Stillness that is alive

Neruda ends with a lesson from the Earth. In winter, everything seems dead; yet in spring it comes alive again. So stillness can hide life: the Earth can teach us, he says, as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.

Think of a seed under the soil. From above, nothing seems to be happening, as if the ground were dead; then rain and sunlight come, and a green shoot pushes up. The life was there all along.

In the same way, keeping quiet is not death. A moment of silence can lead to new understanding: about ourselves, about others, and about the harm we do.

The poem is written in free verse: there is no fixed rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are of different lengths, like natural speech.

Three poetic devices to spot:

• Personification: giving a human quality to something that is not human. The Earth that can teach us is an example.
• Repetition: 'wars with gas, wars with fire' repeats a word for force.
• Enjambment: a sentence runs on from one line to the next with no punctuation at the line's end, so the thought flows without a pause.

Each stanza moves to a new idea: from the call to count to twelve, to the picture of the still moment, to the people who would stop harming, to what the poet does not mean, and finally to the Earth's lesson.

Try it yourself: sit quietly for five minutes, without speaking or moving, and notice how your mind feels afterwards.