Your Laughter is a poem by Chilean author Pablo Neruda. As the name suggests, the laughter of the speaker's loved one brings him great joy, and the purpose of the poem is to describe such feeling. To do so, Neruda uses lots of figurative language and imagery. As we can see in the excerpt we are analyzing here:

Next to the sea in the autumn,

your laughter must raise

its foamy cascade,

and in the spring, love,

I want your laughter like

the flower I was waiting for,

the blue flower, the rose

of my echoing country.

We find imagery, metaphor and simile in the excerpt. Imagery is a literary device that uses language to appeal to the five senses, involving readers and helping them visualize or feel the same as the speaker does. Metaphor is a figure of speech used to compare two different things by stating that one thing is the other, meaning that they share a quality or characteristic. Simile is also a figure of speech that compares two different things. The difference between simile and metaphor is the fact that a simile uses support words to make the comparison (as or like).

Throughout the poem, Neruda constantly compares the woman's laughter to things that give life or strength, painting a vivid picture of how her laughter makes him happy. In the excerpt above, the laughter is a foamy cascade (metaphor), fluid and bubbly as water (imagery). It is also like the blue flower, the rose of his country (simile), colorful and beautiful (imagery). Those literary devices allow readers to imagine her laughter, to feel the exciting feeling of hearing it. They make the poem more vivid, more immersive.

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