Pablo Neruda's 'Walking Around': Poetic Insights and Themes

Understanding Pablo Neruda's 'Walking Around'

The poem "Walking Around" is part of the poetry collection Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth), which belongs to the second cycle of Pablo Neruda's poetic output, spanning the years 1931 to 1935. This period delves into the poet's inner world.

During this phase of literary production, Neruda, influenced by Surrealism, developed a vision of a culturally disintegrated and painful world. The poet, in this context, delves into the unconscious.

Residencia en la Tierra is a product of the loneliness and isolation Neruda experienced during his stay in the East as a diplomat. This was a profoundly painful chapter in his life, which Neruda himself called a "season in hell."

The perspective in this work is profoundly pessimistic and anxious. Its fragmentary, tumultuous rhythms, disregard for punctuation, and increasing obscurity of imagery demonstrate how Neruda began to abandon the style established by Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) and embarked on a path converging with avant-garde movements.

Analysis of "Walking Around"

• The leitmotif begins by revealing the lyrical ego's sense of defeat and overwhelming weariness.
• It depicts typical elements and places of the cityscape.
• Humanity is dehumanized, and the lyrical "I" feels alienated from this world.
• Stanza 3 highlights body parts that contribute to this fatigue.
• Stanza 4 explores the possibility of change.
• Stanzas 5 and 6 show a strong presence of gerunds (e.g., -ando, -endo), conveying a continuous sense of fatigue and a desire for it to persist.
• Stanza 7 features the personification of Monday.
• Stanza 8 presents a chaotic enumeration of disagreeable images of the human condition, a disintegrating world, and abandonment.

Formal Structure

• Written in verse.
• No discernible rhyme or regular structures.
• The verses are free, lacking a specific meter.
• The poem consists of ten groups of stanzas with an undetermined number of verses.

The Poem's Title: "Walking Around"

The title, written in English—a language different from the poem's original Spanish and often associated with capitalism—represents a will to break conventions. It aims to create a specific effect on readers and suggests a certain difficulty for the lyrical voice to communicate.

The use of a gerund verb, "walking," conveys a sense of continuous process. "Walking around" implies a walk that leads nowhere, signifying a lack of direction and constant, meaningless motion.

Central Themes

The poem explores the boredom of 20th-century man and the weariness of living in such a world.

Tone

The tone is sober and pessimistic, dominated by feelings of frustration.

Leitmotif

The central leitmotif is "I happen to be tired of being a man." This weariness of life transcends the physical, clearly reflecting the poet's profound fatigue.

Internal Structure

• Stanzas 1-3: The fatigue of man and its underlying reasons.
• Stanza 4: Potential remedies for that fatigue.
• Stanzas 4-5: The lyrical "I"'s unwillingness.
• Stanzas 7-8: The monotony of Monday and a chaotic enumeration.
• Stanza 9: The destruction of life.
• Stanza 10: Synthesis of the poem, with verbs relating to the title.