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My Life with the Wave | Introduction

Octavio Paz, Mexico’s foremost poet of the twentieth century after World War II, was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘‘My Life with the Wave,’’ a surrealist prose poem, first appeared in his collection ¿Águila o sol? (translated as Eagle or Sun?) in 1951.

In ‘‘My Life with the Wave,’’ a man, while at the beach, is seduced by an ocean wave, which insists on following him home to Mexico City. The man and the wave have a passionate, turbulent, love affair, in which the wave is both adoring and demanding. Because she is lonely, he brings her a school of fish to swim in her waters; but, when he becomes enraged with jealousy of her attentions to the fish, he tries to attack them, and the wave nearly drowns him. After that, his love for the wave turns to ‘‘fear and hate.’’ To get away from her, he leaves home for a month. When he returns, he finds that the winter weather has turned the wave into ‘‘a statue of ice.’’ With cold malice, he sells the frozen wave to a friend of his, a waiter at a restaurant, who chops the ice into small pieces to be used for cooling drinks.

Paz represents the wave as a metaphorical image of a woman in love, associating the feminine with nature, passion, and emotional turbulence. In representing the ‘‘authorities’’ who arrest, interrogate, imprison, and try the narrator, Paz further explores themes of freedom and oppression.

My Life with the Wave Summary

The narrator, while at the beach, is seduced by an ocean wave, which begs to be taken home with him. He tries to explain that she would not like life in the city, but she insists. To bring her home on the train, he empties the drinking fountain tank and secretly pours the wave into it. But when a lady takes a drink and discovers that the water is salty, her husband calls the conductor over, accusing the narrator of contaminating the water. The conductor calls in the Inspector, who calls the police, who accuse the narrator of poisoning the water. The police then call in the Captain, who calls three agents. The agents take the narrator away and throw him in jail where he is interrogated and accused of trying to poison the children on the train. After a year in jail, he is tried and, soon after, set free.

When the narrator arrives home, the wave is already at his house. She explains that someone had poured the ‘‘contaminated’’ water from... » Complete My Life with the Wave Summary