FERNANDO PESSOA
Alberto Caeiro(1889-1915)
translated byChris Daniels
Introduction
Alberto Caeiro da Silva was born in Lisboa on April [...], 1889, and died of tuberculosis in the same city on [...], 1915. He spent all but his first two years living in a grange in Ribatejo and only returned to the city of his birth in his final months. In Ribatejo he wrote nearly all his poems, those of the book entitled Keeper of Flocks, those of the incomplete book, The Amorous Shepherd, and some of his first poems which I myself, having inherited them for the purposes of publication with the rest, gathered together under the designation graciously suggested by Ălvaro de Campos: Detached Poems. His final poems, beginning with the one numbered [...], were written in the final period of the authorâs life, after he had returned to Lisboa. The task befalls me briefly to establish a distinction. Some of these poems reveal, by reason of the perturbation caused by illness, something new and rather foreign â in nature and direction â to the general character of his work.
Caeiroâs life cannot be narrated: there is nothing in it to be told. His poems were the life within him. In all else there was neither incident nor story. Even the brief, fruitless, and absurd episode which gave rise to the poems of The Amorous Shepherd was not an incident but rather, so to speak, a forgetting.
Caeiroâs work represents the absolute essence of paganism, fully reconstructed. The Greeks and the Romans, who lived in the midst of paganism and therefore did not think about it, would have been incapable of such a thing. Yet Caeiroâs oeuvre and its paganism were never thought through, nor were they even felt. They came from something within us deeper than feeling or reason. To say any more would be to explain, which serves no end; to affirm any less would be to lie. Every work speaks for itself with its own voice in the language that shapes both work and voice. âIf you have to ask, you will never know.â There is nothing to explain. Imagine attempting to explain to someone a language he did not speak.
Ignorant of life and nearly so of letters, practically without companionship or culture, Caeiro created his work through a deep and imperceptible progress, like that which drives the logical development of civilizations through unconscious humanityâs conscious mind. His was a progress of sensation, of ways of feeling, and an intimate evolution of thought derived from these progressive sensations. Through some superhuman intuition, as one founding a religion (yet the mantle of âreligiousâ does not suit him â witness his repudiation of all religion and metaphysics), this man described the world without thinking about it, and created a concept of the universe â a concept thoroughly resistant to exegesis.
When first confronted with the enterprise of publishing these poems, I thought I would write a long and discursive critical study of Caeiroâs work, its nature and natural destiny. But I found I could make no satisfactory study.
It weighs heavily upon me, but reason has compelled me to preface the work of my Master with a few, null words. Beyond what I have already written, I can write nothing else useful or necessary, that had not been heartfully said in Ode [...] of Book I of my works, where I weep for the man who was for me (as he will come to be for a great many others) the unveiler of Reality, or, as he himself
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said, âthe Argonaut of true sensationsâ â the great Liberator, he who restores us, singing, to the luminous nothing that we are; who draws us away from death and from life, and leaves us among simple things which, while they last, are ignorant of life and death; who frees us from hope and despair, so that we might neither seek groundless consolation nor find pointless sadness; so that we might live unthinking alongside him, fellow guests of the objective necessity of the Universe.
I give you his work, whose editing was entrusted to me by the ineluctable hazard of the world. I give it to you, and I say:
O rejoice, all you weepingIn History, our worst disease!
Great Pan is reborn!
Ricardo Reis
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The Keeper of Flocks(1911-1912)
Preface
If the critic will apply himself to a careful analysis of these apparently very simple poems, he will find himself again and again faced with unexpected and increasingly complex elements. Taking for axiomatic what immediately impresses him â the naturalness and spontaneity of Caeiroâs poems â he will be surprised to find that they are at the same time rigorously unified by a thinking which not only coordinates and links them, but which also foresees objections, anticipates criticism, and explains away flaws by integrating these flaws into the spiritual substance of the work. Though we think of Caeiro as an objective poet â as indeed he is â in four of his poems we find him expressing entirely subjective emotions. But we are not allowed the cruel satisfaction of pointing out his error. In the poem preceding these poems, he explains that they were written during an illness, and therefore they must be different from his other poems, because sickness is not health. The critic is unable to raise to his lips the cup of his cruel satisfaction. When he seeks the slightly less concrete pleasure of ferreting out transgressions against the workâs own inner theory, he is confronted by poems like Nos. [...] and [...] , where his objections have already been raised, and his questions answered.
Only someone who reads this work patiently, and with readiness of spirit, can appraise what is surprising about Caeiroâs foresight and his intellectual coherence (his coherence is in fact more intellectual than sentimental or emotional).
Caeiroâs work is truly a manifestation of a pagan mind. The order and discipline of paganism which Christianity caused us to lose, the reasoned intelligence of things, which was paganismâs most obvious attribute and no longer ours â permeate his work. Because it speaks here its form, we see the essence, not the exterior shape, of paganism. In other words, I do not see Caeiro reconstructing the exterior form of paganism. Paganismâs very substance has in fact been summoned up from Avernus, as Orpheus summoned Eurydice, by the harmelodic magic of Caeiroâs emotion.
What are, by my own criterion, the faults of this work? Only two, and they do little to dim the brightness of this brother of the gods.
Caeiroâs poems lack the one thing that would complete them: there is no exterior discipline to match the strength, coherency, and order reigning in the heart of his work. He chose, as will be seen, a poetic form which, though strongly personal â as it could not fail to be â is merely the free verse of the moderns. He did not control his writing with an over-arching discipline comparable to the discipline with which he nearly always controls his emotion, with which he always controls his ideas. We may forgive this flaw, because we must forgive much in innovators, but we must not omit saying that it is a flaw, and not a distinction.
Neither did he fully control the sick emotions (still slightly demi-Christian) out of which his poetâs soul rose into the world. His ideas, always essentially pagan, are sometimes cloaked in ill-fitting emotive garb. In âThe Keeper of Flocks,â one can follow a gradual perfection taking place. The final poems â especially the four or five preceding the last two â are perfectly unified in idea and emotion. I would forgive the poet for remaining burdened by certain sentimental accoutrements of Christian mentality if he had never, even at the end of the work, succeeded in ridding himself of that baggage. But since, at a certain point in his poetic evolution, he did succeed, I do chastise him, and I chastise him severely (as I chastised him severely to his face), for not returning to his earlier poems and adjusting them to his acquired discipline. If he had been unable to subject any of them to this discipline, he should have crossed them out entirely. But the courage to sacrifice is a trait
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seldom found in poets. It is so much more difficult to remake than it is to make for the first time. Truly, contrary to the old saying, the last step is the hardest.
And so, I find the [...] poem, so irritating to a Christian, to be absolutely deplorable for an objective poet in the process of reconstructing the essence of paganism. In this poem he descends to the utter nadir of Christian subjectivism, even as deep as that admixture of the objective and the subjective which forms the characteristic malady of the moderns â from certain pages in the intolerable work of the ill-named Victor Hugo to the near-totality of the amorphous magma which sometimes passes for poetry among our contemporary mystics.
Perhaps I have exaggerated; perhaps I have abused. Having benefitted from the resurrection of paganism achieved by Caeiro, and having â as do all beneficiaries â busied myself with the easy secondary art of development, it is probably ungrateful of me to rail against the defects inherent in the innovation from which I have so benefited. But, where I find defects, even if I forgive them, I must name them as such. Magis amica veritas.
Ricardo Reis
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I
Iâve never kept flocks,But itâs like Iâve kept them.My soul is like a shepherd,It knows the wind and the sunAnd it walks hand in hand with the Seasons,Following and seeing.All the peace of Nature without peopleComes and sits at my side.But I get sadAs the sunset is in our imaginationWhen it gets cold down in the plainAnd you feel night coming inLike a butterfly through the window.
But my sadness is quietBecause itâs natural and itâs justAnd itâs what should be in my soulWhen it already thinks it existsAnd my hands pick flowersAnd my soul doesnât know it.Like the sound of sheepâs bellsBeyond the curve of the road,All my thoughts are peaceful.Iâm just sorry about knowing theyâre peaceful,Because if I didnât know it,Instead of them being peaceful and sad,Theyâd be happy and peaceful.
Thinking makes you uncomfortable like walking in the rainWhen the wind gets stronger and it seems to rain more.
I donât have ambitions or desires.Being a poet isnât my ambition,Itâs my way of being alone.
And sometimes if I wantTo imagine Iâm a lamb(Or a whole flockSpreading out all over the hillsideSo I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),Itâs only because I feel what I write at sunset,Or when a cloud passes its hand over the lightAnd silence runs over the grass outside.
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When I sit and write poemsOr, walking along the roads or paths,I write poems on the paper in my thinkings,I feel a staff in my handAnd see my silhouetteOn top of a knoll,Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,With a silly smile like when you donât understand what somebodyâs sayingBut you want to pretend you do.
I greet everyone who reads me,I tip my wide hat to themWhen they see me at my doorJust as the stagecoach comes to the top of my hill.I greet them and wish them sunshine,Or rain, when they need rain,And that their houses haveA favorite chairWhere they sit reading my poemsBy an open window.And when they read my poems, I hope they thinkIâm something natural âThe ancient tree, for example,Where they sat down with a thumpIn the shade when they were kidsAll worn out playing, and wiped the sweatFrom their hot browsWith the sleeve of their striped cotton smocks.
(3/8/1914)
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II
When I look, I see clear as a sunflower.Iâm always walking the roadsLooking right and left,And sometimes looking behind . . .And what I see every secondIs something Iâve never seen before,And I know how to do this very well . . .I know how to hold the astonishmentA child would have if it could really seeIt was being born when it was being born . . .I feel myself being born in each moment,In the eternal newness of the world . . .
I believe in the world like I believe in a marigold,Because I see it. But I donât think about itBecause to think is to not understand . . .The world wasnât made for us to think about(To think is to be sick in the eyes)But for us to look at and agree with . . .
I donât have a philosophy: I have senses . . .If I talk about Nature, itâs not because I know what it is,But because I love it, and the reason I love itIs because when you love you never know what you love,Or why you love, or what loving is . . .
Loving is eternal innocence,And the only innocence is not thinking . . .
(3/8/1914)
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III
In the evening, leaning out my window,Watching the fields out front from under my brows,I read CesĂĄrio Verdeâs bookUntil my eyes were burning.
I felt so sorry for him! He was like a man from the countryAnd he walked through the city like he was out on bail.But the way he looked at houses,And the way he saw the streets,And the way he had of taking things in,Was like someone looking at trees,Or lowering their eyes to the road where they go walkingOr taking in the flowers in the fields . . .
Thatâs why he had that great sadnessHe could never really say he had,But walked in the city like someone walking in the country,Sad, like pressing flowers in booksAnd putting plants in jars . . .
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IV
This afternoon a storm fellDown from the sky onto the hillsidesLike a huge pile of gravel . . .
Like someone shaking a tablecloth out of a high window,And all the scraps falling togetherMake some noise when they fall,The hissing rain rained from the skyAnd darkened the roads . . .
When lightning flashes in the airAnd space shakesLike a big head saying no,I donât know why â I donât feel afraid âI start praying to Saint BarbaraLike I was somebodyâs old aunt . . .
Ah! itâs just that praying to Saint BarbaraMakes me feel even more simpleThan I think I am . . .I feel homey and domesticLike Iâve gone through lifeTranquilly, like the wall of my yard;I have ideas and feelings by having themLike a flower has perfume and color . . .
It makes me feel like someone who can believe in St. Barbara . . .Ah, to be able to believe in St. Barbara!
(Whoever believes thereâs a St. BarbaraBelieve sheâs a person you can seeOr else what would they believe about her?)
(How phony! What do flowers, trees and flocksKnow about St. Barbara? . . . If a branch of a treeCould think, it never wouldConstrue saints or angels . . .It would be able to think the sunGives light and a stormIs an angry bunch ofPeople above us . . .
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Ah, how the simplest of menAre sick and confused and stupidNext to the clear simplicityAnd health in existingOf trees and plants!)
And me, thinking about all this,I became less happy again. . .I became somber and sickened and gloomyLike when a storm threatens all dayAnd even by night it doesnât come . . .
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V
Thereâs enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.
What do I think about the world?I have no idea what I think about the world!If I get sick Iâll think about that stuff.
What idea do I have about things?What opinion do I have about cause and effect?What have I meditated on God and the soulAnd on the creation of the world?I donât know. For me thinking about that stuff is shutting my eyesAnd not thinking. Itâs closing the curtains(But my window doesnât have curtains).
The mystery of things? I have no idea what mystery is!The only mystery is there being someone who thinks about mystery.When youâre in the sun and shut your eyes,You start not knowing what the sun isAnd you think a lot of things full of heat.But you open your eyes and look at the sunAnd you canât think about anything anymore,Because the sunâs light is worth more than the thoughtsOf all the philosophers and poets.Sunlight doesnât know what itâs doingSo itâs never wrong and itâs common and good.
Metaphysics? What metaphysics do those trees have?Of being green and bushy and having branchesAnd of giving fruit in their own time, which doesnât make us think,To us, who donât know how to pay attention to them.But what better metaphysics than theirs,Which is not knowing what they live forNot even knowing they donât know?âInner constitution of things . . .ââInner meaning of the Universe . . .âAll that stuff is false, all that stuff means nothing.Itâs incredible that someone could think about things that way.Itâs like thinking reasons and purposesWhen morning starts shining, and by the trees over thereA vague lustrous gold is driving the darkness away.
Thinking about the inner meaning of thingsIs doing too much, like thinking about health when youâre healthy,Or bringing a cup to a spring.
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The only inner meaning of thingsIs that they have no inner meaning at all.
I donât believe in God because I never saw him.If he wanted me to believe in him,I have no doubt heâd come talk with meAnd come in my doorTelling me, Here I am!
(Maybe this is ridiculous to the earsOf someone who, because they donât know what it is to look at things,Doesnât understand someone who talks about themWith the way of speaking looking at them teaches.)
But if God is the flowers and the treesAnd the hills and the sun and the moonlight,Then I believe in him,Then I believe in him all the time,And my whole life is an oration and a mass,And a communion with my eyes and through my ears.
But if God is the trees and the flowersAnd the hills and the moonlight and the sun,Why should I call him God?I call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moonlight;Because if he made himself for me to seeAs the sun and moonlight and flowers and trees and hills,If he appears to me as trees and hillsAnd moonlight and sun and flowers,Itâs because he wants me to know himAs trees and hills and flowers and moonlight and sun.
And thatâs why I obey him,(What more do I know about God than God knows about himself?),I obey him by living, spontaneously,Like someone opening his eyes and seeing,And I call him moonlight and sun and flowers and trees and hills,And I love him without thinking about him,And I think him by seeing and hearing,And Iâm with him all the time.
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VI
Thinking about God is disobeying GodBecause God wants us not to know him,And so he doesnât show himself to us . . .
Letâs be simple and calm,Like brooks and trees,And God will love us by makingBeautiful things like the trees and brooks for us,And give us greenness in his spring,A river for us to go to when weâre done . . .Nothing else, because giving us more would take more from us.
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VII
From my village I see as much in the Universe as you can see from earth . . .So my village is as big as any other landBecause Iâm the size of what I see,Not the size of my height . . .
In the cities life is smallerThan here in my house on top of this little hill.In the city the big houses shut your sight with a key,Hide the horizon, push your eyes far away from all the sky,Make us little because they take away what our eyes can give us,And make us poor because our only wealth is seeing.
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VIII
One noonday near the end of springI had a dream like a photograph.I saw Jesus Christ come down to earth.
He came down the side of a hillAnd turned into a boy again,Running and rolling in the grassAnd pulling up flowers just to throw them away,And laughing so you could hear it far away.He had run away from heaven.He was like us too much to pretendHe was the second person of the Trinity.In heaven everything was false, everything out of stepWith flowers and trees and stones.In heaven he always had to be seriousAnd from time to time become human againAnd climb onto the cross, and start dyingWith a crown of thorns all around,And his feet skewered with a spikeAnd even with a rag around his waistLike black men in engravings.They wouldnât even let him have a father and motherLike other children.His father was two people âAn old man named Joseph, who was a carpenter,And who wasnât his father,And the other father was a stupid dove,The only ugly dove in the worldBecause it was neither a dove nor of the world.His mother didnât love a man before she had him.She wasnât even a woman: she was the handbagHe came down from the sky in.And they wanted him, who was born only of a mother,And never had a father to love with respect,To preach goodness and justice!
One day when God fell asleepAnd the Holy Ghost went off flying,He got into a box of miracles and stole three.With the first he made it so that no one would know he had run away.With the second he made himself a human boy forever.With the third he created a Christ eternally crucifiedAnd left him nailed to the cross that there is in HeavenWhere heâs used as a model for other crosses.Then he ran away to the sun
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And came down on the first ray he caught.
Today he lives in my village with me.Heâs a lovely, natural, smiling child.He wipes his nose on his right arm,Sloshes around in puddles,Picks flowers and loves them and forgets about them.He throws stones at donkeys,Steals fruit from the orchardsAnd runs away yelling and crying from dogs.And, because he knows they donât like itAnd everybody else thinks itâs funny,He runs around the girlsWho walk in groups along the roadsWith jugs on their headsAnd he lifts up their skirts.Heâs taught me everything.He taught me how to look at things.He shows me everything there is in flowers.He shows me how stones are pleasingWhen you hold them in your handAnd look at them for a while.
He tells me a lot of bad things about God.He says heâs a stupid, sick old man,Always hawking on the groundAnd saying nasty things.The Virgin Mary spends her afternoons in eternity knitting socks.The Holy Ghost picks at himself with his beakAnd perches on armchairs and dirties them.Everything in heaven is as stupid as the Catholic Church.He tells me God doesnât understand anythingAbout the things he created ââIf itâs him who created them, which I doubtâ ââHe says, for example, that all beings sing his glory,But beings donât sing anything.If they sang theyâd be singers.All beings exist and nothing elseAnd thatâs why theyâre called beings.â
And afterwards, tired out from telling me about Godâs wickedness,The Boy Jesus falls asleep in my armsAnd I carry him home in my arms.
â
He stays with me in my house on the middle of a knoll.
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Heâs the Eternal Child, the god who was missing.Heâs the human who is natural,Heâs the divinity who smiles and plays.And thatâs why I know for certainThat heâs the true Boy Jesus.
And the child so human heâs divineIs my daily poetâs life,And itâs because he always walks with me that Iâm always a poet,And my very smallest glimpseFills me with feeling,And the smallest sound, whatever it may be,Seems to speak to me.
The New Child who stays where I stayGives one hand to meAnd the other to everything that existsAnd so we three go along whatever road there is,Skipping and singing and laughingAnd delighting in our common secretWhich is totally knowingThereâs no mystery in the worldAnd everythingâs worth the trouble.The Eternal Child always accompanies me.The direction of my eyes is his pointing finger.My happy attentive listening to every soundIs him playfully tickling my ears.
We get along so well togetherIn the company of everythingThat we never think about each other,But the two of us live togetherWith an inner accordLike right and left hands.
At nightfall we play jacksOn the doorstep of the house,Gravely as is fitting a god and a poet,And as if each jackWere a whole universeAnd because of this it would be a great dangerTo let it fall on the ground.
Afterwards I tell him stories about things only people doAnd he smiles, because itâs all incredible.He laughs about kings and about those who are not kings,And he feels hurt when he hears about wars,
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And commerce, and the ships leavingTheir smoke on the high seas.Because he knows all of this lacks the truthA flower has in its bloomingAnd which moves with the sunlightChanging the hills and valleysAnd making whitewashed walls hurt your eyes.
Then he falls asleep and I put him to bed.I carry him in my arms inside my houseAnd lay him down, undressing him slowlyLike following a ritual all cleanAnd maternal until heâs naked.
He sleeps in my soulAnd sometimes he wakes up at nightAnd plays with my dreams.He throws them around in the air,Puts one on top of the otherAnd claps his hands all aloneSmiling at my sleep.
