Garcia Lorca was assassinated for his Republican sympathies less than two years after they met, an event which symbolized the beginning of the civil war to Neruda. The poet immediately threw his support to the Republic and as a result was recalled from Spain--non-intervention was the policy of the day--but the civil war had been burned into his consciousness.

The third volume of Neruda's Residence on Earth, so different in tone from the first two, pays homage to that destruction and marks the distinctive change in the tenor of his poetry. He writes in his Memoirs of his change from naturalistic verse to political:

I had thought hard about all the world, but not about man. Cruelly and painfully, I had probed man's heart; without a thought for mankind, I had seen cities, but empty cities; I had seen factories whose very presence was a tragedy, but I had not really seen the suffering under those roofs, on the streets, at every way station, in the cities and the countryside.

As the first bullets ripped into the guitars of Spain, when blood instead of music gushed out of them, my poetry stopped dead like a ghost in the streets of human anguish...

Poem after poem the third volume of Residence on Earth and of "Spain in Our Hearts," a work filled with indignation and pathos that he began a month after Garcia Lorca's death, reiterates that theme.

III.

"Jehovah divided his universe: Anaconda, Ford Motors, Coca-Cola Inc.,..."

Nineteen forty-five was an important year for Neruda: he joined the Communist Party, was elected a Senator from Tarapaca and Antofagasta, two Chilean provinces populated by workers in the copper and nitrate mines, and wrote perhaps his most famous collection of poems, The Heights of Macchu Picchu. His decision to become a Communist caused him continual harassment; newspapers often would ignore his letters and censor his statements. He was briefly imprisoned in Argentina with no explanation given. Anti-Communist priests persecuted his poor friends and, finally, the Chilean courts ordered his arrest for criticizing the government, forcing him into exile for three years.

His flight from Chile, through the harsh Southern Andes into Argentina and eventually over to Paris, left an impression on him perhaps as great as the events of a decade before. It was this journey, among mountain peasants who had never heard the name or the poetry of Pablo Neruda, that he recounts in his Nobel Lecture and repeats in the Memoirs. The trip across the Andes contained a simple lesson for Neruda: the poet must identify with mankind because "there is no such thing as a lone struggle."

Most of Neruda's time until his return to Chile in 1952 was spent writing, living in Europe and traveling in Asia and the Soviet Union, which he loved oblivious to the imminence of what he would later call "Stalin's dark night." The revelations of the Twentieth Congress came as a grave shock to Neruda, one which the Memoirs show he could only hesitatingly accept. He refutes accusations in the Memoirs that he remained a die-hard Stalinist, even after the Congress, yet he writes that he can never forget that Stalin had appeared to the world as the "titanic defender" of the Russian Revolution, the leader of the Red Army that "attacked and demolished the power of Hitler's demons." He wrote only one poem to Stalin, recognizing the evil and the hope he represented, at the time of the Russian leader's death. It is rarely included in anthologies.

Neruda's life through the 1950s and '60s was much less eventful than his first 40 years. He divorced his wife of 18 years, Delia del Carril, and moved in with Mathilde Urrutia, about whom he wrote The Captain's Verses. That work went unsigned for many years not, as some critics said, because the CP disapproved but because, Neruda explains in the Memoirs, the passionate love for Urrutia he splashed throughout The Captain's Verses would have caused his wife unnecessary and harsh anguish.

His time was also spent collecting sea shells--15,000 of them--and rare books. When the books and shells overflowed his house, Neruda packed them up and delivered them to Chile's National University in Santiago. Anti-communist thundering against the acceptance of the gift consigned them to oblivion; 20 years after he had donated the collection, Neruda related that they never had appeared before the public, perhaps having been returned to the sea and the used bookstores of the world.

Neruda re-entered the political arena in 1969 to run on the C.P. ticket for president of Chile. He withdrew his nomination in favor of the Popular Unity Party candidate, his friend Salvador Allende. Allende's victory began Chile's revolution that would end so tragically three years later with the help of the Kissingers and Nixons. But while it lasted it represented to Neruda hope, decency and humanity:

Here in Chile, in the middle of enormous difficulties, a truly just society was being erected, based on our sovereignty, our national pride, and the heroism of the best of Chile's population. On our side, on the side of the Chilean revolution, were the constitution and the law, democracy and hope.

But there were challengers to this vision: