The speaker in “alturas de Macchu Picchu” by Pablo Neruda

Abstract

The article at hand presents an interpretation of part I of “Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, the poem by Pablo Neruda. As an abstract of a doctoral thesis, the text purposes to determine the identity of the speaker in the poem. Upon detecting the speaker’s sense of misplacement in the world along with his confrontation of the telluric origin, we conclude that the speaker is an individual in search of an existential meaning that, in the following sections of the poem, would culminate with an ecumenical love.