Canto XII: Heights of Macchu Picchu

 Canto: One of the sections into which long poems are divided. Comes from longer poem. Long poems were
traditionally sung. Italian word for song or singing. Usually sung from a minstrel. The idea of a Canto is a very old
name. Comes from Latin word “to song”. Very similar to Spanish.
 Tone: Empowering, respectful
 Something about the Spanish coming and wiping out the Incans as culture was destroyed.
 He wants to be the mouthpiece for the Incans, for the indigenous dead people.
o We can extrapolate from this, based on the context of Neruda’s poetry, that he is speaking for the
common man.

Arise to birth with me, my brother.

Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses. (short declarative sentences)
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Shift in style: from short imperative sentences into lists of people. The most powerful sentences
are short. He is commanding them, conjuring them from the dead. He is resurrecting them. He
then switches into long lists of people (keeps going, no full stops). The ongoing list, as they are
all of one sentence, unifies the common man and makes the list seem very long. As a reader,
when we have this change in structure,
 In Canto 7__, Neruda speaks directly to the dead indigenous people, listing them by
profession “mason, tiller of fields”. The lack of end-punctuation forces the reader to read
the list in one continuous line which impresses upon the reader the magnitude of the
number of people who were involved in this.

Look at me from the depths of the earth, (look at me from your graves)
tiller of fields (gets fields ready for harvest), weaver, reticent shepherd, (he begins to list jobs and
roles of people that get things ready for something to come)
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason (mason is someone who builds things from stome, macchu picchu is a stone building) is a
high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged (tell me how you were abused, because the gem was not good
enough, the weather was not good enough)
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe (have to give 10% of your crops to the person who owns the land,
it’s your payment) of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body. (how people were killed)
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood. (Show me your pain, show me how you were treated
by the colonists)

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth

let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain, (Macchu Picchu was built through slavery, he is
speaking to the indigenous people who built Macchu Picchu)
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands (do not take this part because it doesn’t make sense
why the slavery),
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins(make my blood run with your blood, I am one of you, I am the people)
and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

 He is both speaking to them, but also to “the heavens” and “to the world”
 Since they are individual sentences that are separated, they are more powerful than
earlier compared to the lists.
  You can talk about cultural stuff, stuff about class as he is clearly speaking against
oppression for the common person
o This is all metaphoric. He is using the metaphor of the ancestors as he is
saying that “we are still these people, and I am speaking for these people”
 Can talk about genre/style/form as it switches
 He uses a lot of figurative physical language: veins, mouths, blood
 Literary device that he uses a lot in his poetry:
 Synecdoche: A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something
refers to the whole of something or vice versa.
o ie. “All hands-on deck!”
 A synecdoche is a class of metonymy, often by means of either mentioning a part for the
whole or conversely the whole for one of its parts.
o Ie. “Boots on deck” + “The white house announced a new law” + “10 Downing
Street” instead of PM

https://study.com/academy/lesson/synecdoche-vs-metonymy-definitions-examples.html