Dialogue in the night
What metaphysical horror you arouse in me,
Not mentally but viscerally!
O vile metaphysics of the horror of flesh,
The fear of love . . .
Between your body and my desire for it
Stretches the chasm of you being conscious.
If only I could love and possess you
Without you existing or being there!
Ah, my solitary habit of thinking
So exiles the animal in me
That I dare not dare what the vilest creature
Of this vile world does automatically!
I’ve so concealed my instinctive nature
From human seeing that I don’t know
How to reveal, in gestures and manners,
A single instinct to observing eyes,
How to make my body and behavior
Bear witness to who I am! If only
You were blind, O eyes and hands of others!
I don’t even know how, in soul or body,
To be naked to others! Eternal solitude . . .
The secret of Seeking is that nothing’s found.
Eternal worlds endlessly and unceasingly
Keep spinning in vain, one inside another.
There’s us, and the Gods, and the Gods of Gods,
And we’re so interspersed and lost in them
That we can’t even find ourselves in infinity.
Nothing’s ever the same, and the uncertain
Light of supreme truth is always ahead
Of where men and gods go.
Ah, everything is symbol and analogy!
The wind that blows and the night that chills
Are something other than night and wind—
Shadows of life and of thought.
Everything we see is something else.
The sweeping tide, the raging tide,
Is the echo of another tide that flows
Where the world is really real.
All we have is forgetfulness.
The cold night and the wind’s blowing
Are shadows of the hands whose motions
Are the mother illusion of this illusion.
Endlessly condemned to eternal error—
Might not this be our reality? Might not
The abstract and infinitely veiled world
Be an eternal delusion, destined
To remain forever veiled and abstract,
Its very unity an inexactness,
An indefinite whole, and more than a whole,
Where the fixed points of truth and error
Are but a greater error?
Everything transcends everything.
Inwardly and infinitely
Far from itself, the universe,
By existing, deceives itself.
The supreme mystery of the Universe,
The only mystery at all, and in all,
Is the existence of a mystery of the universe,
It’s the existence of the universe, of anything,
It’s the existence of existence. O hazy, abstract form
Which existence so often assumes in me,
The mere thought of this is a chill wind in my body
Blowing from beyond the earth and grave
And going from my soul to God.
In me
I step up to the brink of myself and look down . . .
An abyss . . . In that abyss the Universe
With its Time and Space is a star, and there are
Other universes in the abyss, other
Forms of Being with other Times and Spaces,
And other lives different from this life . . .
The spirit is also a star . . . The God we ponder
Is a sun . . . And there are more Gods, more spirits
Belonging to other kinds of Reality . . .
I hurl myself into the abyss and remain
In myself . . . And never descend . . . I shut my eyes
And dream—and I wake up to Nature . . .
Thus I return to myself and to Life . . .
Ah, to drink life in one gulp, a gulp
Containing all of life’s sensations
In all their forms, good and bad,
Troubles, pleasures and occupations,
All places, journeys, explorations,
All crimes, lusts, and forms of decadence!
In the past I wanted
To revel in trees and flowers,
To dream of cliffs, seas and solitude,
But today I shun that crazy idea:
Anything that brings me close to the Mystery
Racks me with horror. Today I want only
Sensations, lots and lots of sensations,
Of everything and everyone in the world—
Not the sensations of pantheist deliriums
But perpetual shocks of human pleasure,
With my personality always changing
To synthesize them in one stream of feeling.
I want to drown in turmoil, light and voices
—In tumultuously commonplace things—
This feeling of desolation that fills
And overwhelms me.
How I would rejoice
To experience in one day, one hour, one gulp
The sum total of all vices, even if
It meant I’d be eternally condemned
—Ah, what madness!—to hell itself!
ENGLISH POEMS
These poems contain, here and there, certain eccentricities and peculiarities of expression; do not attribute these to the circumstance of my being a foreigner, nor indeed consider me a foreigner in your judgement of these poems. I practice the same thing, to a far higher degree, in Portuguese. (. . .)
The fact is that these are forms of expression necessarily created by an extreme pantheistic attitude, which, as it breaks the limits of definite thought, so must violate the rules of logical meaning.
