Love and Loss in Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and J.P. Clark-Bekederemo’s A Reed in the Tide

Love poetry across cultures employs landscape, the body, and memory as vehicles for exploring desire, grief, and the passage of time, and a comparison of Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Sad Song and J.P. Clark-Bekederemo's A Reed in the Tide reveals how geography and cultural tradition shape the lyric mode. This study examined how both poets use natural imagery drawn from their respective environments (the Chilean landscape and the Niger Delta) as metaphorical frameworks for expressing intimate emotional experience. A close reading methodology supported by ecocriticism and comparative lyric theory was applied. Clark-Bekederemo's imagery of the tidal creek, the mangrove forest, and the river as sites of longing and loss was read alongside Neruda's use of ocean, stars, and the Andes as analogues for emotional states. Both poets employ a specifically masculine lyric voice that oscillates between desire and mourning, yet both also grant significant agency to the natural world as a participant in human emotion. The analysis revealed significant structural and tonal parallels despite the cultural distance between both poets: both favour long, breathing line structures, dense imagery, and elegiac tonal registers. However, Clark-Bekederemo's poetry is marked by a sharper sense of communal identity and ecological intimacy specific to the Niger Delta, while Neruda's is characterised by surrealist influence and personal mythologising. The study recommends this pairing as an accessible entry point for comparative poetry analysis in South South Nigerian universities.

Keywords: love poetry, lyric comparison, Clark-Bekederemo, Neruda, ecocriticism