Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part F (2025)

This paper explores Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Bread and Ode to Wine as lyrical enactments of sustenance, community, and transformation. In these odes, Neruda situates the humble objects of daily life within a cosmology of labor, love, and history, transforming bread and wine into metaphors for the human condition. His poetic gaze converts the ordinary into the sacramental, revealing the ethical and political dimensions of nourishment. Through close textual analysis, this study investigates how Neruda fuses material reality with spiritual transcendence, employing tactile imagery and sensuous rhythm to elevate food from a biological necessity to a symbol of creative communion. The argument proposes that Neruda’s odes constitute an ethics of sustenance: an aesthetic of gratitude, rooted in the earth and yet aspiring toward the universal.