Saturday poems: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

By Christopher Marlowe

Read below for Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Fried Potatoes.

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of th purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

Ode to Fried Potatoes

by Pablo Neruda

Translated from the Spanish by Maria Jacketti

The world’s joy

is spluttering,

sizzling in olive oil.

Potatoes

to be fried

enter the skillet,

snowy wings

of a morning swan –

and they leave

half-braised in gold,

gift of the crackling amber

of olives.

Garlic

embellishes the potato

with its earthy perfume,

and the pepper

is pollen that has traveled

beyond the reefs,

and so,

freshly

dressed

in a marbled suit,

plates are filled

with the echoes of potatoey abundance:

delicious simplicity of the earth.

Poetry in the Library The third Thursday of each month is the date for local poets and poetry lovers to meet in the Castlemaine Library, 4-6 pm.

Nobel Prize Winning Foodie

Neruda wrote many of his odes to food, some to prepared dishes, and others to simple foods such as the tomato, onion, artichoke, apple, orange, and watermelon. A deep sense of gratitude for nutrition pervades these poems; however, each one becomes more than the body’s sustenance. There is always a sense of the fruit, vegetable, or dish being something transcendental and sacred: something beyond itself.

In the case of fried potatoes, Neruda exalts the potato’s rich transformation and its fecundity, emphasizing it plain roots. This is certainly no haute cuisine, but rather the “simplicity of the earth.” The poet recognizes that the potato is no longer just a spud. Made into a dish for human consumption, it wears a “marbled suit,” and “echoes of potatoey abundance” remain in something that is new.

Neruda wrote another ode to potatoes, “Ode to the Spud,” emphasizing the tuber’s American roots,and takes a similar angle in his “Ode to Corn.” In searching for a more complete definition of what it is to be American and caretaker of the New World, both native vegetables become objects of poetic meditation.

Over the past two decades, Neruda’s poetry has fallen out of fashion with many postmodern critics, who, no doubt, do not grow their own food, despite their condition of being well-fed. Yet, his poetry has remained popular among the people who first experienced them in the depths of their imaginations, tasting the words with every sense.