A poet's seafaring fantasy.

• Author: DePaul, Amy
• Position: Pablo Neruda's coastal home in Isla Negra, Chile, houses collection of figureheads, among others

PABLO NERUDA loved the sea and everything about it: sand, ships in bottle, figureheads of beautiful maidens from the prows of ships and seashells. At Isla Negra, his coastal home in Chile, over 700 seashells crown the tops of dressers, are tucked into corners, line book shelves, or are embedded like jewels in the floors.

Neruda did not just collect things he loved. He consecrated them with religous fervor, believing that beloved objects preserve the spirit of their owner. Butterflies and masks, hats and crystals, are mixed in a delightfully incongruous fashion. Here, the exquisite resides comfortably alongside the odd and the lowbrow. Antique African string instruments are displayed no less prominently than the cockroach collection. Neruda adored his objects without reserve or apology. As Isla Negra proves, this kind of love can turn the most mundane items into magical treasures.

Isla NEgra has been opened to the pubic since April 1990, and so far, between 100 and 300 visitors a day are flocking to the home of Chile's Nobel Prize-winning poet, considered by some to be one of the greatest of this century. With its seemingly endless collections, ocean views and ship motifs, the home has come to personify Neruda's mystical spirit.

According to Julio Cortazar, Argentine novelist and the poet's close friend, "All of Neruda's houses were also his poems . . . replicas and corroborations of Residencia and Canto" (referring to two of Neruda's works, Residencia en la tierra and Canto general). "It was at Isla Negra," Cortazar recalled, "that I immediately understood that rigorous correspondence between poetry and objects, between matter and the word." When Cortazar asked the name of a flower in the garden. Neruda answered, "Ah, this is the same one that I've mentioned many times in my poems."

Of Neruda's three homes in Chile, the sprawling grey grounds of Isla Negra are where the presence of the poet is strongest. The stone and wood house sits on a hill along the rocky shore southwest of Santiago. Neruda extended the house after he bought it nin 1939, always adding to the north and south ends so that every room offered a view of the ocean. Neruda's personal relationship with the sea is chronicled in his book. The House on the Sand (La casa en la arena), his collection of poems and anecdotes about Isla Negra, eleven of which are titled The Sea. "The Pacific Ocean was going off the map," he wrote. "There was no place to put it. It was so big, wild and blue that it did not fit anywhere. That's why they left in in front of my window." Neruda liked to peer at the sea through stained glass windows, to see it in different colors. He often contemplated the water before he started writing in the morning. In his autobiography, first published in Spain in 1974, Neruda refers to the birth of his epic Canto General, which probes the nature of the Latin...