Wendy Perkins is an Associate Professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland. In the following essay, she examines Neruda's use of nature imagery in "Tonight I Can Write" to illustrate the poem's dominant themes.

Nature has played a large role in literature, especially poetry, since the Medieval age. Poets employ the images of nature for several purposes: to express childlike delight in the sense of freedom it affords, as a background to or reflection of human actions or emotions, to express a sense of the infinite, to symbolize the human spirit, or to describe nature for its own sake. References to a sense of awe in the face of an often hostile nature appear in the Medieval age in Beowulf while Chaucer tended to create idyllic natural settings for his tales. The Elizabethans' pastorals and sonnets used images in nature to provide appropriate settings...