In “The Song of Despair” by Pablo Neruda, the speaker talks about their lost love. The poem is about how the love between the speaker and a woman ended. It tells readers the nature of their relationship and what it has become now. Neruda uses simile and repetition throughout the poem to help express that lost love cannot always be mended.
Throughout the poem, the author uses similes to describe how it feels like to lose someone you love. “You swallowed everything, like distance./Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!” (Neruda 10). In the first line, the speaker says that the woman “swallowed everything,” and then says that she is “like the sea,” because of this. The speaker continues onto say that “everything sank,” in the woman,