If You Forget Me

The “crystal moon” (Line 5) carries the speaker to the beloved. It symbolizes the emotional connection between them. The speaker also refers to the moon, as well as the tree branch and all other things, as “little boats / that sail” (Line 14-15). The moon is a boat that takes the speaker to the beloved’s metaphorical island—The Heart’s Home. Neruda having the speaker look at the moon draws upon a long tradition of love poetry. Poetic speakers looking at the moon are frequently used in ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry—such as in the works of Li Bai and Izumi Shikibu—as well as in ancient Greek mythology, such as in the myth of Endymion, which poets like John Keats wrote about in the 1800s. Neruda’s symbolic moon can be read as an affirmation that all love poetry about the moon carries the speaker to the beloved. Every love poem he reads relates to his personal experience of reciprocal love.

Fire appears twice in the poem, in Lines 8 and 44, which reflects how “fire is repeated” (Line 44). The fireplace in the second stanza symbolizes the domestic sphere, and it—like the moon—carries the speaker to his beloved. In the final stanza, Neruda uses the repeated fire to symbolize how the speaker reciprocates the beloved’s affection and passion.