You can cut all the flowers but you cannot
keep Spring from coming
Neruda was a precocious boy who began to write poetry at age 10. His
father tried to discourage him from writing and never cared for his poems,
which was probably why the young poet began to publish under the
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was infatuated with being unusual. He would
only use green pens to draft his poems, and he even gave himself his own
name. His parents had chosen to call him Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes Basoalto,
but Ricardo Reyes re-christened himself as Pablo Neruda as a teenager.
Pablo Neruda owned three houses in Chile; today they are all open to the
public as museums: La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in
Valparaiso, and Casa de Isla Negra in Isla Negra, where he and Matilde
Urrutia are buried.
Nestled in the quiet Bellavista neighborhood of Chile’s capital city of Santiago,
La Chascona is a splash of blue on a dull dead-end street. Matilda was known
for her wild, curly red hair, and so when Neruda began designing a house for
his beloved, he named it La Chascona, “the one with tangled hair.”
Neruda had been a witness to the atrocities committed during the Spanish
Civil War under the regime of dictator General Franco. He had seen war in
close quarters and very well knew what “victory with no survivors” looked like.
In 1971, Pablo Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize, a decision that did
not come easily because some of the committee members had not
forgotten Pablo Neruda's past praise of Stalinist dictatorship.