“Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” is the second-to-last poem in Pablo Neruda’s most famous book, Twenty Songs of Love and a Song of Despair. Though it speaks of sadness at the loss of his lover, it is technically one of twenty love songs. The song that follows, the last in the collection, is that of despair.

At the time, poets in Latin America were writing Symbolist and Modernist poetry, which tended to be more erudite, employing images as symbols for ideas and feelings. Readers were meant to decode these symbols as a way of understanding the poem. If poets wrote about love or sex, they also employed euphemistic language. Neruda’s first volume of poetry, twilight (1923), was written in a Modernist, Symbolist style.

What makes Neruda’s Twenty Songs unique is the way the speaker describes the body directly, relating romantic and sexual encounters openly, without using inuendo. In “Every Day You Play,” for example, Neruda writes, “Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle, / and even your breasts smell of it” (Lines 22-23). He also says, “My words rained over you, stroking you. / A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body” (Lines 30-31), and “I want to do to you what spring does to the cherry blossoms” (Line 35).