El mar y las campanas

8º. 186p + Book order. Original editor's rustic binding.

These poems, found on his desk at the time of his death, include the moving "Final," a love song to his wife, Matilde, which he concluded shortly before dying. Faced with imminent death, he comments: "It was so beautiful to live / when you lived!"

On November 28, 1973, the first of his posthumous books is published: "El mar y las campanas" (The Sea and the Bells), by Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires. Professor Hernán Loyola notes that this seems to be the most fitting book not only to close the series of posthumous books "but also – due to its extraordinary quality as a whole – to dignify the entire canonical work of Neruda." Loyola adds that this book "included touching texts dedicated to a rising river and a small dying animal, to the Utopia that did not come to the appointment (in the image of a ship that everyone expects and that never passes through the horizon), to a writer of 'mean condition' (...), to the port of Valparaíso... and to himself in a struggle with death..."