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Ode to My Socks

“Ode to My Socks” (also commonly known as “Oda a los calcentines”) is a poem by Pablo Neruda. Neruda’s straight forward but elegant poetic celebration of a pair of woolen socks in one of many odes he wrote to pay homage to the ordinary material objects of daily existence. With no affectation or any attempt at intellectualizing, the poem uses a series of unexpected and unusual images to sing praise to the beauty and extraordinariness of a mundane but useful object.

According to a literary critic made the claim that Neruda could write endlessly about abstractions and ideas, but he couldn’t write about “things”. To prove him wrong, in 1954 Neruda wrote a book entitled Odas Elementales (Elemental Odes) and another, Nuevos Odas Elementales (New Elemental Odes) in 1956. Robert Bly has translated the title as “Odes to Simple Things.” The ode is a poem of celebration or exultation. Originally odes were elaborate and stately compositions sung in public in honor of a great personage, event, or season.

“Ode to My Socks” appeared in the second volume of a series of four collections of odes written between 1954 and 1959. Later translated in 1961.The majority of the almost 250 odes praise common things, including a lemon, an onion, salt, wine, the sea, clothes, a watch, and laziness, but there are odes too to personages, from poets to literary critics. “Ode to My Socks,” like all the poems in Neruda’s books of odes, announces itself as a poem of celebration and praise, but the objects that are the subject of glorification, surprisingly, are common, everyday things. Few people would expect that a humble pair of socks would be candidates for exultation in a poem.

Background

Pablo Neruda was born in 1904 and christened Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He grew up with the 20th Century, witnessing many of its historic events. As a young man he lived in Burma, Ceylon, Java, and Singapore as a consul for the Chilean government. By the age of 13 Neruda begun to acquire a reputation as a poet. Much of his early poetry, even though it is written in his direct realistic style, is accessible only to a relatively sophisticated audience. Neruda uses a great many hermetic images and shifting perspectives, which makes much of his earlier poetry difficult reading for the unschooled reader. The end of this period of surreal despair came in the mid-thirties when Neruda was serving in the Chilean Embassy in Madrid. His firsthand encounter with fascism during the Spanish Civil War solidified the basic commitment to the left that infuses all his subsequent work. In 1945 he was elected senator in the Chilean legislature; that same year he joined the Communist Party. In his writings and during his political career as a leader of the Chilean Communist Party, as a diplomat, he exerted a wide influence in Latin America. But for his early days as a student activist and poet, Neruda envisioned himself as a voice of the people, as someone who would speak for those who could not speak for themselves. Neruda turned from a young love poet into a surrealist, capturing the alienation he felt as a diplomat in the Far East in bleak monologues with long, fluid lines and torrents of imagery.

Canto General (1950) is the flowering of Neruda’s new political stance. Much of it was written while the poet was on the run from the dictator Gabriel Gonzalez Videla; Neruda escaped into exile in 1949. When he returned to Chile after Gonzalez Videla’s government fell, Neruda transformed his poetry yet again, developing a short lined, deliberately “simple” mode of looking at everyday things in three volumes of Elemental Odes (1954-57). Though he wrote in a variety of styles after the odes, there is a general unity of tone in the poems of his last twenty years. The confidence and openness of this work reflect the richness of the poet’s life. Neruda turned to the form of the ode after living abroad for many years and being involved in diplomatic, political and literary activities.

With the odes, however, poetry serves its elemental function as a means of communication. This is poetry—simple, direct, uncomplicated—that reaches all people. Thus with the simple odes Neruda’s poetry finally serves the function he meant it to throughout his career—to speak to the everyday concerns of the simple people of Chile. With these simple poems, Neruda says, he intends to offer something useful to the world. A devoted communist, he sought all his life to write poetry for common folk, to speak for and to the dispossessed and reflect their concerns in his poetry. These poems marked a significant turning point in Neruda’s career as an artist, as he moved away from the high style and overt politicizing of his works written in the late 1930s and 1940s to a plainer form and interest in the particulars of everyday life.At the time of his death from cancer in September 1973, less than two weeks after the assassination of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, he had published 28 collections of verse. He also chronicled in his memoirs the murder of Allende and the destruction of the country he loved.

Composition and themes

An Ode, in general, is primarily formal in style and about a serious subject. “Ode to My Socks,” like all the poems in Neruda’s books of odes, announces itself as a poem of celebration and praise, but the object that are the subject of glorification are common, everyday things. The odes, with their simple language and celebration of ordinary life, are indeed poetry for the people, a reconciliation of art and ideas with concreteness of life. It exists in the most mundane, the most unnatural places. From the poetic perspective, poetry can happen anywhere. Thus, Neruda’s poem continues its ekphrasistic energy because the world is art. Socks, books, watermelons, salt, and clothes are all art. Every object, every thing is a potential engagement with the artistic imagination.