âWhen I die, little boy,Let me be a child, the littlest one.Clutch me to your breastAnd carry me inside your house.Undress my tired and human beingAnd lay me down in your bed.And tell me stories, in case I wake up,To make me go to sleep again.And give me your dreams to play withUntil the day comes âYou know which day I mean.
â
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This is the story of my Boy Jesus.Is there any reason you seeFor it not to be more trueThan everything philosophers thinkAnd everything religions teach?
. . . the stunning dream of the Boy Jesus might be the most original thing in all modern poetry.
There seems to be in Caeiro the radical impossibility for him not to feel everything freshly. His comments are those of one who yearns to tell the gods a few things about the origin of the world. He seems younger by centuries than all the rest of us and is joined to us only by the deficiencies, weakness or hesitation in his fresh ideation. The interstices of his poetic thinking are clogged with the debris of our exhausted mode of thought . . .
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IX
Iâm a keeper of flocks.The flock is my thoughtsAnd my thoughts are all sensations.I think with my eyes and with my earsAnd with my hands and feetAnd with my nose and mouth.
Thinking about a flower is seeing and smelling itAnd eating a piece of fruit is knowing its meaning.
Thatâs why when on a hot dayI feel sad from liking it so much,And I throw myself lengthwise on the grassAnd I shut my hot eyes,And I feel my whole body lying on realityAnd I know the truth and Iâm happy.
Informed that the most original and limpid poetry, the poetry most purely poetry of today would emanate from a materialist, we ought not be led into the evil of doubt. Informed of a radically absolute materialist who nevertheless possesses all the mysticâs qualities of spiritual refinement, we mustnât labor to turn our backs on that crude paradox. If someone told us that there was a contemporary poet who would appear with an entirely new poetry, thoroughly contrary to ours â perhaps weâd choose to turn our backs, almost not [ . . . ] Alberto Caeiro realizes all those contradictions.
In him we salute the most original modern poet, one of the greatest poets of all times . . .
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X
âHey, keeper of flocks,There by the side of the road,What does the blowing wind say to you?â
âThat itâs wind, that it blows,That itâs blown beforeAnd will blow again.What does it say to you?â
âSo much more than that.It speaks to me of many other things.Of memories and yearningsAnd things that never were.â
âYou never heard the wind blow.The wind only talks about the wind.What you heard from it was a lie,And the lie is in you.â
His poetry is so natural that at times there seems nothing great or sublime about it . . . It is so spontaneous and ingenuous that we forget it is completely new, entirely original.
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XI
That lady has a piano.Itâs nice, but itâs not the running of riversOr the murmur trees make . . .
Who needs a piano?Itâs better to have earsAnd love Nature.
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XII
Virgilâs shepherds played the pipes and other thingsAnd they sang about love literarily.(So they say â I never read Virgil.Why should I?)
Virgilâs shepherds, poor guys, are Virgil,And Nature is beautiful and ancient and right here.
(4/12/1919)
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XIII
Lightly, lightly, very lightly,The wind blows very lightlyAnd then stops, always very lightly.And I donât know what I thinkAnd I donât want to know.
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XIV
I donât bother with rhyme. Two treesAre never, ever the same, one beside the other.I think and write like flowers have colorBut with less perfection in my way of expressing myselfBecause I lack the divine simplicityOf wholly being only my exterior.
I see and Iâm moved,Moved the way water runs when the ground slopes downAnd what I write is as natural as the rising wind . . .
(3/7/1914)
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XV
The four songs following this oneSeparate themselves from everything I think,Make lies of everything I feel,Are the opposite of what I am . . .
I wrote them when I was getting sickAnd so theyâre naturalAnd they agree with what I feel,They agree with what they donât agree with . . .Being sick I should think the oppositeOf what I think when Iâm healthy(Otherwise I wouldnât be sick),I should feel the opposite of what I feelWhen Iâm healthy,I should give the lie to my natureOf being a creature who feels a certain way . . .I should be all sick â ideas and everything.When Iâm sick, Iâm not sick for something else.
So these songs that deny meArenât capable of denying meAnd are the landscape of my at night,The same in the opposite . . .
What I admire in Caeiroâs poetry is the strong thought â yes, a kind of reason â that conjoins and unites his poems. In truth, he never contradicts himself, and when he does seem to contradict himself, there exists, in some corner of his writing, the allegation foreseen and answered. Is it a profound coherence of the work itself, XXXXX? or is it the profound genius of a Greek feeling and seeing all? In any hypothesis, the literary figure is enormous, even too grand for the polychrome pettiness of our epoch.
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XVI
If only my life could be an oxcartThat goes creaking, early mornings, along the roadAnd when it gets where itâs going, startsBack, near dusk, along the same road.
I wouldnât have to have hopes â only wheels . . .My old age wouldnât be wrinkles or hair gone white . . .When Iâm no good anymore, theyâll pull off my wheelsAnd Iâll lie broken upside-down in a ditch.
Or else theyâll make me some other thingAnd I wonât know what I was made . . .But Iâm not a cart, Iâm something elseAnd how Iâm different, theyâll never say.
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XVII
Salad
What a jumble of Nature on my plate!My sisters the plants,The companions of springs, the saintsNobody prays to . . .
And they cut them and they come to our tableAnd in the hotels the noisy guestsWho come in with their strapped-up blanketsAsk for âSalad,â carelessly . . .,
Without thinking they demand from Mother EarthHer freshness and her first children,The first green words she ever said,The first things, living and iridescent,That Noah sawWhen the waters lowered and the mountaintopsEmerged green and marshyAnd in the air where the dove appearedThe rainbow was shimmering . . .
A.C.: In the seventeenth poem, we are able readily to discern Caeiroâs foundationary influences: CesĂĄrio Verde and the Portuguese neopantheists. The seventh line is pure CesĂĄrio Verde. The tone in general is almost Pascoaes.
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XVIII
If only I were dust on a roadAnd poor peopleâs feet were tromping on me . . .
If only I were flowing riversAnd washerwomen were on my banks . . .
If only I were poplars next to the riverAnd only had the sky above me and the water below . . .
If only I were a millerâs donkeyAnd he beat me and took care of me . . .
Those would be better than going through lifeLooking back and feeling sorry about it . . .
(1914)
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XIX
The moonlight when it shines on the grass,I donât know what it reminds me of . . .It reminds me of my old maidTelling me fairy talesAnd how Our Lady dressed like a beggarAnd walked the roads at night,Helping mistreated children . . .
If I canât believe theyâre true anymore,Why does the moonlight shine on the grass?
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XX
The Tejo is more beautiful than the river that flows through my village,But the Tejo isnât more beautiful than the river that flows through my village,Because the Tejo isnât the river that flows through my village.
The Tejo has big boatsAnd there navigates in it still,For those who see whatâs not there in everything,The memory of fleets.
The Tejo runs down from SpainAnd the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal.Everybody knows that.But not many people know the river of my villageAnd where it comes fromAnd where itâs going.And so, because it belongs to less people,The river of my village is freer and bigger.
Through the Tejo you go to the world.Beyond the Tejo is AmericaAnd the fortune you might find there.Nobody ever thought about whatâs beyondThe river of my village.
The river of my village doesnât make you think about anything.When youâre at its bank youâre only at its bank.
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XXI
If I could take a bite of the whole worldAnd feel it on my palateAnd if the earth were something to bite intoIâd be more happy for a minute or so . . .But I donât always want to be happy.Sometimes you have to beUnhappy to be natural . . .Not every day is sunny.When thereâs been no rain for a while, you pray for it to come.So I take unhappiness with happinessNaturally, like someone who doesnât find it strangeThat there are mountains and plainsAnd that there are big rocks and grass . . .
What you need is to be natural and calmIn happiness and in unhappiness,To feel like someone seeing,To think like someone walking,And when itâs time to die, remember the day dies,And the sunset is beautiful, and the endless night is beautiful . . .Thatâs how it is and thatâs how I should be . . .
32
XXII
Like someone who opens the door of their house on a Summer dayAnd peers at the heat of the fields with his whole face,Sometimes, suddenly, Nature smacks meRight in the face of my feelings,And I get confused, worried, wanting to perceiveI donât really know how or what . . .
But whoâs telling me to want to perceive?Who says I have to perceive?
When Summer runs the light, hotHand of its breeze across my face,I only have to feel pleased because itâs a breezeOr displeased because itâs hot,However I feel it,So I should feel it like I feel it because thatâs how I feel it . . .
33
XXIII
My looking is blue as the sky,Calm as water in the sun.Itâs that way, blue and calm,Because it doesnât question and it doesnât get surprised . . .
If I did question or got surprisedNew flowers wouldnât bloom in the meadowsAnd nothing would change in the sun in a way to make it more beautiful.
(Even if new flowers bloomed in the meadowsAnd the sun turned more beautiful,Iâd sense less flowers in the meadowAnd think the sun is more ugly . . .Because everythingâs like it is and so things are what they are,And I accept, and Iâm not even grateful,So I donât seem to be thinking about it . . .)
34
XXIV
What we see of things is things.Why would we see something if there were something else?How could seeing and hearing be self-deceptiveIf seeing and hearing are seeing and hearing?
The main thing is knowing how to see,To know how to see without thinking,To know how to see when you see,And not think when you seeOr see when you think.
But this (poor us with dresses-up souls!),This takes deep study,An apprenticeship in unlearning,And isolation in freedom from that conventWhere poets say the stars are eternal brothers,And flowers are penitent nuns who only live a day,But where stars really arenât anything but stars,And flowers arenât anything but flowers,And that why theyâre called stars and flowers.
(3/13/1914)
35
XXV
Those soap bubbles that kidAmuses himself with by blowing them from a strawAre transparently a whole philosophy.
Clear, useless and fleeting like Nature,Friends to the eyes like things,They are what they areWith a little round airy precision,And nobody, not even the kid whoâs making them,Pretends theyâre more than they appear to be.
Some are hard to see in the clear air.Theyâre like a breeze that blows and barely touches the flowersAnd we only know itâs blowingBecause something lightens in usAnd accepts everything more clearly.
(3/13/1914)
Or the supreme perfection of the twenty-fifth, a poem that really does seem a flying soap-bubble of his thought.
36
XXVI
Sometimes on days of perfect and exact light,When things have all the reality they can,I ask myself slowlyWhy I even attributeBeauty to things.
Does a flower somehow have beauty?Somehow a fruit has beauty?No: they only have colorAnd form and existence.Beauty is the name of something that doesnât existI give to things in exchange for the delight they give me.It means nothing.Then why do I say, âThings are beautifulâ?
Yes, even I, who live only on living,Menâs lies come to meet meInvisibly in the face of things,In the face of things that simply exist.
Itâs so hard to be yourself and see only what you can see!
(3/11/1914)
37
XXVII
Only Nature is divine, and sheâs not divine . . .
If I talk about her like sheâs a beingItâs because talking about her I need to use the language of menWhich gives personality to things,And imposes a name on things.
But things donât have a name or a personality:They exist, and the sky is big and the earth is wide,And our heart is the size of a clenched fist . . .
Blessed be me for everything I donât know.This really is all I am. I love all this like you know thereâs a sun.
38
XXVIII
Today I read almost two pagesIn a book by a mystical poetAnd I laughed like someone whoâd cried a lot.
Mystical poets are sick philosophersAnd philosophers are crazy.
Mystical poets say flowers feelAnd they say stones have a soulAnd they say rivers have ecstasies in the moonlight.
But flowers wouldnât be flowers if they felt,Theyâd be people;And if stones had a soul, theyâd be living things, they wouldnât be stones;And if rivers had ecstasies in the moonlight,Rivers would be sick people.
You need to not know what flowers and stones and rivers areTo talk about their feelings.Talking about the soul of stones, of flowers, of rivers,Is talking about yourself and your false thoughts.Thank God stones are only stones,And rivers are nothing but rivers,And flowers are just flowers.
Me, I write my prosy poemsAnd Iâm at peace,Because I know I understand Nature on the outsideAnd I donât understand Nature on the insideBecause Nature doesnât have an inside;If she did she wouldnât be Nature.
39
XXIX
Iâm not always the same in what I say and write.I change, but I donât change a whole lot.The color of flowers isnât the same in the sunAs when a cloud passes overOr when night fallsAnd the flowers are the color of shadow.
But whoever looks right sees theyâre the same flowers.So when I seem to not agree with myself,Watch me closely:Sometimes when Iâm going right,Maybe Iâll turn left,But itâs still me, standing on the same feet âAlways the same, thanks to the sky and the earthAnd my attentive eyes and earsAnd my clear simplicity of soul . . .
40
XXX
If they want me to have some kind of mysticism, okay, Iâve got one.Iâm a mystic, but only with my body.My soul is simple and it doesnât think.
My mysticism is not wanting to know.Itâs living and not thinking about it.
I donât know what Nature is: I sing her.I live on top of a knollIn a lonely whitewashed house,And thatâs my definition.
41
XXXI
If I sometimes say flowers smileAnd if I say rivers sing,Itâs not because I believe there are smiles in flowersAnd songs in the running of rivers . . .
Itâs because that way I make wrong men feel moreThe really real existence of flowers and rivers.
Because I write for them to read me, sometimes I sacrifice myselfTo their stupidity of meanings . . .I donât agree with myself but I forgive myselfBecause I donât really take myself very seriously,Because only I am this hateful thing, an interpreter of Nature,Because there are people donât perceive her language,Because itâs not a language at all . . .
42
XXXII
Yesterday evening some citified guyTalked at the door of the inn.He talked to me, too.He talked about justice and the fight for justiceAnd the workers who suffer,And constant work, and those who are hungry,And the rich, who only turn their backs.
And, looking at me, he saw tears in my eyesAnd smiled with sympathy, believing I feltThe hatred he felt, and the compassionHe said he felt.
(But I wasnât even really listening to him.What do I care about menAnd what they suffer or think they suffer?Let them be like me â then they wouldnât suffer.All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,Good or bad, whatever.Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.If you want more, youâll just lose it and be unhappy.)
What I was thinking aboutWhen the friend of the people talked(And what moved me to tears),Was how the distant clank of sheepâs bells that eveningDidnât seem like bells of a tiny chapelWhere flowers and brooks were going to massWith simple souls like mine.
(Praise be to God Iâm not goodAnd have the natural egotism of flowersAnd rivers following their bedPreoccupied without knowing itOnly with blooming and flowing.Thatâs the only mission in the World, That â to exist clearly,And to know how to do it without thinking about it.)
The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset?
43
XXXIII
Poor flowers in the beds of regimented gardens.They look like theyâre afraid of the cops . . .But all the same theyâre so good to bloom for usAnd have the same ancient smileThey had for the gaze of the first humanWho saw them appear and touched them softlyTo see if they could speak . . .
44
XXXIV
I find it so natural not to thinkI start to laugh sometimes, all alone,I donât really know why, but itâs got something to doWith knowing there are some folks who think . . .
What does my wall think about my shadow?I ask myself that sometimes until I noticeIâm asking myself things . . .And then I get mad at myself, and feel uncomfortableLike when my foot falls asleep . . .
What does this think about that?Nothing thinks about anything.Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants?If it did, it would be people. . .Why am I worrying about this?If I think about these things,Iâll stop seeing trees and plantsAnd stop seeing the EarthFor only seeing my thoughts . . .Iâll get unhappy and stay in the dark.And so, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky.
45
XXXV
Moonlight through high branches,All the poets say itâs moreThan moonlight through high branches.
But for me, who donât know what I think,What moonlight through high branchesIs, besides beingMoonlight through high branches,Is being nothing elseBut moonlight through high branches.
(3/11/1914)
46
XXXVI
And there are poets who are artistsAnd they work on their versesLike a carpenter with boards! . . .
How sad not to know how to bloom!To have to put verse on verse, like someone making a wallAnd looking to see if itâs good, and tearing it apart if itâs not! . . .
When the only artistic house is the whole EarthAnd it varies and itâs always good and always the same.
I think about it, not like someone thinking, but like someone not thinking,And I look at flowers and I smile . . .I donât know if they understand meOr if I understand them,But I know the truth is in them and in meAnd in our common divinityOf letting ourselves go and live on the EarthAnd snuggling through the contented SeasonsAnd letting the wind sing us to sleepAnd not have dreams in our sleep.
47
XXXVII
Like a great big blob of dirty fireThe setting sun lags among left-over clouds.A vague whistle comes from far away in the very calm evening.There must be a train out there.
At this moment a vague yearning comes over meAnd a vague placid desireAppears and disappears.
Also at times, on the surface of streams,Water-bubbles formAnd grow and burstAnd have no meaning at allExcept that theyâre water-bubblesGrowing and bursting.
48
XXXVIII
Blessed be the sun on other landsWhich makes all men my brothersBecause every man, one moment in the day, looks at it like meAnd in this pure moment,All clean and tender,They go back tearfullyWith a sigh they barely feelTo the true and primitive ManWho saw the sun rise and didnât worship it yet.Because thatâs natural â more naturalThan adoring the sun and God, tooAnd everything else that doesnât exist.
look in other edition for highlighted lines
49
XXXIX
The mystery of things, where is it?Where is the thing that doesnât appearAt least to show us itâs a mystery?What does a river know about this and what does a tree know?And I, who am no more than those, what do I know?Every time I look at things and think about what men think about them,I laugh like how a brook sounds cool on a stone.
Because the only hidden meaning of thingsIs that they have no hidden meaning at all,Itâs stranger than every strangenessAnd the dreams of all the poetsAnd the thoughts of all the philosophers,That things are really what they seem to beAnd thereâs nothing to understand.
Yes, this is what my senses learned all by themselves: âThings donât have meaning: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.
50
XL
A butterfly goes in front of meAnd for the first time in the universe I noticeThat butterflies donât have color or movement,Just like flowers donât have perfume or color.Color is what has color in a butterflyâs wings.In a butterflyâs movement the movement is what moves.Perfume is what has perfume in a flowerâs perfume.A butterflyâs only a butterfly.A flowerâs only a flower.
(5/7/1914)
51
XLI
Sometimes in the evening on Summer days,Even when thereâs no breeze at all, it seemsLike thereâs a light breeze blowing for a minute . . .But the trees keep stillIn every leaf of their leavesAnd our feelings have had an illusion,Theyâve had the illusion of what would please them . . .
Ah, our senses, sick beings that see and hear!Letâs be like we should beAnd not hold on to this need for illusion in us . . .It should be enough for us to sense with clarity and lifeAnd not even think about what senses are for . . .
But thank God thereâs imperfection in the WorldBecause imperfection is a thingAnd people being wrong is primordialAnd there being sick people makes the world bigger.If there were no imperfection there would be one less thingAnd there should be a lot of thingsSo we have a lot to see and hear(As long as our eyes and ears arenât shut) . . .
(5/7/14)
52
XLII
A stagecoach went by on the road and kept on going;And the road didnât become more beautiful or even more ugly.Thatâs human action all over the outside world.We take nothing away and we put nothing back, we go by and forgetAnd the sunâs always right on time, every day.
(5/7/14)
This calm notation on the margin of history says more about the eternal vacuity of human action than a hundred lengthy odes by a hundred poets.
53
XLIII
Rather the flight of a bird that goes by and leaves no trace,Than when an animal goes by and leaves a reminder on the ground.A bird goes by and is forgotten and thatâs how it ought to be.When itâs not there anymore and so no use at all, an animalShows it used to be there, which is no use at all.
Recollection betrays NatureBecause yesterdayâs Nature isnât Nature.What was is nothing and to remember is to not see.
Pass, bird, pass, and teach me to pass!
(5/7/14)
54
XLIV
I suddenly wake up at night,And my clock occupies the whole night.I donât sense Nature outside.My room is a dark thing with vaguely white walls.Itâs quiet outside like nothing existed.Only the clock goes on with its noise.And this little thing full of gears on top of my tableMuffles the whole existence of the earth and the sky . . .I almost get lost thinking about what it means,But I come back, and I feel myself smiling in the night with the corners of my mouth,Because the only thing my clock means or symbolizesFilling the enormous night with its smallnessIs the curious sensation of the enormous night being filledAnd the sensation is a little strange because itâs not filling the nightWith its smallness.
