Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the Clothes’ is one of the poet’s attempts to bring seemingly humdrum objects to life, personifying them for the readers. Through the poetic eye, Neruda sees clothing become a lover and a most loyal friend, and all these while putting on his garb in the morning and noticing how his clothes take on the mold and contour of his body.
Man’s relationship with his clothes is erotic. He enters his clothes waiting for him in the morning the same way he enters his lover that waits for him. Clothes are sensual objects in Neruda’s poem as man makes love to his clothes, the lover filling his vanity, his body, and his love. He looks for the hollows of the legs.
Clothes die along with man. They take the bullet that hits their wearer. They get bloodied as much as he. They die along with him and get interred in the tomb with him. Both man and clothes will lay motionless someday. And because clothes are man’s most loyal friend, in both life and death, he learns to love and respects his clothes, greeting them in the morning. He learns to regard them with as much reverence as he would life itself because clothes never leave him as he meets every challenge in the cold of the night, in the street, or in a fight.
Our clothes become the person we are. We wear clothes not only as protection from the elements of nature but as a way to shield us from people’s opinions of us that we would like to avoid. There’s more to clothes than becoming man’s second skin. Man chooses clothes the way he chooses his being. In ‘Ode to the Clothes,’ Pablo Neruda makes us see something banal with a novel eye – while allowing us our humorous introspection along the way.
Ode to the Clothes
Every morning you wait,
clothes, over a chair,
to fill yourself with
my vanity, my love,
my hope, my body.
Barely
risen from sleep,
I relinquish the water,
enter your sleeves,
my legs look for
the hollows of your legs,
and so embraced
by your indefatigable faithfulness
I rise, to tread the grass,
enter poetry,
consider through the windows,
the things,
the men, the women,
the deeds and the fights
go on forming me,
go on making me face things
working my hands,
opening my eyes,
using my mouth,
and so,
clothes,
I too go forming you,
extending your elbows,
snapping your threads,
and so your life expands
in the image of my life.
In the wind
you billow and snap
as if you were my soul,
at bad times
you cling
to my bones,
vacant, for the night,
darkness, sleep
populate with their phantoms
your wings and mine.
I wonder
if one day
a bullet
from the enemy
will leave you stained with my blood
and then
you will die with me
or one day
not quite
so dramatic
but simple,
you will fall ill,
clothes,
with me,
grow old
with me, with my body
and joined
we will enter
the earth.
Because of this
each day
I greet you
with reverence and then
you embrace me and I forget you,
because we are one
and we will go on
facing the wind, in the night,
the streets or the fight,
a single body,
one day, one day, some day, still.
- Pablo Neruda