Neruda achieves this effect through his brilliant play with ekphrasis. An ekphrasis is a poem, usually an ode, dedicated or written about an art object. The most famous use of ekphrasis is probably John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Neruda’s odes also resemble Rainer Maria Rilke’s dinggehichte or “thing poems.” Each line and phrase of the poem is straight forward and presented in the rhythms of natural speech. It is poetry as it’s most basic; poetry as communication. Neruda’s Marxist understanding of the material world as that which transforms human life is communicated in this poem that draws close attention to the wonder of a concrete, physical thing.

The poem, written in short, irregular lines of free verse, is poetry at its most pure and elemental, as it communicates in words that all people can understand a simple message about the wondrous nature of the physical world. Often, never are there more than four or five words per line. What distinguishes Neruda’s (and most Latin American) poetry from North American poetry is how they work with the image. Neruda gives us some wonderful images in “Ode to My Socks.” The poem begins in a typically narrative fashion; in fact, it is a sort of realist, autobiographical beginning. The poet explains that he received a gift, a pair of woolen socks that she knitted for him, from Maru Mori, who was the wife of the distinguished Chilean painter Camilo Mori. The socks transform the poet’s feet, making them into all manner of fantastic objects. But it is also his feet that transform the socks and turn them into these marvelous things. Neruda animates the socks, almost to the point of personification. Note that he does not claim they are as soft as rabbit fur but rabbits themselves. The poet pulls us out of the realm of the rational by suggesting that the socks live. As is the case with most Neruda poems, he continues:

I slipped my feet into them as though into two cases knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin. Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool, two long sharks sea-blue, short through by one golden thread, two immense blackbirds, two cannons.

As soon as Neruda describes the gift as “two socks soft as rabbits” the poem shifts from realism to surrealism, from the practical to the magical. Through these wild images and intense metaphors, Neruda makes his socks a kind of menagerie and a virtual arsenal. We see Neruda linking the socks to magical treasure chests, woven chests, comprised of both real and metaphorical material. Then with no explanation, the socks transform the poet’s feet into various sea-creatures: wooly fish and blue sharks and back again to blackbirds. These images are metaphors. Metaphor is an internal, non-logical fusing of two unlike ideas. When he claims that the socks have turned his feet into two cannons, he is suggesting that his feet have been “armed” through their immersion in enchanted socks. They are so beautiful that his feet seem unacceptable to him; he fears they diminish the glow of the socks. But yet he realized that these socks must be used and worn. He resists the urge to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies or scholars hoard rare books, and resolves to wear them. He feels remorse that he must surrender these beautiful objects to his use, and feels guilty at the bodily pleasure he gets from wearing them. The poet knows not to hoard the socks as schoolboys keep fireflies in glass bottles, for to do so would be to prevent them from serving their function. So incredible are the socks, which at first the poet’s feet seem unworthy of the socks, their “woven fire.” This bizarre and powerful image seems to connote layers of meaning, yet makes little sense on a rational level. Through this image, we get a sense of how warm the socks are through animation, not just a simple description. The poet recognized that the socks are not socks unless they are worn, and so, despite his guilt at sullying this beautiful creation, he puts them on.

Neruda leaps back and forth from image to metaphor to reality, then back into the world of the illogical and the irrational, where, for him, poetry resides. The socks are beautiful, wondrous, celestial, and the poet is loathe to wear them because he feels he is not worthy of their grandeur. But he resists the temptation to hoard them, and he puts them on his feet to warm his against the cold. The moral is that beauty and goodness are twice as beautiful and good when it comes to two woolen socks in wintertime. The moral reinforces the idea that the socks are both beautiful and useful, that they have a dual function of providing aesthetic pleasure and utility. The interesting images and metaphors do not necessarily have anything to do with each other. The poem does not have a controlling metaphor the way a Shakespearean sonnet of a poem by John Donne might.

Art and utility are not two separate things, but inform each other somehow. Using the socks is what makes them the beautiful creations that they are. And using them is what makes them useful; a tool is not a tool unless it is used. It celebrates a useful object, it explores the idea of the relationship between art and utility, and it serves as a didactic function to explain with its moral that beauty and utility are united. Neruda takes this staple object of daily existence and describes it in such a way as to make it seem endowed almost with magical properties. “Ode to My Socks” has a clear didactic purpose. His admiration of them, his ambivalence about wearing them, and then offers a clear moral at the end.

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<Rader, Dean. “Overview of “Ode to My Socks”.” Literature of Developing Nations for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literature of Developing Nations. Ed. Elizabeth Bellalouna, Michael L. LaBlanc, and Ira Mark Milne. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Literature Resource Center. Gale. Houston Community College. 30 Oct. 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=txshracd2512/>