(5/7/14)
55
XLV
A stand of trees over there on the hillside.But what is it, a row of trees? Itâs just trees.Row and the plural trees arenât things, theyâre names.
Sad human souls, putting everything in order,Tracing lines from thing to thing,Hanging signs with names on absolutely real trees,And drawing parallels of latitude and longitudeAll over the earth itself, innocent and more green and more flowering than that!
(5/7/14)
56
XLVI
One way or another,Whether it works out or not,Sometimes able to say what I think,Other times saying it badly and all mixed up,I keep writing my poems without meaning to,As if writing werenât a thing made of gestures,As if writing were a thing that happened to meLike the sun shining on me outside.
I try to say what I feelWithout thinking about things I feel.I try to lean words on the ideaAnd not need a corridorFrom thought to words.
I donât always feel what I know I should feel.My thought crosses the river I swim very slowlyBecause the suit men made it wear weighs it down.
Iâm trying to take off what I learned,Iâm trying to forget the way of remembering they taught me,And scrape off the paint they painted my senses with,Unpack my true emotions,Unwrap myself and be me, not Alberto Caeiro,But a human animal produced by Nature.
So I write, wanting to feel Nature, not even like a man,But like someone feeling Nature and nothing else.So I write, sometimes well, sometimes not so well,Sometimes hitting the mark, sometimes missing,Falling down over here, standing up over there,But always going my way like a stubborn blind man.
Even so, Iâm somebody.Iâm the Discoverer of Nature.Iâm the Argonaut of true sensations.I bring a new Universe to the UniverseBecause I bring the Universe itself.
57
I feel this and write thisKnowing perfectly wellAnd without not seeingThat itâs five in the morningAnd the sun, which still hasnât shown its headAbove the wall of the horizon,Can already be seen by its fingertipsClutching the top of the wallOf the horizon full of low hills.
(5/10/14)
58
XLVII
On a too clear day,A day when you wish youâd worked a lot the day beforeSo youâd have no work left to do,I glimpsed, like a road between trees,What might be The Great Secret,That Great Mystery wrong poets talk about.
I saw thereâs no Nature,Nature doesnât exist,There are hills, valleys, plains,There are trees, flowers, weeds,There are rivers and stones,But there isnât a whole all this belongs toAnd a real and true wholenessIs a sickness of our ideas.
Nature is parts without a whole.Maybe thatâs the mystery they talk about.
Thatâs what I hit upon without thinking or pausing,That must be the truthEveryoneâs looking for and doesnât find,And only I found it because I wasnât looking for it.
Caeiro is the Saint Francis of Assisi of the new paganism. (A. Mora)
59
XLVIII
From the highest window of my houseWith a white handkerchief I say goodbyeTo my poems leaving for humanity.
And Iâm not happy or sad.Thatâs the destiny of poems.I wrote them and I should show them to everybodyBecause I canât do any different,Like a flower canât hide its color,Or a river hide its flowing,Or a tree hide its fruit.
There they are, going away like in a stagecoachAnd without meaning to I feel sadLike a pain in my body.
Who knows whoâll read them?Who knows whose hands theyâll go to?
Flower, my destiny plucked me for their eyes.Tree, they picked my fruit for their mouths.River, my waterâs destiny was to not stay with me.I give in and feel almost happy,Almost happy like someone tired of feeling sad.Go, go from me!A tree dies and stays, scattered throughout Nature.A flower withers and its dust endures forever.A river runs and flows into the sea and its water will always be what was its.
I pass and I stay, like the Universe.
60
XLIX
I go inside, and I close the window.They bring me the lamp and they say goodnight,And my peaceful voice says goodnight.If only my life were always like this:A day full of sun, or soft with rain,Or stormy to end the world,A pleasant evening with groups of passing peopleI can watch curiously from my window,A last friendly look at the quietness of the trees,And then after, the window shut, the lamp still burning,Without reading anything, or thinking about anything, or even sleeping,A feel of life running through me like a river along its bed,And outside a silence as big as a sleeping god.
61
The Amorous Shepherd
I am aware that these two poems are pearls of universal love poetry. We sense a new kind of love in them, and hear a new music of amorous emotion. Caeiro may have been at times unfaithful to his principles; he could never be anything but original. These love poems are unique in the history of love poetry. I recognize this fact without admiration, for I hold my admiration most high and dear. The very state of love, while natural, is hardly the proper state for the fixing of impressions we call art. There exist rare artists who manage always to hold onto themselves, and whose intelligence bridles their emotion; but these same artists certainly do not arrange their sexual emotions in columns according to some or another algorithm.
Caeiroâs metaphysical temperament was less receptive to those amorous emotions, which, already disturbing in themselves, would be even more disturbing to a temperament so foreign to them. Hence the momentary abdication of his principles and his native objectivity in the two poems of The Amorous Shepherd. How can one in love not gaze within?
The mental addiction produced by this fruitless and disturbing amorous episode, whose details I neither know nor wish to know, ran its course in the poetâs mind and left a wake of destruction. Never again, save in fleeting poetic events, would Caeiro return to that eminently serene, godlike vision that he, as a poet, after gradually cleansing himself of the accretions of Christian spirituality, attained along the road he called The Keeper of Flocks.
I shall dispense with further comment. In abundantly explaining the substance of Caeiroâs work, I have also implicitly explained what it degenerated into, when degenerate it did. I gladly dispense with commenting on this point, the consideration of which so aggrieves me. I urge the reader to take my lead, and pass over these two unlikable poems, thus to arrive, with no great increase in joy, at the many fragments, complete and incomplete, which close this collection of Caeiroâs works.
Ricardo Reis
62
I
When I didnât have youI loved Nature like a calm monk loves Christ . . .Now I love NatureLike a calm monk loves the Virgin Mary,Religiously, in my way, like before,But in another way more moving and nearer.I see the rivers better when I go with youThrough the fields to the riversides;Sitting at your side looking at cloudsI look at them better . . .You didnât take me from Nature . . .You didnât change Nature for me . . .You brought Nature right next to me.Because you exist I see it better, but the same,Because you love me, I love it the same, but more,Because you chose me to have you and love you,My eyes stare at everything more lingeringly.I donât regret anything I used to beBecause Iâm still the same.I only regret not having loved you.Put your hands in mineAnd letâs keep quiet, surrounded by life.
(7/6/1914)
63
II
The moonâs high in the sky and itâs spring.I think of you and Iâm whole inside.
A light breeze runs to me through empty fields.I think of you, I murmur your name, Iâm not me: Iâm happy.
Tomorrow youâll come and go with me to pick flowers in the fieldAnd Iâll go with you through the fields to see you picking flowers.
I already see you tomorrow picking flowers with me in the fields,But when you come tomorrow and go with me for real to pick flowers,Itâll be a real joy and a really new thing for me.
(7/6/1914)
64
III
Now that I feel loveIâm interested in smells.I was never interested in a flower having smell.Now I sense the smell of flowers as if I were seeing something new.I know theyâve always smelled just as well as I know I exist.Theyâre things you know from the outside.But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.Today flowers taste good to me on a palate that smells.Today I wake up sometimes and smell before I see.
(7/23/1930)
65
IV
Every day now I wake up with happiness and sadness.Before, I woke up without any feeling at all; I used to just wake up.Iâm happy and sad because Iâm losing what I dreamAnd can be in reality where sheâs what I dream.I donât know what to do about my feelings.I donât know what to do with myself when Iâm alone.I want her to say something to me so I can wake up again.
Whoever loves is different from who they are.Theyâre the same person without anyone.
(7/23/1930)
66
V
Love is company.I donât know how to walk alone on the roads anymoreBecause I canât walk alone anymore.A visible thought makes me walk fasterAnd see less and at the same time really enjoy seeing everything.Even her absence is a thing thatâs with me.And I love her so much I donât know how to want her.If I donât see her, I pretend I do and Iâm as strong as trees are tall.But if I see her I tremble, I donât know what happens to what I feel in her absence.All I am is some strength abandoning me.All reality looks at me like a sunflower with her face in the middle of it.
(7/10/1930)
67
VI
I spent the whole night without knowing how to sleep, seeing her shapeAnd nothing else, always in a different way from when Iâm with her.I make thoughts with the memory of when she talks to me,And in every thought her look changes.To love is to think.And I almost forget to feel just because Iâm thinking about her.I donât know what I want at all, even from her, and I donât think about anything but her.Thereâs this big, animate distraction in me.When I want to meet her,I almost feel like not meeting her,So I donât have to leave her afterwards.And I prefer thinking about her, because Iâm afraid of her, somehow.I donât really know what I want, and I donât want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her.Iâm not asking for anything from anybody, not even her, except to let me think.
(7/10/1930)
68
VII
Maybe when you see really well youâre not so good at feelingAnd youâre not so nice because youâre so past etiquette.There has to be a way for everything,And each thing has its way, and so does love.Whoever has a way of seeing fields by seeing their grassShouldnât be blind enough to make people feel.I loved and wasnât loved back, thatâs what I finally saw when it was over,Because youâre not loved like being born but like it happens.She goes on with her beautiful hair and mouth like before,I go on like I was before, alone in the field.Itâs like my head had been lowered,Thatâs I think, so I keep my head upAnd the golden sun dries the little tears I canât stop.The field is so big and love is so little!I look, and I forget, just like water dries and trees drop leaves.
I donât know how to talk because Iâm feeling.Iâm listening to my voice as if it were someone elseâs,And my voice is speaking about her as if someone else were speaking.She has hair as blond as yellow wheat in the sun,And when she speaks her mouth says things that arenât in words.She laughs, and her teeth are clean as river stones.
(11/8/1929)
69
VIII
The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,And his sheep are straying on the hillside,And he didnât even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.The others cursed at him and herded his sheep for him.No one had loved him, in the end.When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:The great valleys full of the same green as always,The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields, is present.Once again the air heâd missed for so long entered coolly into his lungsAnd it felt like the air was opening sad freedom in his chest again.
(7/10/1930)
70
Detached Poems(1913-1915)
Past the curve in the roadMaybe thereâs a pond and maybe thereâs a castle,And maybe it just keeps going.I donât know and I donât even ask.While Iâm walking on the road before the curve,I only look at the road before the curve,Because I canât see anything but the road before the curve.Itâd do me no good to look for the other sideAnd at something I canât see.Letâs only care about the place where we are.Thereâs enough beauty in being here and not anywhere else.If thereâs someone past the curve in the road,Let them worry about whatâs past the curve in the road,Thatâs what the road is to them.If we have to get there, when we get there weâll know.For the time being all we know is, weâre not there.Here thereâs only the road before the curve, and before the curveThereâs only the road without any curve at all.
(1914)
71
Clean up Matter,Put back all the things people scattered all aroundBecause they didnât see what they were for . . .Like a good lady of the house of Reality, straightenThe curtains on the windows of Sensation,And the mats for the doors of PerceptionSweep the rooms of ObservationAnd wipe the dust off simple ideas . . .Hereâs my life, line by line.
(9/17/1914)
72
Whatâs my life worth? At the end (I donât know what end)One guy says: I made 300,000Another guy says: I had 3000 days of gloryAnd another: I had a good conscience and thatâs enough . . .If they show up and asked me what I did,Iâll say I looked at things, thatâs all.Thatâs why I carry the Universe here in my pocket.And if God asks me: what did you see in things?Iâll answer: just things. You didnât put anything else in them.And because God has the same opinion, heâll make me a new kind of saint.
(9/17/1914)
73
The astonishing reality of thingsIs my discovery every day.Each thing is what it is,And itâs hard to explain to someone how much this makes me happy,How much itâs enough for me.
Itâs enough to exist to be whole.
Iâve written quite a few poems.Iâll write many more, naturally.Each poem of mine says it,And all my poems are different,Because each thing there is, is a way of saying it.
Sometimes I start looking at a stone.I donât start thinking if it feels.I donât lose myself and call it my sister.But I like it because itâs being a stone,I like it because it doesnât feel anything,I like it because it doesnât have any kinship with me.
Sometimes when I hear the wind blowI feel that just hearing the wind blow makes it worthwhile being born.I donât know what other people will think when they read this;But I think it must be good because I think it without a struggleOr some idea about what people would think about me;Because I think it without thoughts;Because I say it like my words say it.
One time they called me a materialist poetAnd it made me wonder, because I didnât thinkI could be called anything.Iâm not even a poet: I see.If what I write has any worth, itâs not me who has it:The worth is here, in my poems.Itâs all totally independent of my will.
(11/7/1915)
74
When spring comes againMaybe she wonât find me in the world anymore.Right now, Iâd like to be able to think spring is a personSo I can imagine sheâll cryWhen she sees sheâs lost her only friend.But the spring isnât even a thing:Sheâs a manner of speaking.Even the flowers donât come back, or the green leaves.There are new flowers, new green leaves.There are other easy days.Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real.
(11/7/1915)
75
If I die young,Without ever publishing a book,Without seeing the face my poems have in print,If someone wants to agitate for my cause,I hope they donât agitate.If it happens like that, it happens right.
Even if my poems are never printed,They have their beauty in them, if they really are beautiful.But they canât be beautiful and stay unprinted,Because even though their roots are under the earthFlowers bloom in the open air and theyâre easy to see.It has to be that way. Nothing can stop it.
If I die really young, listen here:I was never anything but a kid playing.I was a heathen like the sun and the water,I had the universal religion only people donât have.I was happy because I didnât ask for anything at all,Or tried to find anything,And I didnât think there was any other explanationThan the word explanation not having meaning at all.
I didnât want anything but to be in the sun or the rain âIn the sun when there was sunAnd in the rain when it was raining(And never anything different),Feeling heat and cold and wind,And going no farther than that.
I fell in love once. I thought she loved me,But I wasnât loved back.I wasnât loved for one main reason âI didnât have to be.
I consoled myself by going back to the sun and rain,And sitting at the door of my house again.When allâs said and done, fields arenât as green for people in loveAs for those who arenât.To feel is to be distracted.
(11/7/1915)
76
When spring comes,If Iâve already died,The flowers will bloom in the same wayAnd the trees wonât be less green than they were last spring.Reality doesnât need me.
I feel incredibly happyWhen I think my death has absolutely no importance.
If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,And spring came the day after tomorrow,Itâd be a good death, because it came the day after tomorrow.If thatâs its time, when else should it come but in its own time?I like it that everythingâs real and everythingâs right;And I like that it would be, even if I didnât like it,And so, if I died now, itâd be a good deathBecause everything is real and everything is right.
They can pray Latin over my coffin if they want to.Itâs alright with me if they dance and sing all around it.I donât have any preferences about when I wonât even be able to have preferences.What comes, when it comes, will be what it is when it comes.
(11/7/1915)
77
If they want to write my biography after I die,There couldnât be anything simpler.There are only two dates â my birth and my death.Between one and the other all the days are mine.
Iâm easy to define.I saw like I was sentenced to see.I loved things without any sentimentality at all.I never wanted something I couldnât get because I never went blind.Even hearing was never anything but an accompaniment to seeing.I understood that things are real and all different from each another;I understood this with my eyes, never with my thought.If I understood it with thought I wouldâve thought everything was the same.
One day I got sleepy like any kid.I shut my eyes and slept.Besides that, I was Natureâs only poet.
(11/8/1915)
78
Iâve never been able to figure out how somebody could think a sunset is sad.I guess itâs just because sunset isnât daybreak.But if itâs a sunset, how could it ever be a daybreak?
(11/8/1915)
79
A rainy day is as beautiful as a sunny day.Both exist, each one just like it is.
(11/8/1915)
80
When the grass grows on top of my grave,Make that the sign for me to be totally forgotten.Nature never remembers, thatâs why sheâs beautiful.If they have the sick need to âinterpretâ the green grass on my grave,Let them say I keep growing green and being natural.
(11/8/1915)
81
Itâs night. The night is very dark. In a house far awayThe light from a window shines.I see it, and feel human from head to foot.Itâs funny that the whole life of the individual who lives there, and I donât know who it is,Interests me only because of this light from far away.Iâm sure his life is real and he has a face, gestures, family and profession.But right now all I care about is the light coming out of his window.Even though the lightâs there because he lit it,The light is the immediate reality for me.I never go beyond immediate reality.Thereâs nothing beyond immediate reality.If from where I am I only see that light,Because itâs so far away, where I am thereâs only the light.The man and his family are real on the other side of the window.Iâm over here, far away.The light goes out.Why should I care if this guy goes on existing?â Itâs just some guy who keeps existing.
(11/8/1915)
82
You talk about civilization, and that it shouldnât be,Or how it shouldnât be the way it is.You say everybody suffers, or most everybody,And itâs because humans set it up that way.You say if things were different, weâd suffer less.You say if things were like you want them, it would be better.I hear you. Iâm not listening.Why should I want to listen to you?Listening to you wonât make me know any better.If things were different, theyâd be different: thatâs all.If things were like you want them, theyâd just be like you want them.Poor you and everyone else going through lifeTrying to invent a machine for making happiness!
83
Every theory, every poemLasts longer than this flower.But thatâs like fog, which is unpleasant and damp,And bigger than this flower . . .Size and duration have absolutely no importance . . .Theyâre only size and duration . . .What matters is whatever lasts and has duration . . .(If true dimension is reality) . . .Being real is the most noble thing in the world.
(1/11/1916)
84
Fear of death?Iâll wake up another way,Maybe body, maybe continuity, maybe renewed,But Iâll wake up.If even atoms donât sleep, why should I be the only one to sleep?
85
So, my poems mean something and the universe doesnât have to have meaning?In what geometry is the part greater than the whole?In what biology does the mass of organsHave more life than the body?
86
Today someone read me St. Francis of Assisi.They read it and it shocked me.How could a man who loved things so muchNever look at them, or know what they are?
Why should I call water my sister, when itâs not my sister?To sense it better?I sense it better by drinking it than by calling it anything,Sister, or mother, or daughter.Waterâs water and thatâs why itâs beautiful.If I ever called it my sister,Right when I called it my sister, Iâd see itâs notAnd if itâs water the best thing to do is call it water;Or better yet, not to call anything,Just drink it, feel it on my wrists, look at it,All without any name at all.
(5/21/1917)
87
Every time I think about a thing, I betray it.I should only think about it when itâs in front of me,Not thinking, but looking,Not with thought, but with the eyes.A thing thatâs visible exists to be seen,And what exists for the eyes doesnât have to exist for thought;Iâm all there is when Iâm thinking, not looking.
I look, and things exist.I think and only I exist.
(5/21/1917)
88
Iâd like to have enough time and quietTo think about nothing at all,To never feel myself living,To only know myself in othersâ eyes, reflected.
(5/21/1917)
89
The morning shines. No, the morning doesnât shine.Morningâs an abstract thing â in other words, itâs not a thing at all.We start seeing the sun, here, at that time.If the early sun is beautiful shining on trees,Itâd be just as beautiful if we called morning âWeâre starting to see the sunâAs it would if we called it morning.So thereâs no advantage to putting wrong names on thingsAnd we shouldnât be putting names on them, anyway.
(5/21/1917)
90
A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy talesActs like a sick god, but like a god.Because even though he affirms that what doesnât exist exists,He knows how things exist, that theyâre what exists,He knows existing exists and doesnât explain,And he knows thereâs no reason at all for anything to exist.He knows being is to be at a point.All he doesnât know is that thought isnât any kind of point.
(10/1/1917)
91
From far away I see a boat go by on the river . . .Itâs going down the Tejo indifferently.But not indifferently because itâs not concerned with meAnd Iâm not expressing desolation with this.Indifferently because it has absolutely no meaningOutside the fact â isolatedly boat âGoing downriver without permission from metaphysics . . .Downriver to the reality of the sea.
