until another person named it for you.Let’s see what Neruda wrote and what he exactly meant through his words.
Quote of the day
As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin
Pablo Neruda
What does the quote mean?
Neruda’s words describe two images that pull in opposite directions. Fire is hot, restless and alive, and on the contrary, the moon is cool, calm and quiet. Together they describe a person who glows, with passion burning inside and a soft silvery light on the surface. By which he means that the beauty isn’t painted on. It comes from within.The lines come from Neruda’s “Oda a la Bella Desnuda” or “Ode to a Beautiful Nude” which is a poem of admiration for a woman’s body, and the moon is the poet’s way of saying she is both earthly and otherworldly.Quote websites such as AZQuotes and Goodreads credit these beautiful words to Pablo Neruda, and they originally comes from his poem “Oda a la Bella Desnuda”, from Nuevas Odas Elementales (1956), in Nathaniel Tarn’s English translation in Selected Poems, Houghton Mifflin.
How are his words still relevant today?
We live in a time of filters, edits and perfect profile pictures. And amid all this digitalisation, these lines remind us of a different kind of beauty, the kind you can’t put on artificially. That may be why people use them for friendship and self-love as well as romance.
