The poet Neruda uses the ‘foot’ as a metaphor and conveys his view of life. Thus, by personifying the foot, the poet expects the readers to compare the experience of the foot to the whole person’s hopes and dreams as well as to the realities of everyday life. By and large, one can say that the poem is basically a criticism of how people force children to grow in society forgetting all their dreams and aspirations. The child wants to be a butterfly or an apple, but society is harsh and forces the chid to become a responsible adult doing responsible adult things. As a child’s foot, it has relatively more freedom than the adult’s foot. As the infant’s foot starts walking in the real world outside, it steps over “stones and bits of glass, streets, ladders and the paths in the rough earth’’. It realizes that its role is that of a foot and it cannot become a butterfly or an apple. The moment it discovers that it is only a foot, its spirit loses its battle against the world. It surrenders itself to the dictates of the society. It is taken prisoner and is condemned to live in a shoe. It also means that the child’s spirit becomes aware of its limitations as a human being and understands its roles, duties and responsibilities as a social being in human society. It is true that “the foot is a symbol for the helplessness of an individual in the vice-like grip of an insensitive system”. This meaning is captured in the phrase ‘condemned to live in a shoe’. Once it gets imprisoned, it has to slog there until it dies. The society decides what it should understand about ‘life’ or the world outside. Gradually, the foot adapts itself to its world and learns to cope with the harsh realities of life. The adult foot gets trapped in the routines of everyday life or the humdrum commonality of existence. It is now less capable of enjoyment and finds life difficult in every walk of life. It slogs and slogs either as a man’s foot or as a woman’s foot working in the field or market or mines or ministries day and night, scarcely finding time to enjoy the pleasure of love or sleep. It works without respite and finally meets with death.
To the Foot from its Child by Pablo Neruda About the Poet: Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) is the pen name and, later legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Neruda became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and eroticallycharged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’.
Neruda’s poetry is renowned for its fantastic imagery and surreal use of language. The surrealists attempted to express in art and literature the workings of the unconscious mind and to synthesize. these workings with the conscious mind.
Neruda believes that our most intense experience of impermanence is not death, but our own isolation among the living. It is probably this idea that gets reflected in the poem ‘To the Foot from its Child’. According to Neruda, “it was through metaphor, not rational analysis and argument, that the mysteries of the world could be revealed”.
