Coda -- Octavio Paz

Many thanks to Rajat Sharma, for
introducing me to this poem.

(Poem #442) Coda Perhaps to love is to learn to walk through this world. To learn to be silent like the oak and the linden of the fable. To learn to see. Your glance scattered seeds. It planted a tree. I talk because you shake its leaves. -- Octavio Paz

(Rajat informs me that this is an extract from a larger poem titled
'Letter of Testimony').

There are some poems which you only have to read once to know
that they'll be a part of you forever; this, for me, is one of them.

It's not as if 'Coda' is a particularly complex poem; it isn't. What it
is, though, is exquisitely 'true' in its simplicity: the basic idea is
something that I've always known implicitly, but which needed
Paz's genius to put into words.

thomas.

PS. Isn't 'linden' an absolutely beautiful word?

[Commentary]

In a slightly more analytical vein:

The first few phrases of the poem are a sort of definition (if such a
thing were possible) of love; like any great poet, Paz presents a
wholly new way of looking at his subject. I especially like the line
"to love... is to learn to be silent" - it conveys a truth lost in many
more verbose descriptions of the emotion.

The silence of the forest ("the oak and the linden of the fable")
leads naturally into the analogy of the second half:"Your glance
scattered seeds / It planted a tree". Again, the metaphor is neither
forced nor is it taken too far; the final line comes as a natural (and
beautiful) conclusion to the whole.

Notice how the rather abstract infinitives with which 'Coda' starts (to
love, to learn, to walk, to see, to be silent) give way to more
concrete actions later on - 'scattered', 'planted', 'talk' and 'shake'.
The result is to move the poem from the general to the specific:
from a discussion of Love as an abstract concept, to words and
sentences addressed directly to the poet's beloved. This is a fairly
common poetic device, but one no less pleasing for that; I like the
delicate and unobtrusive skill with which it's done in today's poem.

thomas.

[Links]

Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, 'for impassioned
writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence
and humanistic integrity'. His Nobel lecture, titled 'In Search of the
Present', can be found at [broken link] http://www.nobel.se/laureates/literature-
1990-lecture.html

Sadly, neither Martin nor myself know much about poetry in
languages other than English (Hint! Hint!), so there's a paucity of
translated works on the Minstrels. We've only done one Paz
before, that too a guest submission, 'There is a motionless tree',
archived at poem #412

Other 'Latin' poets to have featured on this list include
Borges: poem #401, and
Lorca: poem #210
Both of these are guest submissions as well.