Don T Go Far Off By Pablo Neruda Analysis

In the sensitive poem “Don't Go Far Off”, Pablo Neruda, the author, conveys the message that once you have someone who has grown to mean so much to you, it becomes almost impossible to even imagine how you would get by without that person in your life. Neruda substantiates this by using a dark sense of word choice, a type of imagery that inflicts emotions of loneliness and pain throughout the poem.
To begin with we have Neruda saying “Don’t go far off” (1) which shows a desire to be with whomever this poem is dedicated to. We see this further into the poem. Neruda displays how he doesn’t want this person to leave him “even for a day” (1) which shows how much time he wishes to spend with this individual. A day can seem like eternity to some,

however in reality it only amounts to 24 hours. This shows the strength of one’s desire to be together with their beloved and how fearful they can be to lose them. The poem continues by talking about how he will wait “as in an empty train station when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep” (4) this analogy is used to give a feeling of loneliness and abandonment. The feeling one would usually feel when they miss the final train of the night and have no way to get back home. The use of the word “asleep”(4) can relate to the sense of being unaware. As if the trains are unaware that you are waiting to be picked up to have a ride home. It’s the same way that this person is unaware that Neruda will be waiting anxiously for this person. Without knowing if the person will ever return.
Neruda opens the second stanza saying “Don't leave me, even for an hour”(5).

Here we can notice a shortening of the time, this is probably used to magnify the fact that there are 24 hours in a day and he choses to be with this person the full 24 hours. We can see here how comfortable Neruda would be with this friend to say he would spend every hour with them. Neruda moves on to talk about how if this person leaves “The little drops of anguish will all run together” this can correlate to the times where one would lay in bed and think of all the things and feel overwhelmed by everything. The fact that he described anguish as drops made it seem as the anguish he is feeling is not a lot until it’s piled together. It would then create a larger more harder to control, problem. Neruda later talks about how after the person is gone “the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into [him] and choke [his] lost heart”(7). Something we can assume from this is that the smoke can be a symbol of loneliness, how different people feel it at different times, we can imagine loneliness roaming from person to person “looking for a home”, and when it gets to him it will obtain him, and a feeling many get from anxiety attacks is that they have trouble breathing, which explains how the emotion can “choke” his

heart.
Shifting to the third stanza of the poem we can see that