Cite This Page To Go A Song of Despair A Song of Despair by
Pablo Neruda  Lines 31-58 Summary   Lines 31-32  How terrible
and brief was my desire of you! How difficult and drunken, how
tensed and avid.    • Now the speaker is feeling guilty about
his desire for his lost lover. He is really torn up about it,
but it's a little too late for that.    • The parallelism party
continues in these lines, with the "How x and y" over and over,
describing the speaker's desire.   • All of these intense
adjectives let us know that the love the speaker felt for the
woman was super-intense at the time—and not always in a good way
("terrible," "difficult," and "tensed"). Luckily, though, this
also meant that it faded fast ("brief").  Lines 33-34  Cemetery
of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited
boughs burn, pecked at by birds.    • And in case you thought
those two crazy kids had a chance at making it in this life,
these lines bring it all crashing down. The love affair is
compared to a burning cemeter