The poetry of Neruda's that I love best, that I do reread with an always-renewed pleasure, is the poetry of his ripeness, beginning with the first book of Elemental Odes, published when he was fifty years old, and ending with Full Powers, published when he was fifty-eight, eleven years before his death. These are the poems of a happy man, deeply fulfilled in his sexuality, at home in the world, in love with life and its infinite particular forms, overflowing with the joy of language. They are largehearted, generous poems, resonant with a humor that is rare in modern poetry, in any poetry. The sometimes showy surrealism of the earlier poems has mellowed into a constant, delicious skating on the edge of nonsense.

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” in Richard Wilbur's memorable phrase, Neruda is one of the most loving poets who has ever written. We may be put off by the doctrinaire and self-dramatizing comradeliness of the more political poems, but there is a deeper sense of genuine communion that speaks through all his mature work. His sources o f inspiration are unlimited. He turns his attention to an elephant or a pair of socks or time or an artichoke or an atom or a star or a bar of soap, and immediately it comes to life, it becomes the center of the universe, linked in an often astonishing series of metaphors to anything and everything else in the interconnected web of beings. The con-nections are so ceaseless, so surprising, that we may find ourselves racing to keep up with the fecundity of his imagination, gasping for breath at the brilliance and rightness of it all.

I enter these poems with delight and leave them with exhilaration, grateful for the vividness with which they let me see the world through the eyes of a fabulously intelligent child. “Behold, I make all things new.” Neruda would have hated to have me quote Revelation about him. But the spirit of poetry, whether or not we call it holy, does make all things new. And Neruda, who gathers so many of the things of this world into his large embrace, brings us closer to the loving, humorous, compassionate source of all these things, since, with all his impassioned love for language, he is a poet who can say:

I utter and I am
and across the boundary of words,
without speaking, I approach silence.