Tonight, I can write the saddest lines by Pablo Neruda is among the most poignant poems I know. 

And yet, I’m amazed by the strength of human emotion—to feel, to love, to lose. From those ashes, a sonnet rises that lives on long after its creator. 

If he had not loved as deeply as he did, and lost her, could this poem ever have come into being? Is it then a blessing or a burden to feel so profoundly? Grief pours forth, simply love with nowhere left to go. 

Before I talk some more about the poem, here it is for your reading pleasure.

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Tonight I can write by Pablo Neruda 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
And these the last verses that I write for her.

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My favorite line from this poem, although it’s so difficult to choose just one, is: Love is so short, forgetting is so long. 

Sigh…. Haven’t we all been there? And if you haven’t, I both envy and feel sorry for you. 

The poem is more than grief; it is also an attempt to come to terms with her absence, with the knowledge that he may continue to love her even though that moment has passed, just as the night will. Perhaps these lines mark the end, or perhaps not. 

Love lingers, does it not? Longer than it should—longer than we wish. It simply lingers.