The
Oxford Book
Of Portuguese Verse
Oxford University Press
_London_ _Edinburgh_ _Glasgow_ _Copenhagen_
_New York_ _Toronto_ _Melbourne_ _Cape Town_
_Bombay_ _Calcutta_ _Madras_ _Shanghai_
Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY
The
Oxford Book
Of Portuguese Verse
XIIth Century-XXth Century
Chosen by
Aubrey F. G. Bell
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
1925
Printed in England
Á Illma. Exma. Sra.
D. CAROLINA MICHAËLIS DE VASCONCELLOS
A QUEM TANTO DEVEM
A LITERATURA E A LINGUA PORTUGUESA
INTRODUCTION
Portugal only began to exist at the end of the eleventh century (1095),
and the first century of its existence was tentative, since it was
occupied in disengaging itself from Galicia in the north and in extending
itself over the south, held by the Moors. The Cid had fought and died
and the _Poema de mio Cid_ had been written before Portugal became a
separate kingdom. Thus a nation did not properly exist to sing the epic
deeds of Afonso Henriquez (who was making a new nation) and other heroes,
and the legends of the battle of Ourique (1139) were handed down orally,
to be chronicled later in prose. Portuguese literature opens without
epics. The lyric poetry of the troubadours came to Portugal as it went
to Sicily and Spain, about a century after it had begun to flourish in
Provence. The founder of Portugal had been a French prince of the House
of Burgundy. Whole colonies of Frenchmen settled in the new country
and helped to drive the Moors southward, and the Benedictines of Cluny
played no small part in its affairs. Portugal, by its geographical
situation, its extensive seaboard, and the neighbourhood of Galicia
with the world-famous pilgrimages to Santiago, was peculiarly exposed
to foreign influences and also received many crusaders on their way
to the Holy Land, not a few of whom settled in the country. It is,
therefore, not surprising that Portugal had close relations with France
and was not ignorant of the poetry of the _trouvères_ of the north,
from which some of the Portuguese _pastorelas_ may have been directly
imitated. It was, however, the poetry of the troubadours of Provence that
predominated, and this came to Portugal through Spain and the courts of
Aragon, León, and Castille, with which that of Portugal became intimately
connected by dynastic marriages. Unhappily, this poetry lost heavily in
exportation to Portugal as to other lands, and although it was cultivated
by Court poets with uncommon zeal, it grew up white and insipid, like
a plant in a cellar. Despite astonishing technical excellence, the
Portuguese-Provençal _cantigas de amor_ lack variety and character. It
was only the satirical _cantigas de maldizer_ that were as coloured and
personal as any _sirventès_ of Provence. Perhaps it was the very monotony
of the _cantigas de amor_ that caused another kind of lyric to flourish
side by side with the imported Provençal. This indigenous poetry is
confined in Portugal to the region north of the Tagus, and King Dinis,
the last poet to patronize it keenly, was the first king to establish
his court so far south as Lisbon. The first specimen that we have is by
King Sancho I, an earlier Dinis, and dates from 1199, ten years after the
first recorded poem in Portuguese (Galician). During the period between
1220 and 1280 the indigenous poetry was cultivated abundantly, by noble
_trovador_ and humble _jogral_, by priest and soldier, in Portugal and
Galicia, and by foreigners who composed their lyrics in Galician, the
language of the new kingdom of Portugal. Other literatures offer no
parallel to these strange, exquisite _cossantes_, as it is convenient
to call them (always remembering that the Spanish _cossante_ was by no
means confined to the parallel-strophed lyrics); nor were it easy to
find poems of such freshness and grace elsewhere. Portuguese literature
is thus opened with a golden key. That we are privileged so to open
it is due to the researches of recent years, which constitute, in the
words of that great scholar Menéndez Pelayo, ‘one of the most splendid
achievements of modern learning’. These researches were mainly those of
foreigners. It has ever been a characteristic of the Portuguese, in their
love of new things, to neglect their past, as the _minhotos_ whitewash
their ancient shrines; although a brilliant group of modern scholars,
with Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos at its head, is now making up for past
remissness. Writers of the sixteenth century, if they knew of these
ancient lyrics, were half ashamed of their roughness and rusticity, and
it was left for the nineteenth century to re-discover them in the Vatican
Library at Rome. Even so, the full appreciation of the value and beauty
of these poems has been reserved for the twentieth century. Together with
