Pablo Neruda, pen name of Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born on July 12, 1904 in Chile. Neruda’s most famous work, published when he was only 19, is the collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, but his style of writing evolved throughout his lifetime. While he is best known for his poetry, Neruda also had a very long and controversial career in politics, and his involvement with the Communist Party forced him to spend three years in exile. Below, a poem.

Some Beasts

It was the twilight of the iguana:
From a rainbowing battlement,
a tongue like a javelin
lunging in verdure;
an ant heap treading the jungle,
monastic, on musical feet;
the guanaco, oxygen-fine
in the high places swarthed with distances,
cobbling his feet into gold;
the llama of scrupulous eye
the widens his gaze on the dews
of a delicate world.

A monkey is weaving
a thread of insatiable lusts
on the margins of morning:
he topples a pollen-fall,
startles the violet-flght
of the butterfly, wings on the Muzo.

It was the night of the alligator:
snouts moving out of the slime,
in original darkness, the pullulations,
a clatter of armour, opaque
in the sleep of the bog,
turning back to the chalk of the sources.

The jaguar touches the leaves
with his phosphorous absence,
the puma speeds to his covert
in the blaze of his hungers,
his eyeballs, a jungle of alcohol,
burn in his head.

*Photo courtesy A.