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Pablo Neruda is a vivid example of an extraordinary and constructive poet of modern times. His works are focused on the main problems of nowadays society that gives his style such a necessary contemporary outlook. One of his most memorable poems is thought to be Walking Around that can be analyzed in different ways from different perspectives.
Walking Through Hell
Nowhere else you will meet such an explicit description of the society from the communist point of view in such an extremely grim manner. Pablo Neruda uses quite an appalling look at a struggling class to describe the lifestyle of doomed people. He chooses specialized metaphors to underline his angry attitude to democracy and other types of government of similar kind. The intentional use of repetitions creates the atmosphere of a gloomy line inside the author’s head. The notion of morality is a separate issue in the poem; the author feels that the society has nearly destroyed the entire world, forgetting about the ethical code that people must be driven by. Pablo Neruda blames the government in all the faults, as only because of them the society is now in such a deep decay. He also includes his own character into the poem, concluding that one day he will be able to turn the crowd into the right direction and overcome all the obstacles that people now suffer from.
Power Delve
According to the structure, it can be said that the entire poem is devoted to the author’s feelings about the modern problems. First of all, Neruda underlines that nowadays the society is completely exhausted and people are trying their last effort to escape. He begins the stanza with the following words “It happens that I am tired of being a man” and then continues, "It happens that I go into tailor's shops and the movies/ all shriveled up, impenetrable, like a felt swan/ navigating on a water of origin and ash." This tells us about the author’s hatred towards the materialism and feeling fake even mentioning about it. Neruda also talks about industrial exploitation that not only wastes the Earth’s resources, but also empties itself. He looks back at the horrid past, but says that some day the bright future will come and emphasizes that it is inevitable. The last words are also devoted to the corrupted government, complaining about the monopoly control of all spheres of merchandise, as well as entertainment sector that is so much important in the modern world.
Finally, the poem’s end has the same melancholic mood, which only underlines the author’s intention to depict the problems of nowadays society, “I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops, and courtyards with washing hanging from the line: underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling.”