the Portuguese-Provençal poetry they are preserved in the _Cancioneiro da
Vaticana_ (1875), _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ (1880), and _Cancioneiro
da Ajuda_ (1904), fascinating song-books which are the most striking
commentary on the statement of the Marqués de Santillana that it had been
customary for poets throughout the Peninsula to compose their lyrics in
Galician; for we have here not only poems by Galicians and Portuguese,
King of Portugal or Canon of Santiago, but those of high-placed
_trovador_, poor _segrel_, and lowly _jogral_ from León and Castille and
other parts of Spain. Although the earliest _cossante_ we have belongs
to the end of the twelfth century, they were in all probability of
immensely older date in Galicia, and whatever influence may be assigned
to the Arabic poetry of the south of Portugal must have been derivative,
having been received originally from Galicia. Of Oriental origin in so
far as they were copied from the psalms and hymns of Church services, the
_cossantes_ are Celtic (a term perhaps more convenient than scientific
in this connexion) in spirit, and in tone and structure belong to the
people. They consist of two, four, or more distichs with a refrain, of
which the second and fourth, while often altering the sound from _i_
to _a_ (_pino_ to _ramo_, _amigo_ to _amado_), repeat the sense of the
first and third, the first line of the third taking up the last of the
first, and so on to the end, where the position of the song (always
accompanied by its music—_son_) is found to be very much the same as it
was after the first two verses, as far as the sense is concerned. They
were dance-songs (_bailadas_), danced by the peasants in the villages
_de terreiro_ or before pilgrimage shrines; _alvoradas_ (songs of
dawn); pilgrimage songs (_cantigas de romaria_); shepherds’ hill-songs
(_serranilhas_), boat-songs (_barcarolas_); songs of _ría_ and sea
(_marinas_). Those that we possess are not anonymous, although many of
their authors are obscure. As a rule these _cantigas de amigo_ are placed
on the lips of a love-lorn girl waiting or mourning for her lover, and
it is scarcely doubtful that in the twelfth century they were copied by
the _jograles_ from the songs composed and sung by the women in Galicia.
The happy result for us is that this neglected literature yields at the
outset something new and entirely charming, which lovers of poetry can as
ill afford to neglect and ignore as the poems of Chaucer or any other
priceless heritage of song. That they were danced by the peasants or sung
as a glee by shepherds on the hills does not belie the religious origin
of the _cossantes_, since dancing itself was primarily religious and to
sing was the shepherd’s form of prayer. The fact merely indicates their
immeasurable antiquity. A song, perfectly grave and melancholy, such as
King Dinis’s _Ai flores, ai flores_ might be sung by a solitary maiden in
the gloom of the pinewoods or danced by pilgrims in the courtyard of a
shrine.
The world-wide cult of St. James of Galicia certainly had much to do with
the fact that Alfonso X, the Learned, who had nobly laid the foundations
of Castilian prose, wrote his hymns to the Virgin in Galician. He may
have learnt it as a boy, he certainly, himself, wrote the greater part
of the _Cantigas de Santa Maria_, which were first printed in 1889 and
will be far more widely read when they are published in a more accessible
edition. The king spread his net for miracles in many lands, and he
claimed no originality of theme, but he could clothe the more beautiful
legends in verse which preserves their beauty, and if his care for rhyme
sometimes led him astray, he always retained the popular atmosphere
of the miracles and often a word here and there belonging to the land
of their origin. Some of those which interested him less he may have
entrusted to the _jograles_ at his Court, a few may have come to him
already versified; but the majority are his own, and place him very
high among early singers—not as a great original poet or a master of
technique, but as a conscientious and delightfully eager craftsman who
realized the poetry inherent in these simple stories. He has a genuine
sympathy for the humble types described in many of his _cantigas_:
reapers, fishermen, monks, nuns, poor old peasant-women, the little Musa
_garridelinna_. Alfonso X wrote a few profane poems, one of which is
in the stirring metre of the famous Leonoreta song composed by Joan de
Lobeira in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Pai Charinho, Lord
High Admiral of Castille under Alfonso X and a more delicate poet than
his master, wrote no religious verse, but his _cossantes_, with the lyric
of another Galician, Roy Fernandez, are the most beautiful, hauntingly
beautiful, of the early poems relating to the sea.
