The themes of "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" by Pablo Neruda include nature, humanity, and resurrection. The poem itself is broken into twelve parts that each address a different facet of the speaker's journey and thoughts about Macchu Picchu and the people who lived there.

The theme of nature is deeply linked to happiness, longevity, and vitality in the poem. The poet explains that people live in cities and slowly die every day because they're separated from nature. He also believes that nature—unlike humanity—is eternal. Life can be found in that vitality, and not in the city where a person tries to live out his or her daily routine. The speaker compares the city itself to nature, saying that it's the "high reef of the human dawn" and the "mother of stone."

Neruda also explores the nature of humanity. The speaker tries to find the spirits of the people who lived in Macchu Picchu. He asks them to reveal themselves to him. He wonders whether the people who built the city were slaves. He speculates on how people live their lives in cities and how it disconnects them from happiness and health. He says that humans are only mortal and are unable to last forever—unlike nature.

Resurrection is another theme in "The Heights of Macchu Picchu." By the end of the poem, the poet has connected with the people who built Macchu Picchu and wants them to be reborn along with him. He wants to find his immortality in the structures of Macchu Picchu that remain standing long after the people are gone—and he wants them to experience that too. He tells them to "fasten your bodies to me like magnets" and to "speak through my words and my blood."

The major themes of Neruda’s poem are death and regeneration. These themes are primarily realized through the speaker’s cyclic journey (similar to those in the Bible or in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, c. 1320). The speaker explores the cosmos, penetrates the earth to its secret chambers, ascends toward light from the roots through the stems of plants, and identifies with the stones of the huge sacred city. The speaker serves as primitive human, as prophet, and, ultimately, as semidivinity, searing through space and through history, bringing the reader with him on an incredible voyage, an adventure to the end of the earth. A strange poetic time machine allows the speaker to swim upstream in the flow of time, exploring nature, humankind, history, and visions of the future.

The speaker’s magic powers have taken him first down into the earth, through seas of darkness. Then, he ascends the ladder. Climbing, he goes through the thickets toward the tall city rocked in a “wind of thorns,” the city that is like a spade buried in primordial sand, the city made out of stone. The speaker beckons to the reader to “climb up” with him.

On this journey, the overwhelming presences are those of nature in all of its power and those of ghostly ancient men who came to terms with nature many centuries ago. Both presences fuse in a moment of love and recognition, and the past becomes the present.

What the speaker finds in his vertical pilgrimage is not God or the gods, however, but the traces of a destroyed civilization: the ashes of a ruined kingdom and the signs of its priests, its women, its children, and its slaves. Everywhere, the footprints of humankind are present: everywhere, matter has been penetrated. Beneath each stone, the speaker senses a presence from the past, and the initial sense of loneliness gives way to joy. The gods may have vanished, but the presence of humankind endures. Identity and brotherhood infuse the key words of the poem’s climactic end: “I am here to speak for your dead lips.” Only thus are the ancient ghosts placated. In the speaker’s identification with his ancestors, he becomes one of them. The speaker has come into contact with death and resurrection. It is the awakening of an identification and a commitment of solidarity with the Americas past, present, and future.

Thus, The Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem of symbolic death and resurrection in which the speaker himself participates as an actor, beginning as a lonely voyager and ending with the manifestation of his full commitment to the collectivity of the American indigenous people: their cultural roots, their past, and their future.