(10/1/1917)
92
I believe Iâm going to die.But the meaning of dying doesnât move me.I remember dying shouldnât have meaning.Living and dying are classifications like those of plants.What leaves or flowers hold a classification?What life has life or what death, death?Theyâre all terms where youâre defined.The only difference is an outline, a stopping place, a distinctive color, . . . a . . .
(10/1/1917)
93
On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,And I begin to mull over problems I make up.
If man were what he should be,Not a sick animal, but the most perfect animal,Directly animal, not indirectly,Heâd be a creature with another way of finding sense in things,Different and true.He wouldâve acquired a sense of âwholeâ;A sense â like seeing and hearing â of the âentiretyâ of things,And not, like we have, a thought about âentiretyâ;And not, like we have, an idea about the âentiretyâ of things.And so weâd see â we wouldnât have the notion of âwholeâ or of âentiretyâBecause the meaning of âentireâ or of âwholeâ wouldnât come from entirety or wholenessBut from true Nature which is maybe neither whole nor parts.
The only mystery of the universe is the plus, not the minus.We see too much in things â thatâs whatâs wrong, thatâs why we have doubts.What exists transcends underneath what I think exists.Realityâs just real, not thought about.
The universe isnât an idea of mine.My idea of the universe is one of my ideas.Night doesnât fall for my eyes.My idea of the night is it falls for my eyes.Outside of me thinking and having a few thoughtsNight falls concretelyAnd the shining of stars exists like it had weight.
Just as words fail when we want to express any thought,So thoughts fail when we want to think any reality.But, as the essence of thought isnât to be said but to be thought,So the essence of reality is to be existing, not to be thought.And so everything that exists, simply exists.Everything else is a kind of being sleepy,An old age coming with us since the childhood of our sickness.
A mirror reflects right; it doesnât make mistakes because it doesnât think.To think is essentially to be wrong.To be wrong is essentially to be blind and deaf.
94
These truths arenât perfect because theyâre said,And before they were said they were thought:But at bottom whatâs certain is that they negate themselvesIn the negation opposed to them affirming anything.Being is the only affirmationAnd being opposed to it is what I wouldnât want for me.
(10/1/1917)
95
Night falls, the heat whelms down a little.Iâm as lucid as if Iâd never thoughtAnd had a root, a direct link to the earth;Not this phony link, this secondary sense called sightI use to separate myself from thingsAnd near the stars or the far constellations âIâm wrong: whatâs far isnât nearAnd when I near it, Iâm kidding myself.
(10/1/1917)
96
Iâm sick. My thoughts begin to be confusedBut my body, touching things, enters among them.I feel a part of things with my touchAnd a great freedom begins to build up inside me,A great solemn happiness like a heroic deedDone all alone in a sober, hidden gesture.
(10/1/1917)
97
Accept the universeAs the gods gave it to you.If the gods wanted to give you something elseTheyâd have done it.
If there are other matters and other worlds âSo be it.
(10/1/1917)
The only useful part of occultism is the scientific â a verification (a bit vague and intuitive) of states of matter other than those of which we are ordinarily aware. It is what there is.
Mora?
98
When itâs cold in time of cold, for me itâs nice out âBecause my being is adjusted to the existence of things,The naturalâs pleasing simply because itâs natural.
I accept lifeâs difficulties because theyâre destiny,Like I accept extreme cold deep in winter âCalmly, without complaining, like someone merely accepting,And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting âIn the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the natural as inevitable.
What are my illnesses and the harm that comes over meBut the winter of my person and my life?Irregular winter, whose laws of appearance I donât know,But which exists for me in virtue of the same sublime fatalityFrom the same inevitable exteriority to meAs the heat of the earth at the height of summerAnd the cold of the earth deep in Winter.
I accept because of my personality.I was born subject like others to errors and defects,But never to the error of wanting to understand too much,Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect,Never to the defect of demanding of the worldThat it be anything thatâs not the world.
(10/24/1917)
99
Whateverâs there in the center of the world,It gave me the world outside me as an example of Reality,And when I say âThis is real,â even about a feeling,I canât help seeing it in some space outside me,Some vision outside me, not mine.
Being real means not being inside myself.I have no notion of reality inside my person.I know that the world exists but I donât know if I exist.Iâm more certain of the existence of my white houseThan the inner existence of the owner of my white house.I believe more in my body than in my soul,Because my body is present in the middle of reality,Able to be seen by others,To touch others,To sit and stand,But my soul can only be defined by outer terms.It exists for me â in the moments when I believe it actually does exist âBorrowed from the reality of the World outside me.
If the soul is more realThan the outer world, as you say, philosopher,Why was the world outside given as the model of reality?If itâs more certain I senseThan the thing I sense exists,Then why do I senseAnd why does the thing appear independent of meWithout needing me to exist,And me always joined to me-myself, always personal and untransmittable?Why do I move with othersIn a world where we understand each other and where we coincideIf this world is somehow wrong and itâs me whoâs right?If the world is wrong, then itâs everybodyâs error.And each one of us is just the error of each one of us.Thing for thing, the World is more certain.
But why am I asking all these questions, unless Iâm sick?
On certain days, the outside days of my life,My days of perfect natural lucidity,I sense without sensing I sense,I see without knowing I see,And the Universe is never as real as those times,The Universe is never (not near or far from meBut) so sublimely not-mine.
100
When I say âItâs obvious,â do I somehow mean âItâs only me who sees it?âWhen I say âItâs the truth,â do I somehow mean âItâs my opinion?âWhen I say âThere it is,â do I somehow mean âThere it isnât?âAnd if this is so in life, why should it be different in philosophy?We live before philosophizing; we exist before we know we doAnd the first fact deserves precedence and respect, at least.Yes, rather than inner, weâre outer,So weâre essentially outer.
You say, sick philosopher, philosopher after all, that this is materialism.But how can this be materialism, if materialism is a philosophy,If a philosophy would be, at least if it were mine, a philosophy of mine,And this isnât even mine, and Iâm not even I?
(10/24/1917)
101
I donât care very much.What donât I care very much about? I donât know: I donât care very much.
(10/24/1917)
102
War afflicting the world with its squadronsIs the perfect type of error of philosophy.
War, like everything human, wants to alter.But war, more than everything, wants to alter and alter a lotAnd alter quickly.
But war inflicts deathAnd that death is our contempt for the universe.With death as a consequence, war proves itâs false.Being false, it proves that wishing-to-alter is totally false.
Letâs leave the outer universe and other men where Nature puts them.Everything is pride and unconsciousness.Itâs all wanting to hustle and bustle, make things, leave a trace.When his heart stops, the commander of squadronsWill go back in pieces to the universe outside.
Natureâs direct chemistryLeaves no empty place for thought.
Humanity is a slave-revolt.Humanity is a government usurped by the people.It exists because it usurped, but itâs wrong because usurping means not having the right to.
Let the outer universe and natural humanity exist!Peace to all pre-human things, even in people!Peace to the entirely outside essence of the Universe!
(10/24/1917)
103
All the opinions there are about natureNever made a weed grow or a flower bloom.All the knowledge about thingsWas never a thing I could hold on to like a thing;If science wants to be truthful,What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?I close my eyes and the hard earth I lie down onHas a reality so real even my back feels it.I donât need reason â I have shoulderblades.
(5/29/1918)
104
Ship leaving for far away,Why is it that, unlike others,I donât miss you after you disappear?Because when I donât see you, youâve stopped existing.And if you miss what doesnât exist,You miss it in relation to nothing at all;We donât miss ships, we miss ourselves.
(5/29/1918)
105
Little by little the field widens and goldens.Morning wanders around on the bumpy plain.Iâm not part of what Iâm seeing: I see it,Itâs outside me. No feeling links me to it.And this is the feeling that links me to the coming morning.
(5/29/1918)
106
Last star to disappear before day,I set my calm eyes on your trembling white blueness,And I see you independently of me,Happy because of my victory of being able to see youAnd not be in any âstate of mindâ at all except seeing you.For me, your beauty is in you existing.Your grandeur is in you existing completely outside of me.
(5/29/1918)
107
Water tinkles in the dipper I raise to my mouth.âItâs a cool soundâ says the person who gave it to me.I smile. The sound is only a sound of tinkling.I drink the water without hearing anything in my throat.
(5/29/1918)
108
Someone who heard my poems said to me: Whatâs new in this?Everybody knows a flower is a flower and a tree is a tree.But I said not everybody, nobody.Because everybody loves flowers because theyâre beautiful and Iâm different.Everybody loves trees because theyâre green and make shade, but not me.I love flowers for being flowers, directly.I love trees for being trees without my thought.
(5/29/1918)
109
Yesterday the preacher of those truths of hisTalked to me again.He talked about the suffering of the working class(Not about the people who suffer, who are the ones who really suffer, after all).He talked about the injustice of some having money,And others going hungry, but I donât know if itâs hunger for food,Or hunger for someone elseâs dessert.He talked about whatever gets him mad.
He must be happy if he can think about the unhappiness of others!Heâs stupid if he doesnât know other peopleâs unhappiness is theirsAnd isnât cured from outside âSuffering isnât like running out of inkOr a trunk not having iron bands!
There being injustice is like there being death.I would never take a step to changeWhat they call the worldâs injustice.A thousand steps taken for thatWould only be a thousand steps.I accept injustice like I accept a stone not being a perfect circle,And a cork tree not growing into a pine or an oak.
I cut an orange in two, and the two parts canât be equal.Which one was I unjust to â I, who am going to eat them both?
You died young, as the gods desireWhen they love.
â Ricardo Reis
110
But why should I compare myself to a flower, if Iâm meAnd a flower is a flower?
Ah, letâs not compare anything at all; letâs look.Letâs forget about analogy, metaphor, simile.Comparing one thing to another is forgetting that thing.Nothing reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.Each thing only reminds us of what it isAnd itâs only what nothing else is.The fact that itâs it separates it from every other thing(And other things not being it).Everythingâs nothing without another thing thatâs not it.
What? Iâm worth more than a flowerBecause it doesnât know it has color and I do know,Because it doesnât know it has perfume and I do know,Because itâs not conscious of me and Iâm conscious of it?
But what does one thing have to do with anotherSo that it could be superior or inferior to it?Yes, Iâm conscious of the plant and itâs not of me.But if the form of consciousness is being conscious, whatâs there in that?If a plant could talk, it could say to me: Whereâs your smell?It could say to me: Youâre conscious because being conscious is a human qualityAnd Iâm not conscious because Iâm a flower, not a man.I have a smell and you donât, because Iâm a flower . . .
111
Unrecognized dirty kid playing at my door,Iâm not asking you if youâre bringing me word of symbols.I think youâre charming because Iâve never seen you before,And naturally if you could be clean youâd be another kid,And you wouldnât come here.Play in the dirt all you want!I appreciate your presence with my eyes only.Itâs worth more to see a thing always for the first time than to know it,Because recognizing is like never having seen for the first time,And never having seen for the first time is only to have heard tell.
The way this kid is dirty is different from the way others are dirty.Keep on playing! When you pick up a stone that fits in your hand,You know it fits in your hand.What philosophy comes to greater certainty?None, and none could ever come and play at my door.
(4/12/1919)
112
Truth, lies, certainty, uncertainty . . .That blind man over there on the road knows those words, too.Iâm sitting on the top step and I have my hands claspedOn top of my crossed knees.Well, then, what is truth, lies, certainty and uncertainty?The blind man stops in the road,I unclasp my hands on top of my knee.Are truth, lies, certainty, uncertainty the same?Something changed in a part of reality â my knees and my hands.What science has knowledge for this?The blind man goes on his way and I donât do anything else with my hands.Itâs no longer the same time, the same people, nothingâs the same.This is being real.
(4/12/1919)
113
A giggle from a girl on the road sounds in the air.Sheâs laughing at something someone I donât see just said.For now I remember I heard it.But if they told me now about a girlâs giggle from the road,Iâd say: no, the hills, the land in the sun, the sun, this house here,And me who only hears the hushed sound of blood in my life of the two sides of my head.
(4/12/1919)
114
St. Johnâs night beyond the wall of my yard.On this side, me without St. Johnâs Night.Because St. John is where they celebrate him.For me thereâs shadow from the light of bonfires in the night,A sound of laughing people, thumping feet.And the random shout of someone who doesnât know I exist.
(4/12/1919)
115
Book to Write
Mystic, you see meaning in everything.Everything has a veiled meaning for you.Thereâs something hidden in everything you see.What you see, you always see it so you can see something else.
But me, thanks to having eyes only for seeing,I see the absence of meaning in everything;I see it and love myself, because to be a thing is to mean nothing.Being a thing is not being susceptible to interpretation.
(4/12/1919)
116
Shepherd on the hill, so far from me with your sheep âThat happiness you seem to have â is it yours or mine?The peace I feel when I see you, does it belong to you or me?No, not to you or me, shepherd.It belongs only to happiness and peace.You donât have it, because you donât know you have it.I donât have it, because I know I have it.Itâs just it, and falls on us like the sunHits your back and warms you and you think about something else â whatever â,And it hits my face and dazes me and I just think about the sun.
(4/12/1919)
117
Ah, they want a better light than the sunâs!They want meadows greener than these!They want flowers more beautiful than the ones I see!This sun, these meadows, these flowers are good enough for me.But, if they somehow bothered me,What I want is a sun more sun than the un,What I want is meadows more meadows than these meadows,What I want is flowers more flowers than these flowers âEverything more ideal than it is in the exact same way!That thing over there â more there than itâs there!Yes, sometimes I cry about the perfect body that doesnât exist.But the perfect body is the bodiest body there can be,And the rest are the dreams men have,The myopia of someone who doesnât see much,And the way someone who doesnât know how to stand up wants to sit down.Christianityâs a big dream about chairs.
Since the soul is the thing that doesnât show,The most perfect soul is the one that never appears âThe soul made of body,The absolute body of things,The absolutely real shadowless existence without errors,The exact and entire coinciding of a thing with itself.
(4/12/1919)
118
Back-folded petal of a rose other people would say is velvet.I pick you up off the ground and contemplate you up close for quite a while.
There arenât any roses in my yard: what wind brought you?But I suddenly come from far away. I was sick for a minute.No wind at all brought you now.Now youâre here.What you were isnât you, or else the whole rose would be here.
(4/12/1919)
119
2:30 AM. I wake up and fall back asleep.There was a moment of a different life between sleep and sleep.
If nobody decorates the sun for shining,Why decorate a hero?
I sleep and wake with the same rightnessAnd I exist in the interval.
In that moment, when I woke up, I opened into the whole world âOne great all-inclusive night,Only outside.
120
Between what I see in a field and what I see in another fieldThe figure of a man goes by for a moment.His steps go with âhimâ in the same reality,But I look at him and them, and theyâre two things:The false and foreign âmanâ goes walking with his ideas,And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.I see him from far away without any opinion at all.How perfect that he is in him what he is â his body,His true reality which doesnât have desires or hopes,But muscles and the sure and impersonal way of using them.
(4/20/1919)
121
I enjoy the fields without looking at them.You ask me why I enjoy them.Because I enjoy them is my answer.Enjoying a flower is being right next to it unconsciouslyAnd having a notion of its perfume in your most dim ideas.When I look, I donât enjoy: I see.I shut my eyes, and my body, which is in the grass,Completely belongs to the outside of someone shutting their eyes âTo the fresh hardness of the fragrant bumpy earth;And something of the indistinct noises of things existing,And only a red shadow of light lightly loaded into my sockets,And only something left of life is listening.
(4/20/1919)
122
Iâm in no hurry. What for?The sun and moon arenât in a hurry and theyâre right.Hurrying is believing people can get past their legsOr when they jump they can land past their shadow.No; Iâm not in any hurry.If I stretch out my arm, I get exactly where my arm gets---Not even a centimeter farther.I only touch where I touch, not where I think.I can only sit down where I am.And thatâs really silly, like all really true truths,But whatâs really, really silly is us always thinking something else,And weâre always outside it because weâre here.
(6/20/1919)
123
Yes: I exist inside my body.Iâm not carrying the sun or the moon in my pocket.I donât want to conquer worlds because I slept badly,And I donât want to eat the world for lunch because I have a stomach.Am I indifferent?No, Iâm a child of the earth, who, if he jumps, itâs wrong,A moment in the air thatâs not for us,And only happy when his feet hit the ground again,Pow! In reality where nothingâs missing!
(6/20/1919)
124
The green of the blue sky before the sunâs about to riseAnd the white blue in the west where sunshine disappears.
True colors of things the eyes see âThe not white but slightly blue ash moonlight.
Iâm glad I see with my eyes and not the pages Iâve read.
125
Like a kid before they teach him to be big,Iâm true and loyal to what I see and hear.
126
I donât know what understanding myself is. I donât look inside.I donât believe I exist behind myself.
127
Am I patriotic? No, Iâm just Portuguese.I was born Portuguese like I was born blond and blue-eyed.If I was born to speak, I have to speak a language.
128
I lie down flat on the grassAnd forget everything they taught me.What they taught me never made me hotter or colder.What they told me never changed the form of a thing for me.What they taught me to see never touched my eyes.What they showed me was never there: only what was there was there.
129
They were talking to me about people, about humanity,But Iâve never seen people or humanity.Iâve seen a various people almost scarily different from each other,Separated from one another by an unpopulated space.
130
Iâve never tried to live my life.My lifeâs lived itself whether Iâve wanted it to or not.All I ever wanted to do was see as if I didnât have a soul.Iâve always wanted to see as if I were nothing but eyes.
131
You say live in the present;Live only in the present.
But I donât want the present, I want reality;I want things that exist, not time that measures them.
What is the present?Itâs something relative to the past and the future.Itâs a thing that exists by virtue of other things existing.I only want reality, things without the present.
I donât want to include time in my scheme of things.I donât want to think of things as present; I want to think of them as things.I donât want to separate them from themselves and think of them as present.
I shouldnât even think of them as real.I shouldnât think of them as anything.
I should see them, only see them;See them till I canât think about them,See them without time or even space,See, able to get rid of everything but what you see.This is the science of seeing, which isnât one at all.
(7/19/1920)
132
You tell me youâre something moreThan a stone or a plant.You tell me you feel, you think and you knowYou think and feel.So do stones write poems?So does a plant have ideas about the world?
Yes: thereâs difference.But itâs not a difference you can findBecause being conscious doesnât make me have theories about things âIt only makes me be conscious.
Am I more than a stone or a plant? I donât know.Iâm different. I donât know what more or less is.
Is having consciousness more than having color?Could be and couldnât be.I know itâs just different.No one can prove that itâs more than just different.
I know stones are real and plants exist.I know because they exist.I know because my senses show me.I know Iâm real, too.I know because my senses show me,Though with less clarity than they show me a stone and a plant.I donât know anything else.
Yes, I write poems, and a stone doesnât write poems.Yes, I have ideas about the world, and a plant doesnât have any.The thing is, stones arenât poets, theyâre stones;And plants are just plants, not thinkers.However much I can say Iâm superior to them because of that,I can also say Iâm inferior.But I donât say that: I say about a stone, âItâs a stone,âI say about a plant, âItâs a plant,âAnd I say about myself, âIâm me.âI donât say anything else. What else is there to say?
(6/5/1922)
133
They say a hidden thing dwells in each thing.Yes, itâs itself, the thing without being hidden,That dwells in it.
But I, with consciousness and sensations and thought,Am I like a thing?Whatâs more or less in me?Iâd be happy and good if I were only my body âBut Iâm something else, too, more or less than only that.What thing more or less am I?
The wind blows without knowing it.A plant lives without knowing it.I live without knowing it, too, but I know Iâm alive.But do I know Iâm alive, or do I just know I know?I was born, Iâm alive, Iâll die by a destiny I have no say in,I feel, I think, I move through some force outside me,So who am I?
