Ode to my Socks

Pablo Neruda wrote a series of odes to inanimate objects - kitchen tables, tomatoes, etc. In my creative writing class, we have been talking about the idea in poetry that you do not tell something, you show it. You don't say "she was sad and cried." You say "her eyes were dark seas that couldn't contain the waves escaping them." In this poem, "Ode to my socks" by Pablo Neruda, I will be highlighting the showing aka imagery and metaphor versus the telling.

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Neruda uses great metaphors here of the socks as "two cannons," "two fish," and "two long sharks" to describe the colors of the socks and the way he feels about them. He describes them with such adoration it's almost romantic

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.
Up until this point, the amount of showing versus telling has been clear. The author uses images to convey his feelings about the socks. He never says "I liked them." He says they were "sacred texts," and "rare green deer." It is only in the last stanza that he breaks his format and just spills about what he means.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.