Pablo Neruda’s Celebrated Birds

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Pablo Neruda’s Celebrated Birds
Written by Bob Sundstrom

This is BirdNote.

[Ambient sound of Chilean Swallow, ML303677]

Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. A native of Chile who wrote in Spanish, much of his work has been translated into English.

Known best for poems of love, he also celebrated nature. His “Ode to the Hummingbird” brilliantly captures the bird. The poem begins:

The hummingbird
in flight
is a water-spark,
an incandescent drop
of American
fire,
the jungle’s
flaming résumé,
a heavenly,
precise
rainbow:
the hummingbird is
an arc,
a golden
thread,
a green
bonfire!    

[hummingbird buzz]

Birds were close to Neruda’s heart, and his metaphors draw us into the beauty of nature. He composed more than twenty poetic profiles of Chilean birds, including the Andean Condor, Black-necked Swan, Rufous-collared Sparrow, and Magellanic Penguin.

One of these poems spoke of how the Wandering Albatross…

skims the waves
with its great symphonic wings,
leaving above the tempest
a book that flies on forever:
the statue of the wind.

[Wandering Albatross, ML42306]

Neruda’s poetry, too, might be read as “a book that flies on forever.”

For Poetry Month, you can find more poems about birds on our website, BirdNote dot org. I’m Michael Stein.

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Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
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Content Director: Jonese Franklin

Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Chilean Swallow, ML303677 recorded by Peter Boesman. Wandering Albatross, ML42306 recorded by Ted Parker.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote   April 2025        Narrator: ​​Michael Stein

ID# poetry-04-2025-04-16    poetry-04

References:
Pablo Neruda 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/pablo-neruda
Chile birds in the poems of Pablo Neruda
http://focusonnature.com/ChileNerudaBirds.htm
Pablo Neruda’s Nobel Prize biographical
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1971/neruda/biographical/