Am I, body and soul, the exterior of some interior?Or is my soul the universal forceâs consciousnessOf my body being different from other bodies?In the middle of everything where am I?My body will die,My brain will fall apartInto abstract, impersonal, formless consciousness,Iâll no longer feel the I I have,Iâll no longer think with my brain the thoughts I feel are mine,Iâll no longer move by my will my hands I move.Will I end up like that? I donât know.If I have to end up like this, feeling bad about itSure wonât make me immortal.
(6/5/1922)
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Itâs not enough to open the windowTo see the fields and the river.Itâs also not enough to not be blindTo see the trees and the flowers.Also, you have to not have any philosophy at all.With philosophy there arenât any trees, there are only ideas.Thereâs only each of us, like a wine-cellar.Thereâs only a shut window and the whole world outside it;And a dream of what you could see if the window were open,Which is never what you see when you open the window.
(1923-4)
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Put on my gravestoneHere liesAlberto CaeiroWithout a crossWho went off to look for the gods . . . Whether the gods are alive or not, thatâs on you.To me, I leave their welcome.
(8/13/1923)
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The snow puts a quiet blanket over everything.You donât feel anything except what goes on in your house.I wrap myself in my covers and donât even think about thinking.I feel an animal delight and I think aimlessly,And I fall asleep, no more useless than all the actions in the world.
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I went out really early in the morning todayBecause I woke up even earlierAnd there was nothing I wanted to do . . .
I didnât know which way to goBut the wind blew strong,And I went where the wind pushed at my back.
Thatâs how my life has always been, and thatâs how Iâd like it all the time âGo where the wind pushes meAnd donât let myself think.
(6/13/1930)
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First sign of a storm coming the day after tomorrow.The first white clouds hover low in a dimming sky.Do they belong to a storm coming the day after tomorrow?Iâm sure of it, but being sure is a lie.To be sure is to not be seeing.There is no day after tomorrow.This is what there is:A blue sky, a little gray, some white clouds on the horizon,A little dirty underneath like they might turn black later on.Thatâs what there is today,And since todayâs all there is for now, thatâs everything.Who knows if Iâll be dead the day after tomorrow?If Iâm dead the day after tomorrow, the storm coming the day after tomorrowWill be another storm than if I hadnât died.Of course I know storms donât fall because I see them,But if I werenât in the world, the world would be different âItâd be minus me âAnd the storm would fall on a different world and wouldnât be the same storm.Whatever happens, whatâs falling is whatâll be falling when it falls.
(7/10/1930)
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Penultimate Poemto Ricardo Reis
I know how to make conjectures, too.In everything thereâs something it is and it animates it.In a plant itâs on the outside and itâs a little nymph.In an animal itâs a distant being inside.In a man itâs the soul that lives with him and is him.In the gods it has the same sizeAnd the same space as the bodyAnd itâs the same thing as the body.Thatâs why they say the gods never die.Thatâs why the gods donât have a body and soulBut just a body and theyâre perfect.For them the body is the soulAnd their consciousness is in their own divine flesh.
(5/7/1922)
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Last Poem(dictated by the poet on the day of his death)
This could be the last day of my life.I greeted the sun by raising my right hand,But I didnât really greet it or say good-bye, either.I just showed I still like seeing it, thatâs all.
(before 1920)
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Variant Poems
The Keeper of Flocks
XI
That lady has a piano.Itâs pretty to hear, but itâs what she makes it do.She makes a made music,Not the thin, watery sound of narrow creeksOr the far-off sound tall trees make.Itâs better not to have a pianoAnd only listen to things born making noise.
(1/1/1930)
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Unattached Poems
Iâm in no hurry: the sun and the moon arenât, either.Nobody goes faster than the legs they have.If where I want to go is far away, Iâm not there in an instant.
(6/20/1919)
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Yes, maybe theyâre right.Maybe something hidden lives in each thing,But that hidden thing is the sameAs the thing without being hidden.
In a plant, in a tree, in a flower(In everything that lives without speechAnd is a consciousness but not with what makes it a consciousness),In the woods that isnât trees but woods,Total of the trees without a sum,There lives a nymph, the exterior life insideThat gives it life;That flowers with their floweringAnd is green with their greenness.
It enters into the animal and the man.Itâs an already inside outside,The philosophers say itâs the soulBut itâs not the soul: itâs the animal or the man itselfIn its way of existing.
And I think that maybe there are beingsWhere the two things coincideAnd theyâre the same size.
And that these beings would be the gods,That exist like that because they completely exist,That donât die because theyâre the same as themselves,That can lie because they have no divisionBetween who they are and who they are,And maybe they donât love us, or want us, or appear to usBecause whatâs perfect doesnât need anything.
(6/4/1922)
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Fragments
If you have flowers, you donât need God.
â
And everything felt directly brings new words.
â
Different from everything, like everything
â
Maybe the nymph is the future of the tree or of the river.
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Interview With Caeiro
Of the many experiences in the arts I owe to the city of Vigo, Iâm most grateful for the meeting Iâve just had with our most recent and doubtless most original poet.
Friendly hands in Portugal sent me Alberto Caeiroâs book â to soften my exile, perhaps. I read it here at this window, as he would have wanted it, with Vigoâs [...] bay before my enchanted eyes. And I cannot see it as anything but providential that happy circumstances allowed me the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the glorious poet so shortly after reading his book.
A mutual friend introduced us. That night, over dinner at the [...] Hotel, I had a conversation with the poet. I told him I intended to write it up as an interview.
I told him how much I admired his work. He heard me with the air of one receiving what is rightfully his, with that fresh, spontaneous pride which is one of the most attractive things in this man who, by all appearances, recognized what is rightfully his. And no one recognizes his right more than I, do; it is his â extraordinarily his.
Over coffee our conversation turned to intellectual matters. I easily led Caeiro to the only topic that interested me: his book. I herein transcribe his opinions as I heard them, and while of course it is not the entire conversation, it very much represents what he said.
The poet spoke of himself and his work with a kind of a religious feeling, a natural elevation that might seem frankly insupportable in others with less of a right to speak in such a way. He spoke always in objective sentences, excessively synthetic, censuring or admiring (the latter rarely) with absolute despotism, as if he werenât voicing an opinion, but intangible truth itself.
I think it was when I expressed my initial confusion when faced by the novelty of that the conversation took on that aspect which I prefer to transcribe here.
âThe friend who sent me your book told me it was renascent, that is, part of the Portuguese Renaissance movement, but I donât think so . . .â
âYou think right. If thereâs anything different from my work, itâs theirs. Your friend insulted me without even knowing me when he compared me to those people. Theyâre mystics. The last thing I am is a mystic. Whatâs there between them and me? Not even the fact of being poets, because theyâre not. When I read Pascoaes I laugh so hard, Iâve never been able to finish anything of his. These people look for hidden meanings in stones, human feelings in trees. They turn sunsets and dawns into people and souls. Itâs like this Belgian idiot Verhaeren. A friend of mine made me read him and I stopped talking to the guy for a while. Itâs unbelievable.â
âDoesnât Junqueiroâs Hymn to Light belong to that movement?âIt couldnât help but be: itâs bad enough. Junqueiroâs not a poet. He just arranges sentences.
Everythingâs rhythm and meter to him. His religious feeling is a reading. His admiration of Natureâs another reading. How could anybody take a guy seriously who says heâs a hymn of mysterious light gravitating in Godâs orbit? It doesnât mean anything. All this meaningless stuff, all this stuff that means too much nothing â thatâs what poetryâs been made of up till now. We need to stop all that.â
âWhat about JoĂŁo de Barros?ââWhoâs he? Contemporary poets donât interest me. [...] The only good thing in anybody is what
they donât know.â
â
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âAre you a materialist, Sr Caeiro?ââNo way. Iâm not a materialist or a deist or anything else. Iâm the guy who opened the window
one day and discovered a really, really important thing: Nature exists. I saw it was true that trees, rivers, and stones are things that really exist. Nobody ever thought that way before.
âI donât intend to be anything but the greatest poet in the world. I made the greatest discovery ever. No one made it before me and next to it every other discovery looks like one of those dopey games kids play. I turned to the universe. The Greeks with all their clear-sightedness didnât do as much as me.
âIâd even say Iâm the first poet who remembered that Nature exists. Other poets have sung Nature like she was below them and they were gods. I sing Nature like Iâm her slave because nothingâs ever shown me Iâm superior to her. After all, she includes me, I was born by her and [...]
âMy materialism is spontaneous. Iâm perfectly and consistently an atheist materialist. Thereâs never been an atheist materialist like me, thatâs a fact â but itâs only because materialism and atheism found their poet in me.â
Alberto Caeiro stressed that âIâ and that âmeâ in a way that oddly revealed his deep conviction.
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Letter from Ălvaro de Campos
Dear Caeiro,
What I adore in your poems isnât the philosophical system they say can be drawn from them: itâs the philosophical system that canât be drawn from them. Itâs the freshness, the clarity, the primordiality of sensation. Itâs precisely the lack of a system. Your poems donât make me think, they make me feel; they donât make me feel love or hate or passion â marketable emotion â: they make me feel things as if I were watching them with high interest and attention.
I believe that love poetry, sentimental poetry, patriotic poetry, nature poetry, and [...] poetry are exhausted â all poetry about such things or any other such thing is exhausted. Only poetry of sensation isnât exhausted. Sensations are individual and individualities never repeat. I believe we should try to give our sensations the most complete possible expression. Our individual sensations arenât those of love, hatred, or [...] â these are too similar in all people, and can be varied only in expression, by which process art becomes fatally formalized, excessively plasticized. What are really ours in sensations, the sensations that are really ours, are direct sensations, those which have no social character, those that come directly from seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting; and sensations that come from lives previously lived, which come from a past that is that is ours and only ours. Each of us has his sensations to himself, however contradictory, absurd, inhumane they may be.
Thatâs why I say there are no poets of love, of the fatherland, of [...], or any other thing in the social order. Poetry is individual. Poetry isnât for expressing social emotions. Social emotions are expressed by action, and each social emotion has its relative action. Poetry exists to express what action and gesture canât.
In your poetry, my dear Master, itâs the realization of this I appreciate, not the oft-attributed quality of singing who knows what pagan virtues. Paganism interests me about as much as Christianity, or anything else thatâs not me and my sensations. Your disdain for current social and artistic doctrine is enough to fill me with enthusiasm.
Theyâll say, no doubt, that art shouldnât be made of individuality, because other people wonât be able to feel it. Thatâs nonsense. As soon as something is expressed in words, another person can feel it, as long as theyâre not stupid or of another order of sensibility â provided theyâre alive. Those foreign emotions that canât be expressed . . . if they canât be expressed, then how is it that others will have to understand them or stop understanding them? As long as a thing fits into language, it fits into the understanding of others. Of course this understanding is never perfect because weâre all different and feel things in our own ways, but itâs understanding and thatâs enough for me.
Iâll try to explain myself a little better. Everyone faced with a beautiful day feels a sensation they call happiness. This emotion is authentic, because it serves no social function, nor can it be translated into an act, an action â we can see the day and enjoy it, but itâs emotion in another sense. Appreciating a beautiful woman or anything else beautiful is already something else â and therefore despicable â for comparison might be motivated by an attempt at full and more direct expression â notice I say more direct.
Iâve been told there are landscapes before which one can only howl with joy. So we howl, if thatâs how you express joy. If it can be said, say it.
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But itâs all over, for once and for all â social or patriotic poetry, poetry of love or hate, [...]. If someone has fits of humanitarianism, they should teach school, or be a nurse, or something like that. Humanitarianism is felt by many people, because itâs of the socio-emotional order.
Lifeâs a journey some people make as traveling salesmen, others on honeymoon ships, and others, like me, as tourists. I go through life to look at it. Everythingâs landscape to me, as it is to any good tourist â countryside, cities, houses, factories, lights, bars, women, miseries, joys, doubts, wars [...]. To make the best of my journey, I want to feel the greatest number of things in the shortest possible time; to feel everything in every way, love everything with every form of love, to touch and see things without nailing them down, to pass them by and never look back â that seems to me the only worthwhile destiny for a poet.
The freshness of impression, the direct way of feeling I learned from your poems â Iâve applied it in other ways, to a different order of Nature. For me, a machine is just as natural â because just as real (and being natural is what being real is, when you get right down to it) â as a tree; and a city is as natural as a village. The essential thing is to feel things directly, ingenuously â tree or machine, city or countryside. My sensibility predisposes me to feel machines more than trees, cities more than countryside. This doesnât deny me the right to call myself a poet. The most important thing is to feel directly and simply, and I do feel directly and simply. If I directly and simply feel complexities, abnormalities and artificialities, well, then, itâs my way of feeling. As long as I feel them spontaneously, Iâm where I belong, where Nature, who made me what I am, put me. I do my duty. They call me âdeviant,â but Iâm not. [...] I neither deviate from myself nor from [...]. I was made to feel things simply, just like you; but I wasnât made to feel only simple things the way you do. If Iâm me, not you, why should I write the way you write? I write how [...] is in me to be me. How can I be âdeviantâ by being who I am?
For me, the only way to deviate is to create or belong to a system. There are times of day when Iâm a materialist, others when Iâm ultramontane, utterly ultramontane. It depends on how Iâm feeling. That seems natural to me.
If, like the great majority of poets, I ran on straight rails, if I were a pantheist, a spiritualist, a Protestant, a Catholic [...], anything that knows what it is and can self-define, Iâd deserve to be called âdeviant.â Nobodyâs born belonging to a religion or a philosophical system â weâre born belonging to a brain and a nervous system, and these have ways of feeling, not religion, aesthetics, or some kind of morality.
Yours always,Ălvaro de Campos
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Notes for the Recollection of my Master CaeiroĂlvaro de Campos
I met my master Caeiro in exceptional circumstances â exceptional in that all circumstances in life are exceptional, especially those which are nothing in themselves and come to be everything in their results.
Iâd left Glasgow about three-quarters of the way through my studies in naval engineering. Iâd traveled in the Orient; on returning, after disembarking at Marseilles, I felt that life on board had become unbearably dull, and so went on to Lisboa by land. A cousin of mine met me one day on a side trip to Ribatejo. He knew one of Caeiroâs cousins, and had business with him. In this cousinâs house I met the man who was to be my master. There is no more to tell, because this, like all fecundations, is a small thing.
I see him still, with a soulful clarity that the tears of remembrance cannot dull, because the vision is not outward. I see him before me, and perhaps I will eternally see him as when I met him. First, the blue eyes of a fearless child; then, the slightly prominent cheekbones, the slightly pale coloring, and the strange Greek air, which came from within; it was an impression of inward, not outward calmness; it was caused neither by his expressions nor by his features. His rather thick hair was blond, but it seemed darker in the shade. He was of medium height, but would have been taller if he hadnât stooped; his shoulders were rounded. His gestures were blank, his smile was as it was, his voice the same, projected in the tone of one who seeks to say nothing but what he is saying â neither loud nor soft, but clear, free of intent, hesitation, and timidity. His blue eyes couldnât stop staring. If I found anything odd about him, it was this: his forehead, without being high, was formidably white. It was this whiteness, which seemed greater than that of his pale face, which lent him majesty. His hands would have been delicate, were his palms not so wide. The expression of his mouth, the last thing I noticed, was as if speaking were, for this man, less than existing. It was the same smile his poems attribute to beautiful inanimate things, simply because they please us â flowers, fields, water in sunlight. It was a smile of existence, not of speaking to us.
My master, my master, lost so young! I see him again in the shadow I am in me, in the memory I keep of what is dead in me . . .
It was during our first conversation . . . How it came up, I donât know, but he said, âThereâs this guy, Ricardo Reis â youâd like to meet him because heâs very different from you.â And then he added, âEverythingâs different from us. Thatâs why everything exists.â
That sentence, said as if it were a tellurian axiom, came over me like a tremor in the earth and, like all first possessions, went to the foundations of my soul. But, unlike material seduction, the effect in me was one of sudden reception in all my sensations of a virginity Iâd never possessed.
â
Once, referring to the direct conception of things (so characteristic of Caeiroâs sensibility), I quoted, with friendly perversity, how Wordsworth described an insensitive man:
A primrose by the riverâs brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.
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I translated it (omitting an exact translation of primrose, because I donât know the names of flowers or plants): âA flower on the riverbank was a yellow flower to him, and nothing else.â
My master Caeiro laughed: âThat dummy got it right: a yellow flower isnât really anything but a yellow flower.â
But then suddenly he became thoughtful.âWell, there is a difference,â he continued. âIt all depends on whether you think of that yellow
flower as one of many yellow flowers, or only that one particular yellow flower.âThen he went on:âThis is what your English poet means. For men like that a yellow flower is an everyday
experience, or a known thing. Now, this is not so good. Everything we see, we should see it for the first time, because it really is the first time we see it. So then each yellow flower is a new yellow flower, even if we say itâs the same one we saw yesterday. We arenât the same and the flower isnât the same. Even the yellow itself canât be the same. Itâs a pity people donât have the right eyes for knowing it; otherwise, weâd all be happy.â
â
My master Caeiro wasnât a pagan: he was paganism. Ricardo Reis is a pagan, Antonio Mora is a pagan, Iâm a pagan; even Fernando Pessoa would be a pagan, if he werenât such a tangled skein, all inside-out. But Ricardo Reis is a pagan by character, Antonio Mora is a pagan by intellect, and Iâm a pagan by rebelliousness â that is, by temperament. There was no explanation for Caeiroâs paganism; it was consubstantiation.
Iâll define this the way one defines the indefinable â by the cowardice of example. One of the things that most clearly distinguishes us from the Greeks is the absence of the concept of infinity in Hellenic thinking. One might even say that the Greeks were repelled by the concept of infinity. Now, my master Caeiro had that same conception, or, I should say, lack of conception. I will relate, I believe with great exactitude, the surprising conversation in which he revealed it to me.
Referring to one of his poems in âThe Keeper of Flocks,â he told me that someone â I donât know who â had called him a materialistic poet. Without finding the phrase applicable, since my master Caeiro could never be defined by any phrase, I nevertheless told him I didnât think that calling him a materialistic poet was by any means absurd, and I explained classical materialism to him, more or less well.
Caeiro listened closely with a pained expression and then said bluntly, âThatâs really stupid. Thatâs something for priests â without the excuse of religion, even.â
Stunned, I pointed out all the various similarities between materialism and his doctrine (but not, of course, his poetry based on that doctrine). Caeiro protested.
âBut what youâre calling poetry is what everything is. Itâs not even poetry â itâs seeing. These materialists are blind. You told me they say space is infinite. Where do they see that in space?â
And I, disconcerted: âBut donât you think of space as infinite? Canât you conceive of space as infinite?â
âI donât conceive of anything being infinite. How could I ever conceive of anything being infinite?â
âBut, man,â I said, âImagine space. Beyond that space is more space, and beyond that more, and then more, and more . . . It never ends . . . â
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âWhy?â asked my master Caeiro.I suffered a mental earthquake. âWell, suppose it did end!â I shouted. âWhat would come after?ââIf it ended, nothing would come after,â he answered.This type of argumentation, at once infantile and feminine, and therefore irrefutable, tied up my
brain for several moments. âBut is that really what you believe?â I blurted out.âDo I believe things have limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesnât have limits. Existing
means thereâs always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive of a thing being a thing, and not always something else farther on?â
At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.
âLook, Caeiro . . . think about numbers . . . Where do they end? Take any number â say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 â there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger . . . â
âBut thatâs just numbers,â protested my master Caeiro.And then, looking at me with his formidable, childlike eyes:âWhatâs 34 in reality, anyway?â
â
There are unexpected sentences, deep because they come from the depths, which define a man, or rather, with which a man defines himself without trying to do so. Iâll never forget a sentence with which Ricardo Reis once defined himself for me. We were talking about lies, and he said, âI abhor a lie, because it is an imprecision.â All of Ricardo Reis â past, present, future â is in that sentence.
