Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa Poems

I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at certain stage, people have to be tired.
Of what I am tired, I don't know:
...

I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
...

Symbols? I'm sick of symbols...
Some people tell me that everything is symbols.
They're telling me nothing.

What symbols? Dreams...
Let the sun be a symbol, fine...
Let the moon be a symbol, fine...
Let the earth be a symbol, fine...
But who notices the sun except when the rain stops
And it breaks through the clouds and points behind its back
To the blue of the sky?
And who notices the moon except to admire
Not it but the beautiful light it radiates?
And who notices the very earth we tread?
We say earth and think of fields, trees and hills,
Unwittingly diminishing it,
For the sea is also earth.

Okay, let all of this be symbols.
But what's the symbol - not the sun, not the moon, not the earth -
In this premature sunset amidst the fading blue
With the sun caught in expiring tatters of clouds
And the moon already mystically present at the other end of the sky
As the last remnant of daylight
Gilds the head of the seamstress who hesitates at the corner
Where she used to linger (she lives nearby) with the boyfriend who left her?
Symbols? I don't want symbols.
All I want - poor frail and forlorn creature! -
Is for the boyfriend to go back to the seamstress.
...

Since we do nothing in this confused world
That lasts or that, lasting, is of any worth,
And even what's useful for us we lose
So soon, with our own lives,
Let us prefer the pleasure of the moment
To an absurd concern with the future,
Whose only certainty is the harm we suffer now
To pay for its prosperity.
Tomorrow doesn't exist. This moment
Alone is mine, and I am only who
Exists in this instant, which might be the last
Of the self I pretend to be.
...

Should somebody one day knock at your door
Announcing he's an emissary of mine,
Never believe him, nor that it is I;
...

At times I have happy ideas,
Ideas suddenly happy, in among ideas
And the words in which they naturally shake free…
...

When I am sitting at the window,
Through the panes, which the snow blurs,
I see the lovely images, hers, as
...

Crown me with roses,
Crown me really
With roses -
...

Hate you, Christ, I do not, or seek. I believe
In you as in the others gods, your elders.
I count you as neither more nor less
...

I never kept sheep,
But it is as I did watch over them.
My soul is like a shepherd,
...

If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.
...

Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
...

But no, she's abstract, is a bird
Of sound in the air of air soaring,
...

How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
...

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,
...

As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a thought of what their sense did say.
...

If that apparent part of life's delight
Our tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen
By aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,
Joy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen.
...

We are born at sunset and we die ere morn,
And the whole darkness of the world we know,
How can we guess its truth, to darkness born,
...

How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,
When the miserly press of each day's need
Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
...

When I should be asleep to mine own voice
In telling thee how much thy love's my dream,
I find me listening to myself, the noise
...

Fernando Pessoa Biography

Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa (/pɛˈsoʊə/; Portuguese: [fɨɾˈnɐ̃dw ɐ̃ˈtɔɲju nuˈɣejɾɐ pɨˈsow.wɐ]; June 13, 1888 – November 30, 1935), was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French. Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he dreamed up approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.)

The Best Poem Of Fernando Pessoa

I Am Tired

I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at certain stage, people have to be tired.
Of what I am tired, I don't know:
It would not serve me at all to know
Since the tiredness stays just the same.
The wound hurts as it hurts
And not in function of the cause that produced it.
Yes, I am tired,
And ever so slightly smiling
At the tiredness being only this -
In the body a wish for sleep,
In the soul a desire for not thinking
And, to crown all, a luminous transparency
Of the retrospective understanding…
And the one luxury of not now having hopes?
I am intelligent: that's all.
I have seen much and understood much of what I
have seen.
And there is a certain pleasure even in tiredness
this brings us,
That in the end the head does still serve for
something.

Fernando Pessoa Comments

Bob Kelley 11 August 2021

Today I began reading Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. Any comments appreciated. Pessoa's poetry resonates feelings.

1 0 Reply
Fabrizio Frosini 04 January 2016

By 1914 Pessoa had started publishing criticism in prose and poetry. This year is also marked as the birth year of Pessoa’s three main literary personas which he preferred to call heteronyms rather than pseudonyms. These were Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos. Although throughout his career Pessoa used at least Seventy Eight of his literary figures yet these were the three main heteronyms he returned to from time to time. They all were unique in every manner; they had their own writing style, history, exclusive personality and distinctive physiology. In 1935 Pessoa wrote a letter Adolfo Casais Monteiro explaining how he writes through the names of his three favorite heteronyms.

11 1 Reply
Fabrizio Frosini 04 January 2016

“How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation, which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don’t know what.” Pessoa is known and praised to have given his heteronyms a full life, entirely different and separate from his own, compared to many other literary personas adopted by noble writers of his era.

11 1 Reply

Fernando Pessoa Popularity

Fernando Pessoa Popularity

Close
Error Success