Ode (an excerpt)

Frederick Hart 1997
Clear Acrylic Resin - 25 x 00 inches
Public collection

Come, selfsame and ageless Night,
Queen of Night, born dethroned,
Night matching innermost silence, Night
Spangled with fast flying stars
In your dress fringed by Infinitude.

Come drifting,
Come lightly,
come in solemn, alone, hands fallen
At your sides, come
Bearing the distant hills down to the foot of the trees
    nearby,
Fusing all fields I see into your one field,
Turn the mountain into a single block of your body,
Expunge from it each bit of difference I see from afar,
All the roads climbing it,
All the various trees turning it dark green in the distance,
All the white houses with their smoke rising through the
     trees,
And leave but one light and another, and still another,
In the blurred and vaguely disturbing distance,
In the distance suddenly impossible to penetrate.

Our Lady
Of everything impossible we strive for in vain,
Of dreams that come to us by the window at dusk,
Of the schemes that beguile us
To the European sound of music and voices far off and
    near by
That hurt us, knowing we'll never come anywhere near
    them...
Come lull us,
Come soothe us,
And kiss our brow, silently,
Our brow so lightly we're not aware we've been kissed
Except for some difference in the soul,
And the hint of a sob that flees like a melody
Out of what 's most ancient in us
Rooting all those magical trees
Whose fruits are the dreams we fondly and love
Because we know them apart from any connection with
    life.

(...)

in «English Poems by Fernando Pessoa» Álvaro de Campos Poetry

I study myself but I can't perceive

© Ernst Schütz
Private Gallery at PBase

I study myself but I can't perceive.
I'm so addicted to feeling that
I lose myself if I'm distracted
From the sensasions I receive.

This liquor I drink, the air I breathe,
Belong to the very way I exist:
I've never discovered how to resist
These hapless sensations I conceive.

Nor have I ever ascertained
If I really feel what I feel.
Am I what I seem to myselfe - the same?

Is the I I feel the I that's real?
Even with feelings I'm a bit of an atheist.
I don't even know if it's I who feels.

Lisbon, August 1913

in «English Poems by Fernando Pessoa» Álvaro de Campos Poetry

All Love Letters are Ridiculous

The Letter, ca. 1865
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
H. O. Havemeyer Collection,
Gift of Horace Havemeyer, 1929 (29.160.33)

All love letters are
Ridiculous.
They wouldn't be love letters if they weren't
Ridiculous.

In my time I also wrote love letters
Equally, inevitably
Ridiculous.

But in fact
Only those who've never written
Love letters
Are
Ridiculous.

If I could go back
To when I wrote love letters
Without thinking how
Ridiculous.

The truth is that today
My memories
Of those love letters
Are that is
Ridiculous.

(All more-than-three-syllabe words,
Along with uncountable feelings,
Are naturally
Ridiculous.)

21 October 1935

in «English Poems by Fernando Pessoa»

Tobacco Shop - excerpts

Copyright: Paulo Duarte Filipe,
Microscopic Detail of the Acacia's Flower
Acrilic on canvas
Virtual Gallery of the Artist

I'm nothing.
I'll allways be nothing.
I can't even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I've got all the world's dream inside me.

Windows of my room,
The room of just one of the millions in the world nobody
      knows
(And what would they know, if they knew that?),
You open on the mistery of a street people are constantly
      crossing,
A street blocked off to all though,
A street that's real, impossibly real, and right,
      unconsciously right,
With the mistery of things lying under live beings and
      stones,
With death spreading darkness on walls and white hair on
      heads,
With fate driving the cart of everything down nothingness
      road.

Today I'm bowled over, as though hit by the truth.
Today I'm clearheaded, as though I were going to die,
Having no more brotherly feeling for things
Than to say good-bye, turning this house and this side of
      the street
Into a line of coaches in a long train with its whistle
      shrieking good-bye
From inside my head,
And a nerve-wracking, bone-cracking jerk as it moves off.

Today I'm mixed up, like someone who thought
      something and grasped it, then lost it.
Today I'm torn between the allegiance I owe
Something real outside me - The Tobacco Shop across
      the street,
And something real inside me - the feeling that it's all a
      dream.

I failed in everything.
Since I was up to nothing, maybe it was all really
      nothing.
From learning and training for anything useful I escaped
By slipping off to the country with great plans,
By found only grass and threes there,
And when there were people, they were just like any
      others.
I leave the window, sit down in a chair. What should I
      think about?

....

(Eat your chocolates, little girl!
Eat your chocolates!
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.
Look, all religions on earth have nothing more to teach
      us than a candy store does.
Eat, dirty little girl, eat them up!
If I could gobble down those chocolates as trustily
      as you do!
But I think, peeling off the silver wrapper, it's only
      tinfoil,
And toss it in the floor, just as I've tossed away my life.)

But at least, out of my bitterness at what I'll never be,
There's the quick calligraphy of these lines,
The broken archway to the Impossible.
And at least I reserve for myself this dry-eyed contempt-
Noble, at least, in the great gesture I make
Flinging out the dirty clothes I am, with no laundry list,
      into the drift of things,
And stay at home, shirtless.

....

from «POESIA DE ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS» by Álvaro de Campos

Note

Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind: Those who stay, 1911
Oil on canvas - 70.8 x 95.9 cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York

My soul came apart like an empty jar.
It fell overwhelmingly, down the stairs.
Dropped from the hands of a careless maid.
It felt. Smashed into more pices then there was china in
     the jar.

Nonsense? Impossible? How should I know!
I've more sensations now than when I felt I was all me.
I'm a litter of shards strewn on a doormat about to be
     swept.

My fall raised a din like the crash of a jar.
The gods that exist lean over the bannister,
Staring down at the shards their maid left of me.

They're not mad at her.
They indulge her.
What was I - an empty vase?

They stare at the shards, absurdly conscious,
But conscious of themselves, not of the shards.

They stare down and smile.
Indulgent, they smile at the heedless maid.

The big star-carpeted staircase spreads out.
A shard is shining, glossy side up, among the stars.
Is it my work? My one and only soul? My life?
A shard.
And the gods squint at it, not knowing why it got left
     there.

(1929)

Álvaro de Campos Poetry from «Poems of Fernando Pessoa»

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