Return by Octavio Paz
"Return" is a notable poem by Octavio Paz that reflects his complex emotions and observations upon returning to Mexico City after his tenure as an ambassador in India. Comprising 168 lines distributed across seven stanzas, the poem explores themes of nostalgia, cultural decay, and existential despair in modern Mexico. The poem opens with the speaker's pleasant yet stark observations as he walks through familiar streets, subtly juxtaposed with a sense of loss and deterioration evidenced by neglected mailboxes. As the poem progresses, the tone shifts from external observation to introspective reflection, revealing a deep sense of alienation and disconnection from both the city and its inhabitants.
Paz employs vivid imagery and surrealist techniques to paint a picture of a society plagued by corruption and apathy, where the longing for a shared language and culture becomes apparent. The poem culminates in a sense of frustration and cyclical return, illustrating that despite the changes in the city, the speaker's experience remains tied to deeper existential questions. Through poetic devices such as enjambment and metaphor, Paz effectively conveys his critique of modern life while simultaneously blurring the lines between memory, reality, and imagination, encouraging readers to contemplate the complexities of identity and belonging in a fractured world.
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Subject Terms
Return by Octavio Paz
First published: 1976, as “Vuelta,” in Vuelta (1969-1975); English translation collected in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, 1987
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
The 168 lines of “Return” are divided into 7 stanzas of unequal length. “Return” marks Octavio Paz’s return to Mexico City after serving as Mexico’s ambassador to India between 1962 and 1968. He resigned this post after the massacre of Mexican students at Tlatelolco in 1968. The Lopez Velarde epigraph, which refers to the destruction of the Catholic provinces during the Mexican Revolution, calling the country “the subverted paradise,” mirrors Paz’s revulsion at seeing modern Mexico debased by a megalomaniac government and compliant citizens.
The first stanza is an objective rendering of the speaker’s walk through the streets of Mexico City and Mixcoac. The speaker’s tone is pleasant as he views “bougain-villea/ against the wall’s white lime.” The setting assumes the qualities of a painting except for the lines “Letters rot/ in the mailboxes,” which is the only negative image in the stanza and a reference to a lack of communication. The mention of Mixcoac, the Mexican home of Paz’s infancy, and the lines “I am walking back/ back to what I left” connect the reader to the speaker’s remembered past, a past that has all but vanished.
In the next stanza, the speaker loses contact with the external world. His objective state turns within as his body and spirit dissolve. He speculates about death in Mexico City under the “pounding fist of light.” The speaker wonders what it would be like to die in a city office or hospital or on a city pavement and concludes that such a death “isn’t worth the pain.” Pedestrians become unimportant, just as the speaker feels himself to be. Existence is nothing more than “mist.”
The third and fourth stanzas vividly depict the suffering of an entire population. The educational system, religious institutions, and business enterprises all appear to share the movie theaters’ “ghost populations of desire.” The people of the city help promote the decay of the culture with their sordid, middle-class desires, which lead only to suffering. The speaker implies that the nature of this suffering leaves the city’s citizens with no haven. He denounces several professions, claiming that their members are too selfish to save their culture. People are called “buffoons,” “coyotes,” and “satraps.” Those who should serve, including members of the military and the civil government, do not.
The next stanza examines the result of human corruption. No longer does the speaker focus upon the people but upon the modern wasteland created by them. Decay, poverty, and death are the by-products of the modern dilemma in which gardens “rot,” people are “urban nomads,” and poverty-ridden districts and shantytowns are laced by “thoroughfares of scars.” At the conclusion of the stanza, the speaker states, “City/ heap of broken words,” indicating that all promises and hope for a renewed life have disintegrated.
In the sixth stanza, the fractured society is shown as having lost a common language. “Yesterday’s news” becomes “more remote/ than a cuneiform tablet smashed to bits.” A shared language (closer to a shared system of belief) becomes an anomaly. Without this language, there can be “no center.” The society’s recovery depends on a way of communicating that will include all Mexicans. Yet the only reality that the bankrupt culture honors is the dollar sign, which is stamped “on every forehead,” a reference to the greed of individuals who have become noncommunicative islands of personal suffering.
The final stanza begins with a feeling of frustration as the speaker comments, “We are surrounded/ I have gone back to where I began.” The epigraph had suggested that paradise has been lost, but the speaker is not willing to judge things in terms of “success or failure”; the Chinese sage mentioned by the speaker would answer that it is an error to judge things in this manner. The speaker proclaims that the city “is not a subverted paradise/ it is a pulse-beat of time,” implying that his personal reflections and declarations have no actual meaning outside the poem itself.
Forms and Devices
“Return,” with its “Time/ stretched to dry on the rooftops,” owes much to surrealism. The tone of the poem leaves the reader with several horrific images of modern Mexico City. As the speaker moves from one fantastic observation to the next, using a stream-of-consciousness technique, the reader is rarely allowed a static vision of the speaker’s surroundings. At times, memory is mixed with observation, and the result is a blurring of the line between reality and the speaker’s imagination and past.
Imagery occupies an important position in “Return.” The vividness of this imagery adds to the surreal quality of the poem as well as to the atmosphere of decay. Personification, metaphor, and simile aid Paz in creating this surreal mood. Ash trees and the wind “whistle.” The “sun’s spread hand” creates “almost liquid/ shadow and light.” The sun of midday is a “pounding fist of light.” Colleges and temples possess “genitals.” Ideas become “swarms of reasons shaped like knives.” The buildings of Mexico City are described as “paralytic architecture,” and the nation’s streets become “thoroughfares of scars/ alleys of living flesh.”
Enjambment is used with great success in the poem. Paz employs little punctuation. The ideas of the poem are controlled by the placement of lines on the page. The images, however, are constantly overlapping. The free-flowing pattern created by enjambment adds to the overall dreamlike quality of the work. Nightmarish images are placed in close proximity. Since Paz examines the sometimes enigmatic nature of memory as well as reality, enjambment allows him to blend and distort many of these images. In turn, this blending of images emphasizes the ambiguous nature of memory. Without convenient stopping points, the reader is forced to follow the speaker’s observations in rapid succession.
The use of poetic devices to achieve a level of experience that combines the past, present, and even the future adheres to the speaker’s desire to reach a point where such divisions are indistinguishable. Paz’s methods are directly tied to his thematic intent. Without these poetic devices, the poem would be less effective.