Day 3 - If You Forget Me - by Pablo Neruda

Love is a funny thing.  Everyone seems to have a different idea on what it is.  Love between friends, love between parents and children, love between lovers; all of these have different feelings associated with them, yet all are called Love.  Even love between lovers is different for everyone.  What is Love?  Do I feel jealous and say, I must love him.  Do I feel pity and say, I must love him. Do I feel passion and say, I must love him. Or do I simply feel love, no matter the pity, the passion, or the jealousy.  Is jealousy part of love, or is it selfishness?  Is pity part of  love, or is it pride?

I don't agree necessarily with the way Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) describes it here, in this poem.  How can one forget the person they love so easily? Maybe it's easier to dismiss someone, as easily as he dismissed his real name - Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto.  Or as easily as he dismissed his passion for Communism, after it was outlawed in 1948, and suddenly a fugitive, he escaped through the mountains into Argentina after friends hid him for months in their houses. Or as easily as he forgets this, and returns to Chile after his Nobel Prize?  How does a person with such passion simply forget?

Is this jealousy talking through him, as in - I will only love you if you love me?  Is this the beginnings of a love, where it hasn't fully reached the bottom of his soul, and therefore is easily dismissed?  Or is it such longing that the mind compensates the heartache by forgetfulness, like it does sometimes in grief?  This I don't understand.  To me, a love that he talks about here where "everything carries me to you" is not one that can be forgotten.  I think he is deluding himself and I think that is the profound message this poem carries for me, how we simply think we can dismiss feelings, yet deep down in our hearts and our souls, we know we will carry that person with us forever, even if they do not love us.

Here is my spoken version of this poem:
https://soundcloud.com/raindrop-11/if-you-forget-me

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If You Forget Me - by Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

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Pablo Neruda died of prostate cancer on 23 September 1973 and the world cried for him.  He has had many tributes.  The film Il Postino is about his life in exile during the 1950s.

Here is Madonna reading If You Forget Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5yADgMzGJo

If you prefer it set to music, here is another version of Madonna's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f88n8eQCGvs