(FROM A COVER LETTER SENT BY PESSOA WITH SIXTEEN POEMS TO AN ENGLISH PUBLISHER ON 23 OCTOBER 1915)
POEMS OF ALEXANDER SEARCH
EPIGRAM
“I love my dreams,” I said, a winter morn,
To the practical man, and he, in scorn,
Replied: “I am no slave of the Ideal,
But, as all men of sense, I love the Real.”
Poor fool, mistaking all that is and seems!
I love the Real when I love my dreams.
[1906]
GOD’S WORK
“God’s work—how great his power!” said he
As we gazed out upon the sea
Beating the beach tumultuously
Round the land-head.
The vessel then strikes with a crash,
Over her deck the waters rash
Make horror deep in rent and gash.
“God’s work,” I said.
JULY 1906
THE CIRCLE
I traced a circle on the ground,
It was a mystic figure strange
Wherein I thought there would abound
Mute symbols adequate of change,
And complex formulas of Law,
Which is the jaws of Change’s maw.
My simpler thoughts in vain had stemmed
The current of this madness free,
But that my thinking is condemned
To symbol and analogy:
I deemed a circle might condense
With calm all mystery’s violence.
And so in cabalistic mood
A circle traced I curious there;
Imperfect the made circle stood
Though formèd with minutest care.
From Magic’s failure deeply I
A lesson took to make me sigh.
30 JULY 1907
A TEMPLE
I have built my temple—wall and face—
Outside the idea of space,
Complex-built as a full-rigged ship;
I made its walls of my fears,
Its
turrets many of weird thoughts and tears—
And that strange temple, thus unfurled
Like a death’s-head flag, that like a whip
Stinging around my soul is curled,
Is far more real than the world.
AUGUST 1907
from 35 SONNETS
I
Whether we write or speak or are but seen
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or mien.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To make our soul with arts of self-show stored,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill or thought or trick for seeing.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.
[AUGUST 1910]
VIII
How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever consciousness begins the task
The task’s accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,
Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,
Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces
And get a whole world on their forgot causing;
And, when as thought would unmask our soul’s masking,
Itself goes unmasked to the unmasking.
[MAY 1912]
XVII
My love, and not I, is the egoist.
My love for thee loves itself more than thee;
Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist,
And makes me live that it may feed on me.
In the country of bridges the bridge is
More real than the shores it doth unsever;
So in our world, all of Relation, this
Is true—that truer is Love than either lover.
This thought therefore comes lightly to Doubt’s door—
If we, seeing substance of this world, are not
Mere Intervals, God’s Absence and no more,
Hollows in real Consciousness and Thought.
And if ’tis possible to Thought to bear this fruit,
Why should it not be possible to Truth?
9 JULY 1912
XXXI
I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was born makes me not countryless.
An exile’s yearnings through my thoughts escape
For daylight of that land where once I dreamed,
But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as light rememberèd,
Nor to the left or to the right conceived;
And all round me tastes as if life were dead
And the world made but to be disbelieved.
Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet
How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?
24 DECEMBER 1912
from THE MAD FIDDLER
THE LOST KEY
Set out from sight of shore!
Grow tired of every sea!
All things are ever more
Than most they seem to be.
What steps are those that pass outside my door?
Fail out from shape and thought!
Let sense and feeling fade!
O sadness overwrought
With joy till bliss is strayed!
What birds are those that my swift window shade?
But be those steps no steps,
And be those birds dreamed wings,
Still one ache oversteps
The life to which it clings,
Though to know what ache no step in me helps
And what this pang is no bird in me sings.
8 FEBRUARY 1913
THE KING OF GAPS
There lived, I know not when, never perhaps—
But the fact is he lived—an unknown king
Whose kingdom was the strange Kingdom of Gaps.
He was lord of what is twixt thing and thing,
Of interbeings, of that part of us
That lies between our waking and our sleep,
Between our silence and our speech, between
Us and the consciousness of us; and thus
A strange mute kingdom did that weird king keep
Sequestered from our thought of time and scene.
