.

The imaginary logic of Nerudian poetry, governed by water assumes as antilandscape, as infernal space, the figure of the northern desert: it is the place of pain, of silence, of death, of emptyness.

A distance is then established between the lyric voice and the desert surpassed, in a secondary moment of the poetic meditation, by the precarious lives of the people and the workers' strife in the middle of the desert. At the end, that sentiment permits the reconciliation of stone and water, of the poet and the desert throught images constructed on oxymorons.