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“Ode to an Artichoke” (it has also been translated under the title “Artichoke”) is a short poem consisting of thirty-three lines of free verse. The poem establishes the poet’s connection to the elemental or basic qualities of objects that surround everyone in daily life—here, common food items or vegetables. Pablo Neruda imagines the relationship that an artichoke may have to the rest of the members of the vegetable kingdom and, in the broadest terms, to reality itself. The artichoke is described as being “of delicate heart” yet dressed for battle inside its small “cupola” (a rounded vault that forms a roof). It keeps itself isolated and protected under its scales. This humble member of the food chain is surrounded by less prudent inhabitants of nature’s botanical kingdom. Wild, even crazy, vegetables bristle, raising their backs as if to engage in battle. At the same time, the carrot sleeps under the soil and the cabbage busies itself trying on a skirt. The spicy oregano perfumes the rest of the world while the artichoke, armed for a battle, stays quietly in its garden plot, burnished and proud like a pomegranate.

“Walking Around” opens casually: “It happens that I am tired of being a man.” The poem’s visionary experience starts with a painful awareness of alienation.

“The Hunter in the Forest” is the opening poem of the fourth section of Isla Negra: A Notebook, Neruda’s deeply introspective autobiography in verse. The section title, “Hunter of Roots,” indicates the necessity for humankind to seek its proper connection with the earth. Only in the natural process of decay and regeneration, Neruda argues, can the fear of death and meaningless disintegration be overcome.

Reading Pablo Neruda’s poetry requires patience, tolerance, and high spirit. Very few of the contemporary Spanish-speaking writers have created so much, so incoherently and so poetically, as this Chilean poet. Before his achievement an attitude of indifference or complete adherence becomes almost impossible. Criticism must also take into account the radicalism of his Communist ideology and the resulting controversial opinions of his readers. A literary analysis of his poetry must put aside these perspectives in order to obtain a serene and objective appreciation of his work.

Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, on April 7, 1889, of Spanish and Basque lineage; her father, who deserted the family when Lucila was but a child of three years, was a teacher and a poet. Her early years were spent among the peasants, and the poet, who speaks of herself as one of the campesinos, put the peasant’s love of the land and the countryside into her poetry.

The “Sonnets of Death” are Mistral’s most famous poems. They are also the poems that established her reputation in her native Chile. In 1914, she submitted them to a national poetry contest and won first prize. She was forced out of anonymity and into the literary life of her country.

Mistral chose “Final Tree” as the epilogue for her last book, Lagar, and ever since it has been printed as the closing poem in collections of her work. This placement is fitting not only because of the poem’s subject matter but also because it is one among many of the later poems that demonstrate the furthest refinement of Mistral’s ability to express her inner life through natural imagery.

In “We Were All to Be Queens,” Mistral follows the dreams and hopes of childhood as they are thwarted and destroyed by the realities of adult life. The opening stanzas recount the dream shared by four young girls, the poet among them, who expect to marry kings as powerful and gifted as the biblical King David and to reign over distant kingdoms. These faraway lands are to be fruitful, filled with “trees of milk” and “trees of bread.” Most importantly—in an image repeated throughout the poem—the kingdoms will border the mysterious and magical sea. The girls, sequestered for years behind the tall mountains of the Andes, will at last have their dreams fulfilled when, as queens, they see and touch the ocean. They will be liberated and transformed by contemplating the broad expanse of water and the distant horizon.