Those supreme purposes that never reach
The deed—between them and the deed undone
He rules, uncrowned. He is the mystery which
Is between eyes and sight, nor blind nor seeing.
Himself is never ended nor begun,
Above his own void presence empty shelf.
All He is but a chasm in his own being,
The lidless box holding not-being’s no-pelf.
All think that he is God, except himself.
17 FEBRUARY 1913
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
The Introduction and Chronology were first published, with slight differences, in A MáscaraeoEspelho (Lisbon: Instituto Camões, 2004). All the translations are my own. The literary excerpts are taken from the volume in hand, from Fernando Pessoa & Co.—Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1998), and from The Book of Disquiet (New York: Penguin, 2003). Most of the quotations from Pessoa’s letters and other writings can be found in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (Grove Press, 2001).
ALBERTO CAEIRO
The Keeper of Sheep. When the editors of the Coimbra-based magazine Presença, in which Pessoa published some of his most memorable poems and prose pieces, told him they wanted to publish a volume of his poetry, this was the work he promised to send them. In a letter to one of the editors dated 25 February 1933, he called The Keeper of Sheep “the best thing I’ve done—a work which . . . I could never match, even if I were to write another Iliad, for it springs from a type and degree of inspiration (here the word may be used, for it’s perfectly accurate) that surpasses what in myself I could rationally generate, which would never be true of any Iliad.” He expected to deliver the manuscript forthwith, as it needed only some minor revisions. But despite the insistence of the editors, he never got the book into final shape. He published half of its forty-nine poems in magazines, but the other half continued to hesitate, as it were, in a notebook where he kept tinkering, jotting down variant phrasings, adding or subtracting verses, and calling into question certain passages and even entire poems.
The following poems were published in the magazine Athena 4, in 1925: IX, XIII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXV, XLIII, XLV, XLVI, XLVIII, XLIX.
II Variants of “My gaze is” in v. 1: “In my gaze everything is”; “Everything I see is.” Variants of “completely” in v. 12: “endlessly”; “suddenly.”
IV St. Barbara is invoked for protection against storms. Variant of “Is a sudden noise / That begins with light . . .” in the penultimate stanza: “Is a bunch of angry / People above us. . . .”
VI My reading of the manuscript differs, in the last verse, from the published version.
VII My reading of the manuscript differs, in the penultimate verse, from the published version.
VIII Published in Presença 30, in 1931.
XIV Variant of “rarely” in v. 2: “never.” Variant of “divine” in v. 5: “natural.”
XVI This and the
following poem are the only Caeiro poems that rhyme (in the original).
XXI Between the second and third verses, the manuscript contains the following, subsequently added, verse, “And if the earth were something to munch on,” marked by a symbol indicating doubts about its inclusion.
XXVII Variant of the last verse: “I enjoy it all like someone in the sunlight.”
XXXIII Variant of “true” in v. 3: “good.” Variant of “coloring” in v. 4: “smile.” Variants of the last verse: “To see if they talked”; “To see if they moved”; “To see what they would do”; “To see whom they belonged to.”
XXXIV Variant of vv. 13-15: “If it is, then well and good . . . / What does it matter to me?”
XXXVI Variant of “true” in v. 7: “artistic.”
XLI Variant of v. 5: “In their every manner of leaf.” Variant of “interesting” in v. 16: “bigger.”
The Shepherd in Love. The Portuguese title for this group of eight poems, O Pastor Amoroso, was translated by Pessoa—or, if we like, by an English-language heteronym called Thomas Crosse—as The Lovesick Shepherd. In an unfinished preface to Caeiro’s work, Pessoa-qua-Crosse explained: “In the later poems, his lucid inspiration becomes slightly blurred, a little less lucid. The transformation dates from The Lovesick Shepherd. Love brought a touch of sentiment into this strangely unsentimental poetry. When that love brought disillusion and sorrow, it was not likely that the sentiment should depart. Caeiro never returned to the splendid nonmysticism of The Keeper of Sheep.” Pessoa writing as Campos concurred with this judgment, but noted that these are “among the world’s great love poems, for they are love poems by virtue of being about love and not by virtue of being poems. The poet loved because he loved, and not because love exists.”