Literature Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for scholars and enthusiasts of literature. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I’ve been a fan of Neruda for a while now. In his Sonnet LXVI: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You, he says:
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
I do not understand these verses. Especially why does he mention January specifically? And what does he mean by January light?
Well Neruda was Chilean and Chile is in the southern hemisphere. Therefore January is the hottest month by far and when the sun shines more cruelly.
I am not Chilean but I am from the same latitude in Argentina. As January is the hottest month it is usually the month with the brightest light also.
As in English, the first month of the Spanish year is named after Janus, the Greek double-faced god, who looks behind at the past year and forward toward the new. Janus was also the god of thresholds, liminal spaces and doors, likely accounting for all the back and forth in the narrator’s words and the reference to the “key.”
Some more information from wikipedia, on Janus, may also clarify some of the questions and comments above:
While the fundamental nature of Janus is debated, in most modern scholars' view the god's functions may be seen as being organized around a single principle: presiding over all beginnings and transitions, whether abstract or concrete, sacred or profane.[15] Interpretations concerning the god's fundamental nature either limit it to this general function or emphasize a concrete or particular aspect of it (identifying him with light[16] the sun,[17] the moon,[18] time,[19] movement,[20] the year,[21] doorways,[22] bridges[23] etc.) or else see in the god a sort of cosmological principle, interpreting him as a uranic deity.[24]