A Portuguese writer of the seventeenth century, Antonio de Sousa de
Macedo, says point-blank that he saw and read sacred poems by King Dinis
in the Escoriai, and describes the codex. If in his youth the king, at
the exhortation of his grandfather Alfonso X, wrote such verse, it has
now disappeared, and among the 138 poems preserved under his name is
none of a religious character. They comprise Provençal love-poems and
_cantigas de amigo_,[1] and some charming specimens of the _cossante_, in
which he shows that he had inherited King Alfonso’s fondness for popular
themes, whether he himself composed these delicious _cossantes_, or, as
may appear more probable, merely collected them. He also wrote a few
satirical poems. Satire had gone hand in hand with lyrism in Portugal
from the first, and was considered one of the most important functions
of poetry. The _cantigas de escarnio_ and _de maldizer_, although often
exceedingly coarse, form, historically, one of the most interesting
sections of the early song-books. King Dinis was a true poet, even a
great poet, although his inspiration may not have been as genuine as
that of Airas Nunez, priest of Santiago. He strove with success to play
the part in Portuguese literature that Alfonso X had played in Castille,
encouraged the writing of Portuguese prose, and gave a last prosperity
to Portuguese-Provençal song, which he himself wrote with conspicuous
skill. It was characteristic of his national policy that he, the prince
so carefully trained in Provençal song by his father Afonso III, who had
returned from a long sojourn in France to usurp his brother’s throne,
should so actively encourage the indigenous _cossante_, as did also
one of his sons, D. Afonso Sanchez. It was a late harvest, and after
King Dinis’s death a _jogral_ of León tells us that the troubadours of
Portugal and León, Castille and Aragon were silent: ‘nunca pois de sa
morte trobaron’, and the _jograles_ no longer received presents or money.
A long gap follows in Portuguese poetry, although a thin aftermath
of Galician song continued in Spain up to the very threshold of the
Renaissance. Macias, ‘the Lover’, composed verse and inspired poetry
in others, but neither he nor any other of the Galician-Portuguese
contributors to the _Cancionero de Baena_, the celebrated Villasandino,
the less prosperous scapegrace Garci Sanchez, the jovial Gonzalo
Rodriguez, Archdeacon of Toro, were poets of the first order. To
Casquicio and to Vasco Perez de Camões (ancestor of Luis de Camões),
since we possess none of their poems, it may be charitable to give the
favour of a doubt. The Galician Joan Rodriguez del Padron, or de la
Cámara, wrote in Spanish, and, indeed, when the Marqués de Santillana
addressed his famous letter to D. Pedro, Constable of Portugal, son
of Pedro Duke of Coimbra and nephew of Prince Henry the Navigator,
Galician poetry in Spain was practically dead. Nor had the attempt at
a religious-erudite poetry, made by the first princes of the House of
Avis, prospered in Portugal, its most individual product being the short
poem by João I’s granddaughter, D. Philipa de Lencastre. During the
close relations between Spain and Portugal in the fourteenth century,
the idea of uniting the two crowns was often in men’s minds. When the
national spirit of the Portuguese people and the genius and energy of the
Master of Avis and Nun’ Alvarez had prevented that union by the campaign
of Aljubarrota (1385), a reaction followed in favour of Portuguese
literature, but it mainly took the form of prose, and was expressed in
the incomparable chronicles of Fernam Lopez. This lost opportunity of
reviving the national poetry paved the way for the return of Castilian
influence. This was many-sided, and of such force that the tables were
completely turned and Castilian now became the more universal language.