My master Caeiro, since he only spoke what he was, could be defined by any one of his sentences, written or spoken, especially after he was about halfway finished writing âThe Keeper of Flocks.â But, among his many published sentences and the many he said to me which I either have or have not related, the sentence which contains the most simplicity is one he said in Lisboa. I donât remember exactly what we were talking about â most likely, as usual, something to do with each personâs relation to themselves. I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, âAre you at peace with yourself?â and he answered, âNope, just at peace.â It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.
â
I never saw my master Caeiro unhappy. I donât know if he was unhappy when he died or in the days before his death. It would be possible to know these things, but to tell the truth Iâve never dared ask those who sat with him anything about his death or how it went for him.
In any case, it was one of my lifeâs anguishes â one true anguish amid so many fictitious â that Caeiro died without me at his side. Itâs stupid, but itâs human, and thatâs how it is.
I was in England. Even Ricardo Reis wasnât in Lisboa: heâd returned to Brasil. Fernando Pessoa was there, but he might as well not have been. Fernando Pessoa feels things but he isnât moved by them, not even inside himself.
Nothing can console me for having been away from Lisboa on that day, except for the consolation of thinking spontaneously of my master Caeiro, or of his poems. No one is inconsolable at the feet of Caeiroâs memory, or of his poems; and the idea of nothingness â the most terrifying
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of all ideas, when thought feelingly â possesses, in my dear masterâs work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight on snowy, unscalable peaks.
â
Since it was first said, itâs been widely held that to understand a philosophical system, itâs necessary to understand the philosopherâs temperament. Like all widespread notions with an air of certainty, this is rather silly; if it werenât silly, it wouldnât be widespread. Philosophy gets confused with its formation. My temperament could lead me to say that two plus two is five, but the assertion that two plus two is five is false independent of my temperament, whatever it may be. It might be interesting to know how I could have come to assert that falsehood, but that has nothing to do with falsehood itself, only with the reason for its appearance.
My master Caeiro was a temperament without philosophy; therefore, his philosophy â which he had, like all people â isnât even susceptible to these games of intellectual journalism. Thereâs no doubt that, being a temperament â i.e., a poet â my master Caeiro expressed a philosophy, a conception of the universe. However, his conception of the universe is instinctive, not intellectual; it canât be criticized as a concept, because thereâs none there, and it canât be criticized as temperament, because temperament canât be criticized.
The organically hidden ideas in the poetic expression of my master Caeiro have had their attempts at definition, with more or less logical felicity, in certain theories of Ricardo Reis, in certain theories of mine, and in the perfectly defined philosophical system of Antonio Mora. Caeiro is so fertile that each of us, owing all the thought in our minds to our common master, produced an interpretation of life entirely different from the other two. It really wouldnât be right to compare my metaphysics with Ricardo Reisâs, which is a mere poetic vagueness trying to clarify itself (unlike Caeiro, whose soul was made of poetic certainties not even trying to become clear), or with Antonio Moraâs, which is really a system, not an attitude or a reworking. But while Caeiro affirmed things that, being altogether certain (as we all saw already) in a logic that exceeds â as a stone or a tree â our comprehension, they were not coherent in their logical surface, Reis as well as myself (Iâm not speaking of Mora, who is far superior to us in this sort of thing), were trying to find a logical coherency in what we thought, or supposed we thought, about the World. And what we thought or supposed we thought about the world, we owe to Caeiro, who discovered the souls we then colonized.
Properly speaking, Reis, Mora and I are three organic interpretations of Caeiro. Reis and I, who are fundamentally, if differently, poets, still interpret Caeiro with besmirching temperament! Mora, a pure intellectual, interprets with reason; if he has sentiment, or temperament, theyâre going incognito.
The concept of life formed by Ricardo Reis is seen very clearly in his odes. Whatever his defects, Reis is always clear. His conception of life is absolutely nil. Caeiroâs is also nil, but in an entirely opposite direction. For Reis, nothing can be known about reality except whatâs given us as a real material universe. Without necessarily believing in this universe, we must accept it as such because none other was given us. We have to live in this unmetaphysical, amoral universe without sociology or politics. We adhere to the external universe, the only one we have, as weâd adhere to the absolute power of a king without discussing whether itâs good or bad, but simply because it is what it is. We should reduce our action to the minimum, enclose ourselves as much as possible in the instincts we were given, and utilize our instincts in a way that will produce the least discomfort in ourselves and others. Weâre all equally entitled to avoid discomfort. Itâs morality, but itâs clear. We eat, drink, and love (without being sentimental about food, drink and love, since that would later bring on elements
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of discomfort); life is a day, and night always falls; we should do neither good nor evil â we donât even know what good and evil are, and we donât know whether or not weâre doing one or the other. The truth, if it exists, is with the Gods, or with the forces that shape or create or govern the world. Their actions violate all our ideas of morality or immorality. Their actions are patently beyond any concept of good and evil, and there is nothing to be hoped for from them, either for good or ill. Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little weâre given. Ricardo Reisâ philosophy is Caeiro ripened and falsified by stylization. But itâs absolutely Caeiro, in another way: the concave side of the arch of which Caeiro is the convex side, the turning toward oneâs self of that thing which in Caeiro was turned toward Infinity â the very same infinity he denied.
This fundamentally negative concept of things gives Ricardo Reisâ poetry its hardness, its chill which no one will deny, no matter how much they admire the poetry; and those few who admire it, do so precisely because of that chill. Caeiro and Reis would actually be coeval, but Caeiroâs chill has no hardness; Caeiro, who is the philosophical childhood of Reisâ attitude, has the chill of a statue or a snowy peak, and Reis has the chill of a beautiful mausoleum or a marvelous boulder in shadow, untouched by even a speck of moss. And this is why Reisâ poetry, rigorously classical in form, is totally destitute of vibration â even more so than Horaceâs poetry, despite its greater emotional and intellectual content. Reisâ poetry is intellectual (and therefore cold) to such an extent, that no one can understand a single one of his poems (a typical situation, given his excessive compression) without learning its rhythm.
What happened to me was much the same thing that happened to Reis, but he and I are antipodal. Reis is an intellectual. He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that heâs not dead. Iâm exasperatingly sensitive and exasperatingly intelligent. In this, I seem to myself to be rather like Fernando Pessoa (with a bit more sensibility and a bit less intelligence); but, whereas in Fernando Pessoa sensibility and intelligence interpenetrate, sink into one another, intersect, in me they exist in parallel or, better, in superimposition. Theyâre not of a piece; theyâre more like bickering twins. So I formed my philosophy spontaneously from that part of Caeiroâs teaching from which Reis took nothing. I mean that part of Caeiro integrally contained in his line, âAnd my thoughts are all sensations.â Ricardo Reis owes his soul to the line Caeiro forgot to write: âMy sensations are all thoughts.â When I called myself a âsensationistâ or a âsensationist poetâ I didnât mean to use the term as the name of a school of poetry (holy God, schools of poetry!); I meant the word philosophically.
I donât believe in anything except the existence of my sensations; I have no other certainty, not even of the exterior universe that these sensations present to me. I donât see the exterior universe, I donât hear the exterior universe, I donât touch the exterior universe. I see my visual impressions; I hear my auditory impressions; I touch my tactile impressions. I donât see with my eyes, but with my soul; I donât hear with my ears, but with my soul; I donât touch with my skin, but with my soul.
If you asked me what my soul is, Iâd tell you itâs me. Hereâs my fundamental divergence from the intellectual foundation of Caeiro and Reis, but not from the instinctive and sensual foundation of Caeiro. For me the universe is only one of my concepts, a dynamic projected synthesis of all my sensations. I make sure, or take care to make sure, that my sensations agree with the myriad sensations in other souls. This agreement is what I call the exterior universe, or reality. This proves nothing about the absolute reality of the universe because it exists as a result of collective hypnosis. Iâve seen a great mesmerist oblige a crowd of people to see the same wrong time on clocks that were perfectly right. From that I extrapolate the existence of a supreme Mesmerist; I call him God
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because he succeeds in imposing his suggestion on the mass of souls â however, I have no idea if he did or didnât create these souls, because I have no idea what creating is, but itâs possible he created them, each unto itself, just as a mesmerist could convince me Iâm someone else or that I feel pain I canât say I donât feel, because I do feel it. For me, being ârealâ consists in being available to the experience of all souls, not only real souls, but also possible ones. Iâm also an engineer â which is to say, I have no morality, politics, or religion independent of the real measurable reality of measurable things, and of the virtual reality of immeasurable things. And Iâm a poet. My aesthetic exists in and of itself. It has nothing to do with whatever philosophy or morality I ascribe to, or the politics or the religion Iâm sometimes forced to don.
As for Antonio Mora, he got Caeiroâs message in its totality, and is making a real effort to translate it into philosophy through a process of clarification, rethinking, readjusting, altering here and there. I donât know if Moraâs philosophy would have been Caeiroâs if my master had had one. But I do accept that it would be Caeiroâs philosophy had he not been, as a poet, unable to have a philosophy. As seeds becomes plants, and as plants arenât magnified seeds, but something entirely different in form, so from the germ contained in the totality of Caeiroâs poetry, there naturally flows the very different and complex corpus of Moraâs philosophy. But Iâll leave the exposition of Moraâs philosophy to the next section. Iâm tired of wishing I understood.
â
One of the most interesting conversations with my master Caeiro occurred in Lisboa, when we were all together. Somehow, we got to talking about the concept of Reality.
If I remember correctly, that part of the conversation began with FPâs offhand observation about something that had been said. He said, âThe concept of Being does not allow for parts or gradations; a thing either is or is not.â
âIâm not sure thatâs quite right,â I objected. âYouâd have to analyze this concept of being. It seems to me itâs a metaphysical superstition, at least up to a point . . .â
âBut the concept of Being is not susceptible to analysis,â responded FP. âThat is the whole basis of its indivisibility.â
âThe concept might not be,â I replied, âbut its value is.âF. responded: âBut what is the âvalueâ of a concept independent of the concept itself? A concept,
that is, an abstract idea, is not susceptible to âmoreâ or âlessâ, which means that it is not subject to value, which is always a question of more or less. There might be value in its use or its application, but that is the value of its use or its application, not the value of the concept itself.â
At this point my master Caeiro, who with his eyes had been deeply listening to this transpontine discussion, interrupted. âWhere there canât be more or less, thereâs nothing.â
âThatâs a good one. Why not?â asked FP.âBecause everything thatâs real can be more or less, and except for whatâs real, nothing exists.ââGive us an example, Caeiro,â I said.âRain,â answered my master. âRain is a real thing. Thatâs why it can rain more and it can rain
less. If you said to me: âthis rain couldnât be any more or less,â Iâd answer, âthen this rain doesnât exist.â Unless, of course, you mean the rain exactly as it is at that moment: that rain is what it is, and if it were any more or less, itâd be a different rain. But what I mean is something else . . . â
âThatâs OK, I understand perfectly,â I cut in.
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Before I could go on to say I no longer remember what, FP turned to Caeiro: âTell me somethingâ â pointing with his cigarette â : âwhat do you consider a dream? Is a dream real or is it not?â
âI consider a dream like I consider a shadow,â answered Caeiro, with his usual divine, unexpected promptness. âA shadow is real, but itâs less real than a rock. A dream is real â if it werenât, it wouldnât be a dream â but less real than a thing. Thatâs what being real is like.â
FP has the advantage of living more in his ideas than in himself. He forgot not only what he was arguing, but even the truth or falsehood of what he was hearing: he was excited by the metaphysical possibilities of this sudden theory, [...]
âThatâs an admirable idea! And completely original! It never occurred to me â â (that ânever occurred to meâ so ingenuously suggestive of the natural impossibility of anything occurring to someone else that had never occurred to Fernando) . . . âIt never occurred to me that reality could be considered as subject to degrees. In fact, this is the equivalent of considering Being not as an abstract idea but as a numerical idea . . . â
âYouâre sort of losing me there,â hesitated Caeiro, âbut I think thatâs it, yes. What I mean is being real means other things are real, because you canât be real alone; and since being real is being a thing thatâs not anything else, it means being different from everything else. And since reality is something like size and weight â if it werenât, there wouldnât be reality â and since everythingâs different, there are no two things alike in reality, just like there arenât any two things alike in size and in weight. There always has to be a difference, even if itâs really small. Thatâs what being real is.â
âThis is even more peculiar!â exclaimed FP. âThus, you consider reality as an attribute of things; so it would seem, since you are comparing it to size and weight. But tell me something: what is that thing of which reality is an attribute? What lies behind reality?â
âBehind reality?â repeated my master Caeiro. âThereâs nothing behind reality. Just like thereâs nothing behind size, and nothing behind weight.â
âBut if something has no reality it cannot exist, and it can exist without having size or weight . . .â
âNot if itâs a thing that has size and weight by nature. A rock canât exist without size, and a rock canât exist without weight. But a rock isnât size and a rock isnât weight. A rock canât exist without reality, too, but a rock isnât a reality.â
âAll right, â answered F., somewhere between impatient, grasping at uncertain ideas, and having the rug pulled out from under him. âBut when you say âa rock has reality,â you distinguish rock from reality.â
âYes, I am: a rock isnât reality, it has reality. A rockâs just a rock.ââAnd what does that mean?ââI donât know; itâs just there. A rock is a rock and it has to have reality to be a rock. A person
isnât a face, but you have to have a face to be a person. I donât know why itâs like that. I donât even know if thereâs a âwhyâ for that or anything else . . .â
F. reflected. âYou know, Caeiro, the philosophy that you are elaborating is a little contrary to what you think and feel. You are making a kind of Kantism all your own â creating a noumenon-rock, a rock-in-itself. Iâll explain, Iâll explain . . . â He began to explain the Kantian thesis and how what Caeiro had said conformed with it or didnât. Then he noted the difference; or what he thought was the difference: âFor Kant, such attributes as weight and size â not reality â are concepts imposed upon the rock-in-itself by our senses, or, better, by the fact that we observe it. You seem to be saying that these concepts are just as much things as the actual rock-in-itself. Now that is what
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makes your theory hard to understand, while Kantâs theory, true or false, is perfectly comprehensible.â
My master Caeiro listened to all this with the utmost attention. He blinked his eyes once or twice as if to shake off ideas, the way youâd shake off a dream. After thinking a bit, he responded:
âI donât have any theories. I donât have any philosophy. I see, but I donât know anything. I call a rock a rock to distinguish it from a flower or a tree, or anything else thatâs not a rock. Of course, every rock is different from every other rock, but not because itâs not a rock; because itâs a different size and a different weight and a different color. And a different thing, too. I call some things rocks because they resemble each other in the things that make us call a rock a rock. But what we should really do, is give each rock a different proper name, like we do with people; if we donât, itâs because itâd be impossible to find so many words, not because itâd be wrong . . .â
FP cut in: âTell me one thing, by way of clarification: do you admit to ârocknessâ, so to speak, as you admit to size and weight, just as you say, this rock is bigger â that is, it has more size â than that one, or âthis rock has more weightâ than that other one? In other words, could you say, âthis rock has more rockness than that one?ââ
âYes, sir, I could, and I do, â my master quickly answered. âIâm always saying, âthis rock is more rock than that rock.â I always say it if itâs bigger than the other, or weighs more, because a rock needs size and weight to be a rock . . . but mainly if it has those attributes (as you call them) that make a rock a rock more completely than another rock.â
âAnd what do you call a rock you see in your dreams?â â and F. smiled.âI call it a dream,â said my master Caeiro. âI call it a dream of a rock.âFernando nodded. âI understand. You â how would I say it philosophically? â you do not
distinguish substance from attributes. A rock is something made up of a certain number of attributes â those necessary to the composition of that which we call rock â and of a certain quantity of each attribute which gives a rock a certain size, a certain hardness, a certain weight, a certain color, which distinguish it from other rocks, even though both of them are rocks, for they possess the same attributes, even when they possess those attributes in differing quantities. Now this is like denying the real existence of the rock: a rock becomes simply a sum of other real things. . . â
âBut itâs a real sum! Itâs the sum of a real size and a real weight, etc. And thatâs why a rock, besides having weight, size, etc., has reality too . . . It doesnât have any reality as a rock: it has reality because itâs a sum of attributes (as you call them), all of them real. Since each attribute has reality, the rock has it too.â
âLet us return to the dream,â said F. âYou say that a rock which you see in a dream is a dream, or, at most, a dream of a rock. Why do you say âof a rockâ? Why use the word ârockâ?â
âFor the same reason that when you see a picture of me, you say âthatâs Caeiroâ without meaning itâs me in flesh and blood.â
We all burst out laughing. âI understand and I give up,â said Fernando, laughing with us. Les dieux sont ceux qui ne doutent jamais. I never understood that phrase of Villiers de lâIsle Adam as well as then.
This conversation remained engraved on my soul; I believe Iâve reproduced it with a clarity not far from tachygraphia, just shy of tachygraphia itself (I have that intense and clear memory characteristic of certain kinds of madness). And this conversation had a great result. Of course it was inconsequential, like all conversations, and it would be easy to prove, through rigorous logic, that the only ones who didnât contradict themselves were the ones who didnât speak. In my master Caeiroâs always interesting affirmations and responses, a philosophical mind could find reflections of what
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are in fact different systems. But, even as I concede this, I donât believe it. Caeiro must have been right, even where he wasnât.
But this conversation did have a great result. It was during it that AntĂłnio Mora drank in his inspiration for the two most awe-inspiring chapters of his Prolegomena â the chapters on the idea of Reality. Throughout the course of the conversation, Antonio Mora was the only one who said nothing. He limited himself to hearing, with his eyes turned inwards on himself, the ideas discussed. The ideas of my master Caeiro, exposed in this conversation with the intellectual chaos of instinct, and therefore necessarily imprecise and contradictory, were converted, in the Prolegomena, into a coherent and logical system.
I donât intend to diminish the very real value of Antonio Mora. But, just as the base of his entire philosophical system was born, as he himself says with abstract pride, from a simple phrase of Caeiro, âNature is parts without a whole,â so a part of this system â the marvelous concept of Reality as a âdimension,â and the derived concept of âdegrees of realityâ â was born, precisely, from this conversation. To every man what is his, and everything to my master Caeiro.
â
While Iâm very moved to be a disciple of my master Caeiro, Iâm a disciple with my intelligence, and therefore critically. He wouldnât have wanted to be followed in any other way: he didnât believe in having pets.
Iâve never accepted one of Caeiroâs most original judgements â that there is some distinction between the natural and the artificial. There is no such distinction, because both are real. I understand the distinction between dreams and life, while yet conceding that a good metaphysics can confound it. But the distinction between a tree and a machine has always seemed false to me. It seems to me a tree and a machine are distinct because the first is a natural product and the second is a product which appeared by the intermediation of human intelligence. But, in reality, every product is mediated: the tree appears through its seed, the machine through intelligence. And intelligence is just as much an element of reality as a seed. When we allow that the tree rises out of the seed and the machine out of the mind, weâve reduced everything to material terms and have established the equal rights of matter.
No, Iâve never accepted Caeiroâs criterion for the artificial, nor Caeiroâs criterion for humanitarianism. Caeiro disdained the artificial because it is not born of the earth, and he disdained humanitarianism because it is not born of egoism. But a treeâs flower isnât born from the earth, and the love of humanity isnât born from egoism, but from the relaxation of egoism. Everything is natural, but with a greater circumference.
I still hear, in my heartâs memory, that cold and placid voice â yet so filled by all the inner warmth of reality! â tell me, âĂlvaro de Campos, I believe in what I have to accept.â How imbued with simplicity was Caeiroâs voice. Iâve adopted that sentence to the letter. I believe in a machine because I have to accept it as I accept a tree.
I know very well that Nature is the refuge, that the countryside swaddles the consumptive in all-embracing shelter, that the wind blowing through foliage, etc., etc.. But Iâve isolated myself in a great factory, among its noises; Iâve fled from the world to a grand international cafĂ©. Iâve long been a hermit in the wilderness where nobody knows who I am, in a provincial villa whose name I donât know and never will.
