In the poem ‘To the Foot from its Child’, Pablo Neruda expresses his view of life using the metaphor of ‘foot’. The poem begins with a description of the child’s naivety. The child’s foot does not know that it is a foot. It dreams of unlimited possibilities. It wants to become a butterfly enjoying unbridled freedom and enjoying the pleasures of life symbolized by apple.

The poet expresses the experience of the child’s foot when it is exposed to reality in the real world. It walks over stones, streets, ladders, bits of glass, paths in the rough surface of the earth. All these symbolically stand for obstacles, problems, difficulties and hurdles that one encounters in real life. When the child’s foot faces these realities, it attempts to fight them, and it becomes aware that it was in an illusory world and it does not have infinite possibilities in life but has to serve as a foot only. It is also convinced that it cannot become a butterfly or an apple. The outside forces capture him and he is imprisoned in a shoe. Now, from that of an infant’s foot, it has grown to be an adult and now the adult has been forced to live like any human individual.

Then, we get a description of the changes that the child’s foot undergoes inside the shoe. Its nice, soft, petal-like toes lose their ‘lustre’ and the nails become harder, the toes grow bunched and look like eyeless reptiles, grow callused and are covered with faint volcanoes of death. Inside the shoe, the adult foot is like a blind man groping in the dark. This state depicts the helplessness of man when he faces the harsh realities of life as a member of society. He slogs without respite and keeps on walking, until his death. He works in fields, markets, mines and ministries either as a man’s or a woman’s foot. He does not find time to enjoy his rightful pleasures of life like ‘love’ and ‘sleep’. Finally, one day the foot ceases to walk when the man dies.

When he is buried the foot goes underground. But now he does not know that he is no longer a ‘foot’. In his consciousness, he is equal to the child’s consciousness and hence he again dreams of becoming a butterfly or an apple. Thus, the poet depicts his view of life, tracing its characteristics through different stages like infancy, reaching maturity, adulthood, old age and finally death. Thus, the poem also brings out a cyclical view of life – birth, infancy, maturity, adulthood, old age, death and rebirth.