It was the brother of D. Philipa de Lencastre, the Constable D. Pedro,
the prince of the strange, romantic career, poet, exile, and finally king
in a foreign land, who brought back new metres from Castille and himself
wrote his prose works as well as his long _Menosprecio del Mundo_ in
Castilian. Another even more significant and more popular importation
from Spain was that of the _romances_, the growth of Spanish influence
in Portugal happening to coincide with the increasing vogue of the
_romance_ in Spain. The Portuguese wrote _romances_ in Spanish, which
they considered the proper language for this form of poetry, and it has
been suggested that some of the loveliest and most wistful of the Spanish
_romances_ were written by Portuguese or Galicians. In Portugal the
epics out of which the Spanish _romances_ sprang did not exist, and a
large number of Portuguese _romances_ show clear traces of their Spanish
origin, but the Portuguese, with their power of rapid assimilation, also
composed a considerable number more Portuguese in theme and treatment,
their vague melancholy contrasting with the dramatic vigour of the
Spanish, so that many _romances_ are found not only in Tras-os-Montes
bordering on Spain but as far west as the Azores.
Spanish influence is prominent also in the collection of poems embracing
some three-quarters of a century (1445-1516) and published by Garcia de
Resende in 1516 as a Portuguese _Cancioneiro Geral_. This vast repertory
of Court verse contains the poems of some two hundred authors written in
Spanish and Portuguese. Their poems have this much in common, that they
are mainly artificial in metre and commonplace in theme. For the rest
they vary greatly: there are _cantigas_, _esparsas_, and _vilancetes_,
which consist of a few neatly turned lines containing a courtier’s
compliment or jest or sigh; there are _trovas de arte maior_ which were
reserved for the _poeta_ as opposed to the mere _trovador_; there are
a few poems of true inspiration, such as that of the obscure Francisco
de Sousa, and others in which the influence of Italian poetry, but once
removed, coming, that is, through Spain and the Marqués de Santillana,
is apparent. It is easy to see that their compiler was a courtier, and
in fact Garcia de Resende was brought up at the palace of King João
II, who appreciated his talents in drawing, music, and poetry, and he
spent his whole life at the Portuguese Court, except when he was sent on
friendly missions to other princes. His _trovas_ on the death of Inés de
Castro show that he could write with a fine simplicity and pathos, but
everything genuinely popular was excluded from his collection, and it
might well seem at the end of the fifteenth century that the indigenous
poetry of Portugal had been definitively relegated to the hills.
But just when this poetry seemed—or to us it seems—to have disappeared,
hustled out by the Court poets of the Spanish school, with no King
Dinis to defend it from oblivion, the great events of 1490-1500, the
discoveries and conquests in Africa, America, and Asia stirred Portugal
to its depths and brought the popular poetry once more to the surface.
Not a peasant, not a shepherd but dreamed of migrating to Lisbon to
serve the King or to the Indies in search of gold. The songs of the
people, the old parallel-strophed _cossantes_ of the early _Cancioneiros_
reappeared at Court, and their spirit was embodied in his plays by Gil
Vicente, a great poet by reason of his devoted attachment to the soil,
his sincerity, his divine lyrical gift. How far he improved on the real
songs sung by the peasants and shepherds we cannot know, but judging from
his very natural presentment of peasant types, his persistent realism,
which disdained neither incorrect and coarse phrases, nor any of the
most ordinary features in the life of the mountain villages which he
knew so well, we may assume that such songs were really to be heard
among the hills of Portugal and may believe that, had the taste of the
time encouraged him, he might have collected a song-book of unparalleled
interest and beauty, and perhaps with a surer instinct than three
centuries later Almeida Garrett, whose impulse was to polish. We must be
content with the lovely fragments and specimens of this lyrical poetry
which his plays contain, and with the even more fragmentary gleanings
in Barbieri’s _Cancionero Musical_. It was a short-lived opportunity;
the people under the new conditions soon lost their songs, or rather
they lost their simple gaiety and exchanged the native flavour of the
_cossante_ for what was considered a more refined melancholy. During the
last years of his life Vicente was fighting an up-hill battle against
the new influences and the Latinizers of the Renaissance. He had himself
composed many of his plays in Spanish as the Spanish vogue grew and