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â
Caeiroâs work should be divided â not only in his book, but organically â into three parts â The Keeper of Flocks, The Amorous Shepherd, and that third part to which Ricardo Reis set the authentic title, Detached Poems. The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the worldâs greatest love poems, because theyâre love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists. Thatâs what those poems say.
The Keeper of Flocks is Caeiroâs mental life up to the point when the coach tops the hill. In Unattached Poems, itâs descending. Iâll use myself to make a distinction: there are things in Unattached Poems I can imagine having written. No turn of the imagination would even let me dream of being able to write anything in The Keeper of Flocks.
In Unattached Poems fatigue occurs, and therefore difference. Caeiro is still Caeiro, but heâs an ailing Caeiro. Not always ailing, but at times ailing. The same man, slightly self-estranged. This applies most of all to the middle poems in this third part of his work.
â
I always treated my master Caeiro as a human being: simply as Caeiro. I never called him master to his face: such things are said but never spoken: in other words, written but left unsaid.
â
My master Caeiro was a master of all people able to have a master. No one close to Caeiro, who spoke with him, who had the physical opportunity to share his mind, didnât come back changed from that only Rome from whence one canât return the way one was â unless that person wasnât such a person; that is to say, unless that person was, like most people, incapable of being an individual except by being a body in space, separated from other bodies, symbolically damaged by the human form.
No inferior man can have a master, because the master has nothing to be master of. Thatâs why definite, strong temperaments are easily hypnotized, and ordinary men are hypnotized with relative ease, but idiots, imbeciles, weaklings and scatterbrains canât be hypnotized. To be strong is to be capable of feeling.
As will have been inferred from these pages, there were mainly three people around Caeiro â Ricardo Reis, AntĂłnio Mora, and myself. Iâm not doing any favors, not even to myself, when I say we were and are three individuals absolutely distinct from ordinary animal humanity (in spirit, at least). All three of us owe the better part of the souls we have today to our contact with my master Caeiro. Since passing through the filter of that fleshly intercession of the Gods, all three of us are other â in other words, truly ourselves.
Ricardo Reis was a latent pagan. He misunderstood both modern life and the ancient life to which he should have been born. He misunderstood modern life because his intelligence was of a different quality. He misunderstood ancient life because you canât sense whatâs not here. Caeiro, the reconstructor of Paganism, or, better, its founder, brought to Reis the missing substance of his sensibility. And so Reis discovered in himself the pagan he was before he discovered himself. Before meeting Caeiro, Ricardo was 25 years old, and hadnât written a single line. After meeting Caeiro, and hearing The Keeper of Flocks, Ricardo Reis began to realize he was organically a poet. Some physiologists say itâs possible to change sex. I donât know if thatâs true, because I donât know if anythingâs âtrue.â But Ricardo Reis certainly stopped being a woman to be a man, or stopped being
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a man to be a woman â as you like â when he came into contact with Caeiro.AntĂłnio Mora was a shadow of speculative velleities. Heâd spent his life gnawing on Kant, trying
to see with that thought if life had meaning. Indecisive, like all strong men, he hadnât found the truth, or what could have been the truth for him (the same thing, as far as Iâm concerned). He met master Caeiro and he met the truth. My master Caeiro gave Mora the soul he never had. Caeiro set a center within the periphery Mora had always been. And the outcome was the reduction of Caeiroâs instinctive thought to a truly logical system.
The triumphal results were those two tracts, The Return of the Gods, and the Prolegomena to a Restructuring of Paganism, both of which are marvels of originality and thought.
As for me, before meeting Caeiro, I was a nervous machine for making nothing at all. I met my master Caeiro a little later than Reis and Mora, who had met him in 1912 and 1913, respectively. I met Caeiro in 1914. Iâd already written poems â three sonnets and two longish poems (âCarnivalâ and âOpiatorâ). Those poems and sonnets show me at loose ends. Soon after meeting Caeiro, I became myself. I returned to London and immediately wrote âTriumphal Ode.â And Iâve been myself ever since, for better or worse.
Even more curious is the case of Fernando Pessoa, who, properly speaking, doesnât exist. He met Caeiro a little before me â on March 8, 1914, according to him. Caeiro came to Lisboa to spend a week. Fernando met him, and heard him read The Keeper of Flocks. Fernando went home in a fever (as was his wont) and wrote âOblique Rainâ in one go â the six poems in one sitting.
âOblique Rainâ doesnât seem in the least like one of my master Caeiroâs poems, except in a certain straightforwardness of rhythmic movement. But Fernando Pessoa would have been incapable of drawing those extraordinary poems out of his inner world if he hadnât met Caeiro. Moments after meeting Caeiro, he underwent the spiritual upheaval that produced those poems. It was a swift process. Fernando has an overly quick sensibility coupled with an overly quick intelligence. There was no delay in his reaction to the Great Vaccination â the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia. And the most admirable thing in Fernando Pessoaâs works is that sequence of six poems, âOblique Rain.â There may be, or may come to be, better things in his work, but there wonât ever be anything more original, anything newer, and for that reason I donât know if heâll ever do anything better. There will never be anything more really Fernando Pessoa, more intimately Fernando Pessoa. How could he better express his always intellectualized sensibility, his intense, heedless attention, the hot subtlety of his cold self-analysis, than he did in those intersection-poems, where state of mind is two at once, where subjective and objective are joined, yet are separate; and where real and unreal are confused, because they remain so very distinct? In those poems Fernando Pessoa took the definitive photograph of his very soul. In one moment, in a single stroke, he achieved the individuality heâd never had; and heâll never have it again, because it isnât his.
Viva my master Caeiro!â
Fernando Pessoa wrote, in one go â in one human go â those [...], complicated poems. Fernando Pessoa, who, when he writes a quatrain, employs strenuous industrial organization to see how he has to arrange through it the seventeen ratiocinations (he feels obliged by law to do this); who, when he feels something, sets to cutting it up with shears made of five critiques and fixates on the second line containing a disyllabic conjunction and, as at that point in the poem âwhetherâ would be bad grammar, heâll work it so âwhileâ is pronounced bi-syllabically.
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This man, so fruitlessly well-endowed, living constantly in the parabulia of his complexity, had at that moment â even he â his liberation. If some day forgetting himself to the point of publishing a book, if that book were a book of poems, and the little poems were dated, one would see that there is something different about those poems dated after March 8, 1914.
â
I marvel at AntĂłnio Moraâs doctrine, and show my dissent with a delicate gesture of withdrawal. The bad thing about those men â Ricard Reis, AntĂłnio Mora, Fernando Pessoa, and even, because Iâm outside idolatry (Eng. original], even my master Caeiro â is that they only see reality. They all see clearly in their way; theyâre all objectivists, even Fernando Pessoa, whoâs a subjectivist as well. But I donât just see reality â I touch it. Those men are more or less declared polytheists. Iâm a monotheist. The world considered with sight has an essential diversity. Considered with touch, it has no diversity at all. Those men are all in their own ways more intelligent than me, but Iâm more deeply practical than them. So I believe in God. Sometimes I think Milton could only attain his sublime understanding of Divinity when, bereft of sight, he returned to the great primordiality of touch, the great unity of matter. And Satan himself (who is nothing but God in His own deformed shadow), ejected from the light of appearance, couldnât understand powerfully until his eyes became night.
The variety of the world is not variety except by perceived contraposition to any unity. And this divined unity is God.
â
All of ancient pagan civilization (the blood of Caeiroâs very soul) was, and is, for Reis, a dear childhood memory â the education that drove him into being.
â
Ricardo Reis was listening, but he seemed less attentive to what Caeiro was saying than to some far-off manifestation, some echo of these words. After reading what Reis wrote, I understood. Sunlight was breaking against the cornices of ancient temples, and blood was draining from the dry sacrifice made by the haruspices in his soul. In some earlier incarnation â lived or metaphorical â the ancient gods had been a reality to that being; he was seeing the gods again, now, revealed by a grown-up child, and Ricardo knew they were real.
In his own way, R. Reis was also waking up.
â
This man first disoriented me by joyfully singing things, whether believed or taken for granted, that give everybody nothing but pain or horror â materiality, death, the nothing beyond. Then he disoriented me by not only saying all of it with joy, but also by making others feel that joy of his. When Iâm depressed, I read Caeiro â heâs my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful â yes, I find faith in God, and in the soulâs transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that godless anti-humanist unsurpassed on earth.
Why? Because of the personality behind the work, the elan vital, and where they plainly manifest
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themselves. Itâs the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the childâs mind, and all the vital spirituality of hope and increase that exist in the body and soul of nescient childhood. Caeiroâs work is a dawn that wakes us up and quickens us; a more than material, more than anti-spiritual dawn. Itâs an abstract effect, pure vacuum, nothingness.
Above and beyond all that, Caeiroâs work has a critical effect. These poems of the direct sensation in his soul dead set against our unnatural concepts, our artificial mind-made civilization tabulated in double columns and stuffed into filing cabinets â these poems strip us of all our tatters, and chemically scour our faces and bellies. Itâs a pharmaceutical effect â he comes into our house and shows us that a wooden table is wood, wood, and wood. He shows us that a table is a necessary hallucination of our industrial will.
If even for an instant in our lives we were able to see the table as wood, to sense the table as wood â to see the tableâs wood without seeing the table â weâd be happy. Weâd go back to âknowingâ itâs a table, but for all our lives weâd never forget itâs wood. And weâd love the table that much more, just for being a table.
Such was Caeiroâs effect on me. I never stopped seeing the appearance of things, the human or divine integrity in matterâs material soul. I remained free. Iâve been like a Rosicrucian ever since, one who, according to legend or truth, while outwardly similar to every human and conforming with the customs and manners of the workaday world, yet bears the secret of the Universe, and always knows the location of the âescape hatchâ and the magic of essenciation.
â
The complexity of Caeiroâs simplicity is very curious. The evolution of his concept of the universe, or, I should say, his concept of the lack of universe, is also very curious. Being an absolute sensationist, his sensations are his intellect, with a reason and a critical power all their own. Starting out as a kind of faithless St. Francis of Assisi bursting through obstacles, he crept through the thicket of what heâd learned â which was, happily, very little. In the end he appeared in his nakedness. It was the culmination of The Keeper of Flocks, of the poems â so new on the surface of the most ancient function of the world! â of The Amorous Shepherd and the non-anomalous poems in his Unattached Poems. The anomalous poems are deathâs invasion of truth. In some of them his vision is disturbed. The naked man tries on his shroud. But if we take his work as a whole, itâs nudity itself: his suit barely covers him and the shroud covers nothingness.
His commentary on St. Francis says it all. Once I read him a part of Fioretti, rapidly translating as I went along. I couldnât read more than a small part of it because Caeiro, indignant, or nearly so, crankily interrupted me. âHeâs a good man, but heâs drunk,â said my master Caeiro. At the time, this seemed to me an inappropriately expressed impulse; but, shortly afterward, I saw the deliquescence of the Saintâs compassion in the innocence of his soul, and I recognized what lay behind it as one would recognize a photograph.
â
One day Caeiro said something incredibly astonishing to me. We were speaking, or, rather, I was speaking of the soulâs immortality. I told him I thought the concept, even if false, was necessary for existence to be supported intellectually, to be seen as something other than a more or less conscious
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pile of stones.âI donât know what being necessary is,â said Caeiro.I answered without answering. âTell me something. What are you to yourself, Caeiro?ââWhat I am to myself?â Caeiro repeated. âIâm one of my sensations.âIâll never forget how that sentence crashed into my mind. Itâs useful for many things, including
things contrary to Caeiroâs intention. But it was mostly spontaneous, a beam of sunlight, illuminating with no intention at all.
â
âI never revise,â my master Caeiro once told me. âIf I write some way itâs because thatâs how I feel, and the fact that I feel differently today doesnât mean a thing to me. Sure, my poems contradict themselves all the time, but so what, if I donât contradict me? There are things in some of my poems, you know?, I could never write now, not any time. But I wrote them then, in the time when I wrote them. So I let them be.â
At my questioning, he gave an example:âWell, just look at my poem about the Boy Jesus. Today I could never say âthe direction of my
eyes is his pointing fingerâ â not even if I were distracted. I could never say he plays with my dreams, throws his legs in the air and puts my dreams one on top of the other, and other stuff like that. I couldnât even write that poem today, anyway. Thatâs the only thing that has any meaning.â
I defended the poem, the very sentences Caeiro was incriminating.âNo, no, thereâs no excuse. Theyâre just lies, thatâs all. The direction you look isnât a finger, itâs a
direction you look. You donât play with dreams like you play with jacks or empty matchboxes. Itâs a whole lot of nothing, anyway. It was one of my distractions. I exist in my distractions, too, even though Iâm distracted.
âI perfectly remember why I wrote that poem. Father B â was sitting there in my house talking to my aunt and he was saying things that bothered me so much I had to write the poem so I could breathe. Thatâs why itâs outside my usual breathing. But a state of irritation isnât a real state in me and thatâs why that poem isnât really mine, but my irritationâs, and also the personâs who most feels the same kind of irritation I felt when I felt it.
âToday, if I were irritated â thatâs doesnât happen much, these days â I wouldnât write anything. Iâd let the irritation irritate. Afterwards, when I felt the need to write, Iâd write. Iâd let the writing write.
âEven today, sometimes I write poems I donât agree with. But I write them anyway. I think people are interesting because theyâre not me, so sometimes Iâm interested in a moment when Iâm not me. Anyway, today itâs impossible for me to pull as far from myself as I did when I wrote my poem about the Boy Jesus. I can still pull away from myself, but I canât pull away from Reality anymore.â
Caeiro was silent for a few moments. Then he went on:âThe lstest poem where I pull away from myself the most is the one I wrote last month after
that conversation Ricardo Reis and Antonio Mora had about paganism and the gods.â (He was referring to Unattached Poems, number . . . )
âI was listening to them, and I started imagining how it would be if I imagined a religion. And it came to me how it had to be. Thatâs how I wrote the poem, not as a poetic act, but as an act of the
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imagination . . . Yeah, like telling a story. I had to put âI know how to makes fairy tales, tooâ at the beginning â but only once, of course . . .â
âThereâs another of your poems thatâs a little like that,â I said. Caeiro looked at me questioningly. âItâs the one in which you speak of a man in a lit-up house, far away, and you say that when you stop seeing the man, he stops existing.â
âI donât say he stopped being real. I say he stopped being real for me. I donât mean heâd stop being visible to someone who was where they could see him. He stopped being visible to me. He might as well have died.â
âThen you admit to two kinds of reality?ââMany more than two,â my master Caeiro unexpectedly replied. âLook . . . that chairâs a chair
and that chairâs wood and that chairâs the substance woodâs made of â I donât know what a chemist would say â and that chair is maybe â definitely â many other things besides. But itâs all of them at once. If I look at it, itâs basically a chair; if I touch it, itâs basically wood, if I bite it and taste the flavor of the wood, itâs basically what woodâs made of. Itâs like the left and right and front and back sides of something. Each and every one of its sides is real. The man I stopped seeing could have been real, but I was on the other side, away from him. Because I wasnât on his side, he stopped being real for me.â
â
If children donât understand adults â otherwise, theyâd have nothing to understand because theyâd all be the same, and nothing exists thatâs the same as something else â, itâs more certain that adults donât understand children. To be adult is to forget that you were once a child; therefore, parents punish their children for doing what they themselves did at the same age. When parents remember what they were, and donât punish their children, itâs because theyâre proceeding rationally: if they remember what they were, they believe they shouldnât punish their children. In reality they donât remember. If they remembered, theyâd still be children.
This apropos the appalling result that, in a certain aspect, Caeiroâs influence had on the susceptible Ricardo Reis. The absence of metaphysical preoccupation in Caeiro, natural in one who thinks like a child, became, in Reisâ adult interpretation, a monstrous thing. Like Caeiro, Ricardo Reis faced life and death naturally, but, unlike Caeiro, he thought about it. It gave his poems an anguished materiality, even for he who wrote them. When Reis speaks of death, he seems to foresee being buried alive. He considers it nothing, except for the dispensable effect of feeling âmoist earth piled on,â and other equally suffocating ways of saying the same thing. The sentiment which in Caeiro is an empty field, for Reis is an empty tomb. He adopted Caeiroâs nothingness but didnât know how to keep it free of decay.
For Reis, growing old and dying seem to be the sum and sense of life. For Caeiro, there is no aging, and dying is over there, by the hills. This comes apropos of influences, I believe.
Reis has no metaphysics. He adopted Caeiroâs, and such was the result. I donât deny his aesthetic importance; I do deny that one can decently read him. We ought to have our own metaphysics; each of us is each of us. If we take on influences, letâs take them in our rhythms, our images, in the structure of our poems. Letâs not take them into our very own souls.
â
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The woman Caeiro fell in love with. I have no idea who she was, and I intend to never find out, not even out of curiosity. There are things of which the soul refuses to lose its ignorance.
Iâm perfectly aware no oneâs obliged to reciprocate love, and great poets have nothing to do with being great lovers. But thereâs a transcendent spite . . .
Let her remain anonymous even to God!â
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Fragments, Perhaps Intended forNotes for the Recollection of my Master Caeiro
â
My master Caeiro hated ambition. One day I told him I wanted to be the freest person in the world. âĂlvaro de Campos,â he said,â youâre just what you are and nothing else.â
â
My master Caeiro detested supposition. âNow suppose,â I once began to say, but he cut me off. âWhatâs there to suppose with? The eyes? The ears?â I answered, smiling, âThe mind.â My master answered, [...]
â
My master Caeiro once told me that while the material world has one and only one advantage, its one and only advantage is its visibility. Each time I think of that dictum, I feel it more deeply, in spite of its simplicity. Think how hard it is to be a charlatan in the material world. If someone told me he had God in his pocket, I donât know how I could possibly prove or refute that claim. But if he told me he weighed five pounds, the proof would be the simplest thing in the world. In spiritual matters weâre all able to lie at will. All told, the physical is worth more than the metaphysical.
â
To go blind! To go blind!, my master Caeiro howled disconsolately. â Youâd prefer . . . â Anything but going blind, cried Caeiro. â But . . . â If they take away my testicles, theyâre only taking away the possibility of all women. If they
take away my eyes, theyâre taking the whole universe from me.So spoke the childlike demigod.His organically childlike, divine judgement couldnât conceive of the complexities of virile
humanity. Yes. My master didnât know that when our testicles are taken from us, so is our chastity â the very chastity that was meant to be preserved.
My master Caeiro couldnât see the spiritual ramifications of spermatic fluid.â
My master Caeiro taught me clarity and balance. He taught me to be organic in delirium and in hallucination; and to seek to have no philosophy at all, but with soul.
â
âIf I knew English, I wouldnât be me, Iâd be someone else,â answered my master Caeiro.
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â
Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.
This has nothing to do with sincerity. In the first place, no one knows what they really feel: itâs possible to feel relief at the death of a loved one and suppose itâs grief because thatâs what we think we should feel on such occasions. Most people feel conventionally, though with the greatest human sincerity; what they donât do is feel with any kind or degree of intellectual sincerity, and thatâs what matters in a poet. So much so, that I donât believe that there have been, in all the long history of poetry, more than four or five poets who say what they really and truly feel. Some very great poets never said it; they may have been incapable of saying it. In so many poets there are certain passages where they say what they feel. Coleridge said it once or twice: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kublai Khan are more sincere than all Milton put together. Iâd even say more than all Shakespeare. Hardly a reservation when it comes to Shakespeare: he was essentially and structurally factitious, so much so that his constant insincerity became constant sincerity. Thus his enormous grandeur.
When inferior poets feel, they always feel by rote. They may be emotionally sincere, but what does that matter if theyâre not poetically sincere? There are poets who spew line after line about what they feel: they never check to see whether theyâre feeling it or not. CamĂ”es bewails the loss of his gentle soul; ultimately, itâs Petrarch crying. If CamĂ”es had had one emotion that was sincerely his, he would have found new forms, new words â anything but the sonnet or decasyllabic verse. No: in verse he was a sonneteer, as in life, a whiner.
