Desire as Springtime: Neruda’s Blossoming Metaphor
Created at: August 10, 2025
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. — Pablo Neruda
Unfolding a Seasonal Metaphor
Neruda compresses an entire philosophy of love into a single image. In the line “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees,” which appears in “Every Day You Play” from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), affection is less a possession than a season. The lover becomes spring; the beloved, a tree poised on the verge of bloom. This reimagining shifts love from a private emotion to a natural force that awakens, expands, and illuminates. By choosing cherry trees—symbols of fragile brilliance—Neruda proposes that the highest tenderness is not conquest but cultivation. Consequently, desire is cast as a life-giving climate, a warmth that coaxes color and fragrance into being.
Agency, Tenderness, and Transformation
The Spanish phrasing—“Quiero hacer contigo”—literally “I want to do with you,” matters. The preposition suggests companionship rather than unilateral action. Spring does not wrench blossoms open; it surrounds them with conditions favorable to unfolding. In this light, Neruda’s desire is a gentle catalyst, not an intrusion: warmth that melts frost, rain that loosens soil, light that lengthens the day. The transformation is shared as well as physical; the tree’s blossoming enriches the landscape, just as reciprocal love re-colors the world. Thus the line invites us to think of intimacy as stewardship—attending to the tempos and needs of another until potential becomes palpable. Love, then, is less a spark than a season-long tending.
Cherry Blossoms and Cultural Resonance
Beyond botany, cherry blossoms carry a centuries-old symbolism of radiance and impermanence. In Japan, hanami gatherings date to the Heian era, and the aesthetic of mono no aware—Motoori Norinaga’s 18th-century notion of the poignant awareness of transience—frames their brief spectacle. A haiku often attributed to Kobayashi Issa—“In the cherry blossom’s shade there’s no such thing as a stranger”—suggests how blooming draws people into communal wonder. By invoking cherry trees, Neruda taps into this cross-cultural reservoir: beauty that crests and vanishes, urging us to cherish the moment while it lasts. Consequently, the metaphor carries both promise and ache, implying that love’s fullest flowering is real precisely because it cannot be permanently held.
Neruda’s Earthly Erotics
This seasonal tenderness aligns with Neruda’s wider poetics, where the body converses with earth. In Odes to Common Things (1954), everyday fruits and tools become emblems of human feeling—“Ode to the Tomato” celebrates ripeness and overflowing juice as sensuous plenitude. Likewise, in the love poems, rivers, stones, and forests mirror desire’s textures. As a young writer in Temuco, amid Chile’s rain-soaked Araucanía, Neruda absorbed a landscape that made metaphors tactile. The spring–cherry dynamic thus feels inevitable in his voice: love as weathering, ripening, and release. By yoking eros to ecology, he suggests that intimacy is not merely private consolation; it is a way of participating in the world’s own cycles of making and remaking.
Ephemerality, Fruit, and the Work of Care
Cherry blossoms flare and fall within days, but their briefness prepares fruit and seed. So too, Neruda’s image implies that ecstatic moments are gateways to growth, not endpoints. The task is to honor the bloom without confusing it for the whole tree. Relationships thrive when partners create seasons for each other—spaces where risk is safe, attention is abundant, and change is welcomed. Under such care, the dazzling instant links to durable outcomes: trust, shared memory, and, eventually, a harvest of mutual resilience. Therefore, the poem’s tenderness is practical as well as lyrical, reminding us that peak beauty depends on patient tending.
A Contemporary Ethic of Reciprocity
Ultimately, the line invites an ethic: do with, not to. Just as gardeners study soil and weather, lovers learn each other’s tempos—when to warm, when to wait, and when to step back so light can do its quiet work. Read this way, Neruda’s desire is a promise of conditions—safety, patience, and delight—under which another can dare to bloom. The metaphor also cautions against forcing growth; out-of-season blossoms wither. Thus the poem’s romantic charge becomes a guide to care, aligning passion with consent and stewardship. In offering to be someone’s spring, we commit to the slow, generous labor that makes flourishing possible.