Comparative Essay.docx

Comparative Essay on Pablo Neruda’s "Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair and Octavio Paz’s "Touch".

Upon looking at the title of both poems, Pablo Neruda’s "I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair" and Octavio Paz’s "Truth", the first mentioned title can be portrayed and interpreted basically only in one way. It is not misleading in the facts that it gives a good understanding of what the poem will be about. Unlike the latter, this full of emotion poem of Neruda clearly manifests the author’s feelings towards his lover and his great desire and the feeling of need for this woman. "Touch" on the other hand, creates symbols on the reader’s mind as the word touch may carry with it its connotative and denotative meanings.

The tone of Neruda’s poem is set by feelings of anguish, misery, agony, and grief. While the tone of the other mentioned poem is somewhat associated to sexiness. The choice of words or diction of Paz sounds and appeals sensual as it mentions nudity and uncovering of bodies. Both poem’s true meaning are deep because of all the metaphors and rhetorical devices used throughout the poem.

It can be assumed that the woman Neruda describes in his poem is someone he had completely fallen in love with. On the contrary, Paz’s work indefinitely describe how his touch had transformed into a magic that uncovered a woman’s body and reveal not a single entity but a multiple-layered existence. In the first stanza of Neruda, he uses repetition and caps on lines 1and 2 in order to emphasize the pain he would go through if she were to ever leave him even for the smallest amount of time. He then uses simile to compare himself waiting for her to an empty train station. In the simile, he personifies the trains by giving them human-like qualities such as sleeping. The meaning of the simile is direct in the fact that the comparison is clear and vivid. Paz did repetitions too as he stressed out emphasis to "My Hands" on the first and second to the last line putting a gentle cue that his hands created the magic touch that unveils the woman’s physical being. He also had irony in the third line when he said he clothe her in further nudity. Throughout the second stanza, Neruda uses imagery to give a further feel for his agony if she leaves him.

After reading Neruda’s poem, one can conclude that he was a very loving person but was also very impatient and desperate. He might as well was going through some struggles and was doing all his power to try and keep her by his side.

Neruda here was quite sure of his woman or lover in the poem. Paz on the contrary, has a woman subject but unidentified relationship towards him. Neruda is certain on the woman he speaks of in the poem, while Paz considered himself the light, an exquisite light that invented another body for her. Virginity walked into my nerves

as he declared his act of clothing with nudity and uncovering the bodies and that invented a new body or a new life comes into being.