My master Caeiro was the worldâs only entirely sincere poet.â
As he told me once: âOnly prose gets revised. Verse should never be revised. Prose is artificial. Verse is natural. We donât speak prose. We speak verse. We speak unrhymed, unmetered verse. Pauses happen in conversations that canât happen in prose. Yeah, we speak in verse, in natural verse, and thatâs verse without rhyme or meter, but itâs full of pauses from breath and feeling.
âMy poems are natural because theyâre written that way.âRhyming, metered verse is bastard, illegitimate.â
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A. Caeiro
In placing before the English-reading public my translations of these poems, I do so with the full confidence that I am making a revelation. I claim, in all confidence, that I am putting before Englishmen the most original poetry that our young century has as yet produced -- a poetry so fresh, so new, untainted to such a degree by any kind of conventional attitude, that the words a Portuguese friend said to me, when speaking of these very poems, are more than justified. âEvery time I read themâ, he said, âI cannot bring myself to believe that they have been written. It is so impossible an achievement...!â And so much more impossible, that is of the simplest, most natural and most spontaneous kind.
II
Alberto Caeiro -- that is not his whole name, for 2 names are suppressed -- was born in Lisbon in August 1887. He died in Lisbon in June of the past year.
...
The Keeper of Sheep remains one of the highest works of all time, hard-bound upon a sense of nature or spirit, so spontaneous, so fresh and so natural that it is astonishing that any one should have had it.
...
The Keeper of Sheep is both a series of solitary [?] poems and a philosophical [...]; hence its strength, its unity and its power. The later poems, even allowing for the fact that they are mere fragments, are weak even in form, in comparison with that great achievement. Exception must be made for the two love poems. But thereafter his tone suffers. It does not become garrulous or, properly speaking, weak. But it loses its intellectual keenness, it becomes uncertain, even tentative. Each thing must have cost him effort to write, and he seems to have been tired of things to write it.
***
Caeiro has created (1) a new sentiment of nature (2) a new mysticism (3) a new simplicity, which is nether a simplicity of faith, nor a simplicity of sadness (as in [...]âs case), nor a simplicity of abdication from things and ( ). Much as he likes to prove his irrationalism, he is a thinker and a very great thinker. Nothing is so ennobling as this faith that declares the senses superior to the intellect, that speaks of intellect as a disease.
He has contradictions very slight, but he is conscious of all of these and has forewarned his critics. His contradictions are of 3 kinds: (1) in his thought, (2) in his feeling, (3) in his poetical manner.
...
But the most astonishing circumstance is that C possesses in an extraordinary degree that metaphysical subtlety which is generally, if not universally, considered as associated with spiritualistic and transcendentalist doctrines.
This pure ad absolute materialist, who admits no reality outside things as he feels them, writes, quite in accordance with his theory of things, [...]
There is something not less than scholastic and [...] in the exterior subtlety of his metaphysics. Yet no one can ignore that it is natural from beginning to end.
As the astonishing final verse of the ( ) poem
Things are the only occult meaning of thingsThe only occult meaning of things is the things themselves.
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A verse of which it is not too much to say that it opens new roads for philosophical meditation.
Caeiro is the only poet of nature. In a sense, he is Nature: he is Nature speaking and being vocal.
He has neither interest in mankind, nor in any human activity, not even in art. All these things are to him unnatural.
Only Nature is divine and it is not divine.
(unsigned)
***
But Caeiro displaces all our mental habits and puts all our notions out of drowsing.
He does it, first of all, by the philosophy which can hardly be said to be simply âat the bottomâ of his poetry, because it is both at the bottom and at the top of it.Whatever a mystic may be, he s certainly a kind of mystic. But he is, not only a materialistic mystic, which is already strange enough, but still can be imagined, for these is some sort of modern precedent in Swift and of an ancient one in some poets, but a non-subjectivist mystic, which is quite unworldly. [...] but it is so difficult to discover a recent âmodernâ being precisely like a primitive greek, that we are not at all aided by the very analogy that does at first seem to help us.
Caeiro puts us out, next, by the secondary aspects of his philosophy. Being a poet of what may be called âthe absolute Concreteâ he never looks on that concrete otherwise than abstractly. No man is more sure of the absolute, non-subjective reality of a tree, of a stone, of a flower. Here it might be thought that he would particularize, that he would say âan oakâ, âa sacred stoneâ, âa marigoldâ. But he does not: he keeps on saying âa treeâ, âa stoneâ, âa flowerâ.
All these observations will be better understood after reading the poems.
But, if the matter is this perplexing, the manner is more perplexing still.
The intellectual manner, to begin with. There is nothing less poetic, less lyrical than Câs philosophical attitude. It is quite devoid of âimaginationâ, of vagueness, of âsympathyâ with things. Far from âfeelingâ them, his mental process, a hundred times explicitly put, is that he does not feel them, or feel with them.
Again, his simplicity is full of intellectual complexity. He is a poet purely of sense, but he seems to have his intellect put out his senses.
Then, again, he is absolutely self-conscious. He knows every possible unconscious of his. Where there may be a big fault, he hastens to the rescue with a simple and direct argument. Where ( )
This man, so purely or anciently a primitive greek that he is unworldly, is quite âmodernâ at the same time.
...
It is this man of contradictions, this lucidly unworldly personality that gives him his complex and intense originality -- an originality, in every way, scarcely ever attained by any poet: certainly never before attained by any poet born in a worn and sophisticated age.
Thomas Crosse
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Beyond Another OceanNotes by C. Pacheco
To the memory of Alberto Caeiro
In a fevered feeling of being beyond another oceanThere were positions of a living more clear and limpidAnd apparitions of a city of beingsNot unreal but livid with impossibility, sacred in purity and in nudityI was the gateway to the null vision and the feelings were but the desire to have themThe notion of thing beside thing, each with its own inwardnessAll were living in the life of remnantsAnd the mode of feeling was in the mode of livingBut the form of those faces had a dewâs placidityTheir nudity was a silence of forms without means of beingAnd there was wonder at all reality being only thisBut life was life and only life
Often my thought works in silenceAs smoothly as a greased machine moves without a soundI feel good when it moves thus and I immobilizeTo keep unbroken the equilibrium allowing it to occur in meI foresee my thought as clear in these momentsBut I do not hear it and it works stealthily and in silenceLike a greased machine driven by a beltAnd I can hear nothing but the serene slide of parts at workAs I recall at times, other persons must feel the way I doBut they say it gives them a headache or causes dizzinessThis recollection came to me as could any otherAs for example my recollection of people not feeling the slideAnd they do not think things they do not feel
In this old hall where panoplies of gray armorForm an armature supporting signs of other agesMy materialized gaze wanders and pulls out from hiding in suits of armorsThat soul secret causes my livingIf I fix upon the panoply my mortified gaze which desires not to seeAll the ferric structure of this armature I know not why I foreseeTakes possession of my feel of it like a bolt of lucidityThere is sound in the equal state of two helmets noticing meThe shadow of the lances of being clearly marks the indecisiveness of wordsDistichs of uncertainty dance incessantly above meI hear the coronations of heroes who will come to celebrate meAnd hovering over this addiction to sensing I find myself in the same spasmsOf the same gray dust on the arms adorned with signs of other ages
When I enter a great naked hall at the hour of twilightAnd everything is silence it has for me the structure of a soulIt is vague and dusty and my steps echo strangelyLike those which echo in my soul when I walkThrough their sad windows, the sleeping light enters from withoutAnd projects shadows and penumbras on the dark wall aheadA great empty hall is a silent soulAnd dust-pushing air currents are thoughts
A flock of ewes is a sad thing
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For we shouldnât be able to associate it with other ideas not sadAnd because it is so and only because it is so because it is the truthWe should associate sad ideas with a flock of ewesAnd for this reason and only for this reason ewes are sad in fact
I steal for pleasure when I am given an object of valueAnd I give in return a few bits of metal. This idea is neither common nor banalFor I face it differently and there is no relation between a bit of metal and another objectIf I were to buy tin and paid with lettuce I would be arrestedI used to like hearing anyone expose and explainHow one can stop thinking one thinks anything is doneSo as to lose the fear I have of some day knowingHow my thinking about things and thinking are nothing but a material and perfect thing
The position of a body is not unimportant to its equilibriumAnd the sphere is not a body because it has no formIf it is so and if we all hear a sound in any positionI infer it must not be a bodyBut those whom intuition tells a sound is not a bodyWere not following my reasoning and thus this notion is of no use to themWhen I remember there are persons who play with words in displays of witAnd they laugh about it and tell personal stories about their own livesSo to brighten their spirits and they find circus clowns amusingAnd they become annoyed when a drop of olive oil falls on their new suitsI am glad there are so many things I do not understandIn the art of each worker I see a whole generation at laborAnd therefore I do not understand any craft and only see the generationThe worker does not see anything of a generation in his craftAnd therefore he is a worker and knows his craft
My physique often causes a deep depression in meI know I am a thing and as I am no different from any other thingI know other things must be like me and I have to think I am a common thingAnd thus if it is so then I do not really think but only believe I thinkAnd this my way of conditioning myself is good and it comforts me
I love alamedas full of curving shady treesAnd walking through wide alamedas delightful to my gazeAlamedas my gaze fashions without my knowing howThey are doors opening out into my incoherent beingAnd it is always alamedas I sense when the shock of so being makes me known
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Often I take shelter from my own sensations and inclinationsAnd then they vary and are in accord with those of othersBut I do not feel them and also I do not know I am fooling myself
Feeling poetry is the supposed way for one to liveI do not feel poetry not because I do not know what it isBut because I cannot live supposedlyAnd if I managed it I would have to follow another way of conditioning myselfThe condition of poetry is not to know how it is one senses itCertain beautiful things are beautiful in themselvesBut the inner beauty of feelings mirrors itself in thingsAnd if they are beautiful we do not feel them
In the sequence of steps I cannot see more than the sequence of stepsAnd they follow as if I saw them really following one anotherBy the fact of them being so equalAnd as no sequence of steps is notI see no need to illude ourselves about the clear meaning of thingsOtherwise we would have to believe in an inanimate body feeling and seeing differently from usAnd by being too admissible this notion would be uncomfortable and futile
If we are able to cease movement and speech when we thinkIs it necessary to suppose things do not thinkIf this manner of seeing them is incoherent and easy on the wit?We ought to suppose this the true wayWe think by the fact of our being able to do so without moving or speakingAs do inanimate things
When I feel isolated the need to be any person arisesAnd eddies around me in oscillating spiralsThis way of speaking is not figurativeAnd I know it eddies around me like a moth around a lightIn it I see symptoms of weariness and am horrified when I think it will fallBut as this never quite succeeds, it happens at times when I am isolated
There are those affected by scratching on wallsAnd others not affectedBut scratching on walls is always the sameAnd the difference comes from the persons. But if there is a difference within this sensingThere will have to be personal difference in the sensing of other thingsAnd when all think the same of a thing it is because it is different for each
Memory is the faculty by which we know we must liveAnd therefore amnesiacs cannot know they liveBut like me they are unhappy and I know I am living and must liveAn object attained, a fear one hasAre all manners of being alive for othersI would like to live or to be within myself as spaces are or live
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After eating so many persons sit in rocking chairsThey arrange themselves on the cushions close their eyes and allow themselves to liveThere is no struggle between living and the will not to liveOr else â and this is horrid to me â if there really is a struggleThey kill themselves with a pistol shot having first written lettersTo abandon oneself to living is as absurd as speaking in secret
Circus performers are superior to meFor they know how to leap about and make deadly moves on horsebackAnd they leap about only for the sake of leaping aboutAnd if I leapt about I would have to know why I leapt aboutAnd not leaping about would sadden meThey are not able to say how it is they leap aboutBut they leap as only they know how to leapAnd never ask themselves if they really leap aboutAnd as for myself, when I see somethingI do not know if it has happened or not nor can I know itI know only for myself that it is as if it happens because I see itBut I cannot know if I would see things if they did not happenAnd if I would see them I would also be able to suppose they had taken place
A bird is always beautiful because it is a birdAnd birds are always beautifulBut a featherless bird is as ugly as a toadAnd a mound of feathers is not beautifulI do not know how to induce anything from this fact so bare in itselfAnd I feel there must reside in it some great truth
What I think at one point can never be the same as what I think at anotherAnd hence I live so others know they live
Sometimes at the foot of a wall I see a mason workingAnd his mode of existing and ability to be seen is always different from what I believeHe works and there is a directed incitement moving his armsHow is it he works by a will he has for itAnd neither do I work nor do I have the will to do soNor have an understanding of such a possibility?He knows nothing of these truths and yet surely he is no more happy than ITreading dry leaves on paths of other parksSometimes I dream I exist for myself and I have to liveBut the seeing myself as illusion never endsFor in the end I see myself on the paths of this parkTreading dry leaves as they listen back at meIf at least I could hear the dry leaves crackleWithout it being me who treads on them or them seeing meBut the dry leaves whirl around and I have to tread on themIf only like all people I had someone on this journey
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A masterpiece is nothing more than a piece of workAnd therefore any piece of work is a masterpieceIf this reasoning seems false then my desire for its truthIs not false which is enough for the uses of my thinking
What matter if an idea is obscure so long as it is an ideaAnd one idea cannot be less lovely than anotherFor there can be no difference between two ideasAnd it is so because I see it must be soA dreaming brain is the same as a thinkingAnd dreams cannot be incoherent for they are nothing but thoughtsLike any others. If I see someone looking at meI begin to think like all people without meaning toAnd this is just as painful as if my soul were branded by a red-hot ironBut how can I know if it is painful to brand the soul with a red-hot ironIf red-hot iron is for me an incomprehensible idea
I am moved by the wrong turn taken by my virtuesIt afflicts my conscience when I sense my ability to note their absence if I wishI would like it if my fulfilling virtues were delectableBut only to be able to possess them and for those virtues to be mineThere are persons who say they feel their hearts torn to piecesBut they do not so much as glimpse the goodIn feeling our hearts being torn to piecesThis is something hardly feltBut it is not the reason why it would be happiness to feel the heart torn to pieces
In a shadowed noble hall tiled with azulejosIn which blue azulejos color the wallsAnd the floor is dark and tinted and covered with jute runnersAt times I enter all too coherentI am within the hall like any personBut the ceiling is concave and the doors are off the markThe sadness of stained glass in transoms over doorsIs an uneven sadness made of silenceThrough reticulated windows amidst light during the dayAnd it numbs glass in transoms and mounds blackness in recessesAt times windy chill runs through broad corridorsBut there is an odor of old cracked varnishes in the corners of hallsAnd everything aches in this manor-house of antiques
At times I become happy for a moment to think I will dieAnd be buried in a coffin made of resinous woodMy body surely melt into shocking liquidsMy features come undone in multicolored rotAnd a laughable skull come gradually to light down thereSo dirty and tired and blinking away
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TRANSLATORâS NOTES
I dedicate these translations to my friends and family.
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A number of people have helped along the way. To list them all would take a whole page, but I must express my gratitude to Ben Hollander, Kent Johnson, Rovena Mafouz, Erin Moure, Pat Reed and Dan Strongin.
***
A heteronym is a fictional author who may or may not reflect or refract some aspect or aspects of the personality, beliefs and aspirations of the inventing author, who is not trying very hard, if at all, to hide the fact that the heteronym is fictive.
A huge amount of criticism â though little in English â has been devoted to heteronymy, but itâs not at all difficult to understand. Imagine a vast novel about a coterie of writers in a very particular time and place. All the writers have different styles and concerns and social backgrounds and they write all different kinds of things: belle-lettrist prose, poetry, philosophy, political analysis, light humor, jokes, crossword puzzles, fiction, plays, journalism. The novel includes all of their writings. Excise the narrative trappings of a traditional novel and leave only the writings of the fictional charaters. Thatâs the easiest way to understand heteronymy.
Of course, one can conceive of a heteronym who appears in the world as the author of a real and traditionally constructed novel . . .
â[Pessoa understood that] if a real identity is built the same way as a fictional one, there is no point in depriving oneself of multiplicityâ. (MĂłnica de la Torre)
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Iâve tried to adhere strictly to the manuscript record. Contradictions have not been reconciled; even the most obvious gaps have not been filled in by me. The texts in italics below various poems occur on manuscripts (mosty typewritten) of those poems. These brief texts can be found conveniently in the notes to the Zenith-Martins critical edition of the complete Caeiro.
The unsigned introductory text and the text signed by Thomas Crosse were written in English. Bracketed ellipses denote illegible text. Unfilled parentheses denote blanks in the manuscript.
In Poem XVII of The Keeper of Flocks, âstrapped-up blanketsâ is a direct lift from Richard Zenith. Richard answered a dozen or so questions very early on and cleared up doubts and confusion. I have used his and Martinâs edition of Caeiro as a final guide and have mostly, but not always followed their readings (Iâve omitted two poems that they ascribe to Caeiro). Richardâs knowledge and generosity have touched every single word in this book.
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AS Bessa helped immeasurably with the translation of âBeyond Another Oceanâ. I have taken most of his suggestions. In the original Portuguese, this poem is almost devoid of punctuation. I have followed the original, but have added punctuation in the one or two places where I felt it to be necessary, not to clarify, but to avoid ambiguity where it does not exist in the Portuguese.
In the Nova Aguilar (Brasil) single-volume edition of Pessoaâs complete poetry (which is quite incomplete!), the title of this poem is âPara AlĂ©m Doutro Oceano de C[oelho] Pachecoâ: âBeyond Another Ocean by C[oelho] Pachecoâ.
âPara AlĂ©m Doutro Oceanoâ was meant to appear in the third issue of the journal Orpheu, the literary organ of Pessoa and his circle. The issue was destroyed by censors. As far as I know, there is no manuscript record of this poem. The original exists only in a set of proofs. I have translated directly from a facsimile of those proofs.
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Among Pessoaâs acquaintances was one J. Coelho Pacheco, a businessman who loved poetry and probably wrote poetry. He may have written this poem; indeed, some critics believe that he did; thus, C. Pacheco cannot be a heteronym. On the other hand, Pacheco is a very common surname, and âCâ could stand for âCristinaâ or âClaudioâ, or any other common Portuguese given name beginning with âCâ.
While I do not know the truth of the matter, I feel that any complication of Fernando Pessoaâs contradictory game of masks â his âdrama in peopleâ â is extremely desirable.
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Dana Stevens helped me in the beginning. For a long time, I planned to credit her as co-translator, but itâs been such a long time, the translations have changed so much in so many ways and all the final decisions and âonerousâ labor have been mine. That said, there is no way to thank her enough.
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Any errors are my own. Most are deliberate.
***
Earlier versions of some of these translations have appeared in journals. Many, many thanks to the editors of Antenym (Steve Carll), Five Fingers Review (John High and Thoreau Lovell), Prosodia, -Vert (Andrew Felsinger), Fascicle (Tony Tost) and especially Roberto Harrison and Andrew Levy of Crayon for their support and friendship over the years.
***
Editions consulted
1. PoetryFernando Pessoa â Obra PoĂ©tica, ed. Maria Alhete Galhoz, Nova Aguilar, Rio de Janeiro, 1960Poemas Completos de Alberto Caeiro, ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha, Editorial Presença, Lisboa, 1994Poesia Completa de Alberto Caeiro, ed. Fernando Cabral Martins & Richard Zenith, Companhia das Letras, SĂŁo Paulo, 2005Orpheu I-III, edição facsimilada, Contexto, Lisboa, 1989
2. ProsePoemas Completos de Alberto Caeiro, ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha, Editorial Presença, Lisboa, 1994Notas Para a Recordação do Meu Mestre Caeiro, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes, Editorial Estampa, Lisboa, 1997Pessoa por Conhecer, v. 2, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes, Editorial Estampa, Lisboa, 1990
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