Dec 17, 2009

Ode to My Socks | Themes

The Extraordinary in the Ordinary
As with the majority of the odes he wrote from 1954 to 1959, in "Ode to My Socks" Neruda exalts one of the basic things of daily existence. The poet describes the object of his celebration in such a way as to make it achieve an otherworldly status. It becomes clear that what normally might be taken for granted as being ordinary is actually quite extraordinary. The mundane objects described here, two socks, the poet in fact finds quite remarkable—soft as rabbits, like jewel cases, made of a nonmaterial substance (dusk) as well as wholly...