FIRE FROM WITHIN

Neruda is writing in Spanish, of course. An alternate translation of the line is “Under your skin the moon is alive.” Neruda’s poem is about a woman, yes, but also about the problem of vision and the role of poetry (his poetry) in revealing the true beauty of things. Neruda seeks to see the woman with a “chaste heart” and “pure eyes” as she lies down in the “bed” of his poem. What the poet discerns is that far from existing separate from the world, the woman’s body somehow is the world (“From what materials / Agate? / Quartz? / Wheat? / Did your body come together”) so that enclosed (or contained by) in the perfection of her beauty is the beauty of the universe—that rather than be in the world, somehow, the world is in the woman. The final stanza articulates this idea: the poet is able to see the nude not because of the “light that falls over the world spreading inside your body” but because she is herself he source of illumination, as if she were “on fire within”—or as if the moon were inside her skin. Her beauty is itself the thing that makes the poet’s vision possible—in a way, rather than poet seeing her, and writing about her, her beauty “illuminates” or writes the poem.