Point of View

As is a tradition with the love sonnet dating back to Elizabethan times and earlier, the speaker is the "I" speaking to "you" (his lover, here Matilde) in the second-person. This choice creates an intimacy, a kind of dispensing of the "fourth-wall" which engenders a feeling of genuineness and emotions truly and honestly felt. Second-person also creates the sensation (real or illusory) that the poems were meant or crafted for the sole benefit of the person who is "you," though of course the poems were eventually published for general consumption. The question arising from this second-person perspective is the degree to which the speaker is Pablo Neruda, and the degree to which "you" is Matilde Urrutia, or whether the reader wishes to completely divorce the work from the author and any stated authorial intent or biographical realities. The answer, as usual, probably lays somewhere in between...