Pessoa split himself into four poets because he's pretty bland, pretty bleak and boring. I mean, i don't care about his poetry:
I'm a runaway.
When i was born
They shut me up
Inside myself.
Ah, but I ran away.
If people get sick
Of living in
The same old place,
Why not of living
In the same old skin?
My soul is on
the lookout for me,
but i lie low.
Will it ever find me?
Never, I hope!
Being myself only
means being pinned down
and no one at all.
I'll live on the run,
and really live!
So thank God his personality created these self-obsessed madmen to characterize the brilliance of Pessoa's imagination. They are excavators who find themselves punished with self and have different ways of examining selfdom. For instance, the zen mogul Alberto Caeiro deals with his self by fitful and aggravated reservation, not just of himself but of everything. Violent acceptance of everything:
If they want me to be a mystic, fine. So I'm a mystic.
I'm a mystic, but only of the body.
My soul is simple; it doesn't think.
My mysticism consists in not desiring to know,
In living wihtout thinking about it.
I don't know what Nature is; I sing it.
I live on a hilltop
in a solitary cabin.
And that's what it's all about.
He is stubbornly peaceful, overly contemplating something that is utmost simplicity for the sake of reaching the threshhold of no more thought and thus extending towards freedom:
Sometimes i start looking at a stone.
I don't start by thinking, Does it have a feeling?
I don't force myself to call it my sister.
But i get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it's not at all related to me.
Occasionally i hear the wind blow,
And i find that just hearing the wind blow makes it
worth having been born
This is the asshole of Pessoa's personality. In that why would someone make themselves look like an asshole, it is because assholes are part of the digestive process, they are anatomical not just for the body but for the entire whole of existence, this breaking down and regurgitation. It is a man content to look upon the world and suffocate on last breaths tranquilly for every moment in his life. By asshole, i mean the stark realization of all chaos, and the peace that comes in the noise of chaos,
And the man fell silent, watching the sunset.
But a man who hates and loves, what's he got do with sunset?
or
E o homem calara-se, olhando o poente.
Mas que tem com o poente quem odeia e ama?
Then there is the old man, more contemplating and pronouncedly wise, like a university professor. His name is Ricardo Reis. Think of the man at 70, ten years before he expects death, which could be longer or at any moment and the thoughts peddling gracefully in the abyss of sorrows, regrets, memories and joy. You know, all that old man shit:
I only ask the gods to grant me
That i ask nothing of them. Happiness is a burden,
Good fortune is a yoke,
Both bespeaking too secure a state.
Not composed nor discomposed, i would calmly live
Beyond that state in which men take
To sorrow and to joys.
He is eloquent and conservative, truly a lovely well-educated throng. In this school of matched personalities, he is the understanding teacher who listens with an avid curiosity and presumes how the child will develop, and sees his own journey every day in the things he teaches, says, implores.
It is inevitably sad, and besides Pessoa himself, he is the saddest of his characters. Because he is the most mortal, in knowing his place apart from the universal and from being a side character more than an infinite testament to man:
Recalling who i was, i see somebody else.
In memory the past becomes the present.
Who i was is somebody i love,
Yet only in a dream.
The sadness that torments me now
Is not for me nor for the past invoked,
But for him who lives in me
Behind blind eyes.
Nothing knows me but the moment.
Even my memory is nothing, and i feel
That who i am and who i was
Are two contrasting dreams.
And then there's Walt Whitman, the infinite testament to Man i was just talking about, Alvaro de Campos. Someone who even within the most unimpressive, paltry statements makes a huge ordeal of the ecstasies within the perameters of any space:
I have a terrible cold.
And everyone knows how terrible colds
Change the whole structure of the universe.
Making us sore at life,
Making us sneeze till we get metaphysical.
My day is wasted, full of blowing my nose.
My head aches vaguely.
A sad fix for a minor poet to be in!
Today I'm really a minor poet.
Whatever i was turns into a dream-wish that's disappeared.
or
Go eat your chocolates, little one!
Eat your chocolates!
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.
Look, all the world's religions are just as edifying as making candy.
So eat, my dirty little one, eat them up!
If i could only down those chocolates as honestly as you do!
But no, i'm the thoughtful kind who peels off the silver wrapper,
thinks, This is only tinfoil,
And throws it all on the floor, just as I've thrown my life away...
He is a sincere guy who enjoys everything, even anguish and that which he hates. Pure celebration. And because of this, he is Man. He taps what masculinity is supposed to be about: the bravery of choice...Noble, at least, in the grand gesture i make / of casting out the dirty clothes I am, with no laundry list, into / the drift of things, / And stay at home shirtless.
“And stay at home shirtless”. What provocation! What inclination! What a message, what a delight and a feeling. To walk around the home naked is a feeling of security and freedom and suggestion, it is a feeling of warmth and a symbol of contemplation without being overly exerting. It is simply prying into Saturday, which is how Campos spends all of his time, navigating the hills of ancient lands and speaking about the wonders of their greens, their maidens, their perfection in this world.
He celebrates the hope of the world, and with his “Maritime Ode” exudes all the praise to the majesty of the open seas and its sailors and its rapists and its distants lands and its loch ness monsters and everything imaginable, he eats consumes lies subservient and dies/lives for/amongst:
I want to be the beast
that acts out all your gestures,
that sinks its teeth in keels and gunwales,
that eats the masts and sops up blood and tar on deck,
that chews up sails and oars, ropes and pulleys,
a monster female sea-serpent, glutting herself on crimes!
A symphony of sensations rises, incompatible and analogous,
an orchestration of tumultuous crimes, dinning in my blood,
of spasmodic bloody orgies resounding on the sea,
rising wildly like a hot gale in my soul,
a hot dust cloud dimming my lucidity,
making me see and dream all this through my skin and veins only!
The book ends with sorry old Pessoa, going on about sorry old bullshit. He knew he was a weak little man with tiny poetry. But that's alright. He's still capable of a few gems like “We Took The Town After a Heavy Bombing”:
The little blond boy
lies in the street
his guts hang out
and a toy train loose
loose on a string, forgotten.
His face is a mash
of ooze and nothing.
A celluloid fish
children float in a tub
glints on the curb.
Darkness covers the street.
Far off a light still casts its glow
on all tomorrow promises...
for the little blond boy?
Yeah, it's good and sad. It's poetic, decent. But Pessoa's characters are so much more full!