Ode to Wine-Neruda "Ode to Wine"

Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet whose influential works helped to garner him a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Wine," from Full Woman, Fleshy Apple, Hot Moon, uses allusions, imagery, and the theme of love and admiration to compare his love of wine, and the pleasure he derives from it, to the sensuality and sexuality of a woman.

Neruda structures "Ode to Wine" from a free verse approach; like traditional odes, Neruda praises an object, in this case wine, and draws inspiration from the wine's essence as well as the wine's container, to explain how wine makes him feel. Furthermore, Neruda is able to use wine to express his love of women, or a specific, albeit unnamed, woman. It may be argued that "Ode to Wine" follows a modified ode structure that helps to introduce the object of his affection, explains the correlation between wine and the woman he loves, and explain in what ways the woman supersedes the qualities he admires in the wine.

Moreover, it can be argued that Neruda is able to fulfill the "three modalities of awakened doing" described in A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. Neruda fulfills the first mode of acceptance by recognizing not only the pleasure that wine evokes, but also the pitfalls and the "mortal memories" that it brings up. The second modality, enjoyment, is expressed through Neruda's love of wine and the unnamed woman and the pleasure that is derived from both. The third modality, enthusiasm, is fulfilled through the bringing together of wine and the woman and the mutual love that Neruda has for both.

The poem has an overall tone of admiration,...

In "Ode to Wine," Neruda is able to exalt the power that wine has ranging from its ability to bring people together in which Neruda tells wine that "you must be shared" to its ability to "feed on mortal memories" (line 19, 21-22). Not only does Neruda exalt wine's ability to influence people, but he also highlights the polar attributes that the wine has. Wine is not a single-note beverage, but rather a multi-faceted drink.
Neruda is able to demonstrate the distinction between wine's many features through highly descriptive imagery. Neruda's ode to wine does not discriminate between red and white varieties, but rather encompasses both; Neruda compares the varieties by comparing them to celestial characteristics. Neruda describes white wine as "Day-colored wine…with topaz blood…starry child of earth…smooth/as a golden sword," whereas red wine is described as "night-colored wine,/with purple feet…soft/as lascivious velvet" (lines 1-4, 6-11). Despite the differences in the varieties, Neruda contends that wine, in general, "stirs the spring" and is powerful enough to cause "walls [to] crumble…and rocky cliffs, chasms close" (lines 37, 39-41).

In the second stanza, Neruda shifts his focus from wine and the power that it holds to how it invokes the qualities of sensuous woman. Unlike the first stanza that utilizes the natural world to create a backdrop for comparison, the second stanza also takes the goblet into consideration. The comparisons and allusions that Neruda makes in the second stanza are reminiscent of Robert Herrick's poems and Shakespeare's sonnets. In the second stanza, Neruda…