As indicated by the poem's title, the style is in the form of an ode, which is a structured telling of a story or subject about which the author has special feelings. During his career as one of South America's most noted poets, Neruda had created quite a collection of odes dedicated to ordinary objects, one of his most famous being this tale about the gift of a pair of woolen socks.

The style of an ode is usually full of feeling, and Neruda has summoned both elegance and practicality when describing his socks. Typically, an ode has the pattern of the identification of the subject, two separate turning points, and then the declaration of the moral of the story.

In this ode, Neruda quickly names the handmade gift of socks as the subject and makes his first point by declaring the beauty of the...