Exercise 2: Pablo Neruda’s The Word
Explicating a Poem
Write an Explication and Analysis of no less than 300 words of the poem The Word by Chilean author Pablo Neruda. Following the poem you’ll find a link to how to write a poetry explication, and a paragraph sample written by a student.
THE WORD
It was bornin blood, the wordgrew in the dark body, beatingand flew through the lips and the mouth.
Further, and nearerstill, still it camefrom dead fathers, nomadic races,from lands made of stone,that were tired of their wretched tribes,because when pain set out on the waythe villages walked and arrivedand new earth and water joined againto sow their words anew.And so this is the legacy:this is the air which connects usto the dead man and the dawnof new beings not yet woken.
The atmosphere still trembleswith the first wordformedin panic and moans.It rosefrom the shadowsand even now no thunderyet thunders with the clangof that wordthe firstword spoken:perhaps it was only a sigh, a drop,and yet its cascade falls and falls.Then sense fills the word.The word was made pregnant and filled with lives.It was all births and cries:affirmation, clarity, force,negation, destruction, death:the verb assumed all those powersand merged existence and essencein the electricity of her beauty.
Word, human, syllabic, pelvisof wide light and solid silver,hereditary cup that receivesthe communication of blood:here is where silence was fusedin the total human wordand not to speak is to be dying among beings:language springs from the roots of the hair,the mouth talks without the lips moving:the eyes of a sudden are words.
I take the word and traverse itas if it were solely human form,its lineaments delight me and I flythrough each resonance of language:I pronounce and I am and I reach without speechthe silence at the end of words.I drink to the word, liftinga word or a glass of crystal,in it I drinkthe wine of languageor the interminable watersmaternal fount of words,and glass and water and wineoriginate my songbecause the verb is the originand the living channel: it is bloodthe blood that speaks its substanceand so is ready to flow:giving crystal to crystal, blood to bloodand giving life to life, the words.
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How to Explicate a PoemLinks to an external site.
“On Pablo Neruda’s “The Word,” the third stanza delves in the notions that words are pregnant with meaning, and the comparison suggests that words are personified, as though they were a woman with child. When integrating lines from the poem, be sure to enter a parenthetical citation with the number of the line (Line 3) (Neruda, Lines 3 and 7).
1-Identify literary devices such as allusion, tone, metaphor, style, etc.
2-When you integrate actual verses or lines from the stanza, as to provide evidence to your interpretation, be sure to insert these lines into quotation marks.
3-Avoid writing “Pablo’s poem entitled “The Word” is about… Instead, Neruda’s poem relies upon language , and the power of word as a means to convey notions of existence and the human need to communicate experience. Never call the author by their first name. 
4- Always introduce the title of the work you are responding to, and the author’s full name. Subsequently, use only the author’s last name.