Questions for "Plenos poderes"/"Full Powers"

1. In the first stanza, why might the night inhibit the speaker from writing?
2. What could the “keys” in line 8 unlock for the speaker? What do you think he means by “night” and “darkness in the second stanza?
3. In line 14, what does the speaker mean by “I am weary neither of being nor of non-being”? Explain.
4. What could the speaker mean by his “debts to minerality” (line 17)?
5. Why does the speaker “keep on going,” according to lines 19-20?
6. Why might the poem be titled “Full Powers”? What is the source of the speaker's creative powers?

"Full Powers" by Pablo Neruda, translated by Ben Belitt and Alastair Reid

I write in the clear sun, in the teeming street,
at full sea-tide, in a place where I can sing;
only the wayward night inhibits me,
but, interrupted by it, I recover space,
I gather shadows to last me a long time.

The black crop of the night is growing
while my eyes meanwhile take measure of the meadows.
So, from one sun to the next, I forge the keys.
In the darkness, I look for the locks
and keep on opening broken doors to the sea,
for it to fill the wardrobes with its foam.

And I do not weary of going and returning.
Death, in its stone aspect, does not halt me.
I am weary neither of being nor of non-being.

Sometimes I puzzle over origins –
was it from my father, my mother, or the mountains
that I inherited debts to minerality,
the fine threads spreading from a sea on fire?
And I know that I keep on going for the going's sake,
and I sing because I sing and because I sing.

There is no way of explaining what does happen
when I close my eyes and waver
as between two lost channels under water.
One lifts me in its branches toward my dying,
and the other sings in order that I may sing.

And so I am made up of a non-being,
and, as the sea goes battering at a reef
in wave on wave of salty white-tops
and drags back stones in its retreating wash,
so what there is in death surrounding me
opens in me a window out to living,
and, in the spasm of being, I go on sleeping.
In the full light of day, I walk in the shade.