prospered. In 1490, when he perhaps first came to Court, on the occasion
of the marriage of João II’s son Prince Afonso to a Spanish princess,
all the devices for the great tournament at Evora were written in
Spanish, with the exception of that of the King and one other. Indeed,
only the death of the infant Prince Miguel prevented the consummation
which occurred two generations later, when Philip II of Spain became
Philip I of Portugal. But these two generations were of vital importance
to Portugal and gave time for the fruit sown and so strenuously tended
during the two centuries from Dinis to João II to reach its full
maturity, so that Portugal could thereafter never suffer a loss of
independence other than temporary and superficial. Nevertheless, about
the year 1520 one might have looked forward to a second long blank in
Portuguese poetry such as had occurred two centuries earlier—another
Spanish blank. It was due to the personal triumph of one man, Gil
Vicente’s rival, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, that this disaster was
averted and that, when the national poetry which had momentarily emerged
was melting away, yet another influence had arrived upon the scene. For
however strange it may seem to us that poems such as Dante’s _canzone_
‘Donne che avete intelletto d’amore’ or his sonnet ‘Tanto gentile e tanto
onesta pare’ should have remained without influence on Portuguese poetry
for two centuries, it is certain that the Italian metres and _dolce stil
nuovo_ only came definitively to Portugal with Sá de Miranda on his
return in or about 1526 from a several years’ stay in Italy, although
the Marqués de Santillana had specifically mentioned _el tercio rimo_
and sonnets in his letter to the Portuguese Constable three-quarters of
a century earlier. Indeed, so alien was the new poetry and so jejune
Miranda’s first attempts to acclimatize it that for some years he
strove in vain while the old octosyllabic _redondilhas_ and the Court
_vilancetes_ and _esparsas_ continued to flourish. But a man of Miranda’s
fine character and persistency, helped by the appearance in print in
1543 of the poems of Boscan and Garci Lasso, was not to be ignored, and
presently the mountains began to go to Mahomet in his delightful retreat
in Minho. D. Manuel de Portugal, the charming and mellifluous Diogo
Bernardez, Antonio Ferreira, the severe magistrate who refused to write
a single line of Spanish verse and who thus rendered an inestimable
service to the Portuguese language, but who only occasionally attained
lyrical beauty, perhaps indeed only in a single chorus of his celebrated
play _Inés de Castro_; the even less inspired and less amiable Pedro
de Andrade Caminha: these and others at Miranda’s death in 1557 were
there to assure the success of his school, while the lyrical vein of the
sixteenth century continued to find expression in such felicitous verses
as those addressed to the river Leça by Francisco de Sá de Meneses and a
few of the poems of the anonymous _Sylvia de Lisardo_. Of these writers
Portuguese poetry owes most to Bernardez, and from what we possess of
the poems of his brother, Frei Agostinho da Cruz, we suspect that he
was as richly endowed as his brother Diogo in poetical talent, which he
sacrificed to religious asceticism. It is owing to a group of eclogues
written in the old national octosyllabic metre when the influence of the
new school was beginning, and partly by its founder Miranda, that it is
possible to claim for Portuguese bucolic poetry a character strongly
original and indigenous and a quality of a strange, alluring charm.
The mere fact of their being composed in the short _redondilhas_ at
once removes them from the Theocritus-Virgil tradition. Such poems as
Miranda’s _Basto_, Bernardim Ribeiro’s _Jano e Franco_, and the _Trovas
de Crisfal_ traditionally assigned to Cristovam Falcam are works of a
quaint and exquisite freshness, thickly redolent of the very soil of
Portugal. Bernardim Ribeiro, whose mind became clouded by his ill-starred
and to us mysterious passion, embodies the quintessence of the Portuguese
genius. A foreigner nicely scanning the lines might be inclined to
conclude that his eclogues are not poetry, and say: ‘Here is a poet in
thought without a corresponding power of expression.’ But the Portuguese
know better, and feel that there is much art hidden in these concise,
elliptically halting verses, which are a deliberate and wonderfully
successful expression of an ingenuous simplicity. This fascination,
not of half-inarticulate versification but of an exceptionally gifted
lyrism belongs also to the _Trovas de Crisfal_, which possess all the
extraordinarily individual qualities of those eclogues but were probably
not the work of Ribeiro himself but an inspired imitation by his friend
and fellow-Alentejan Cristovam Falcam. The sorrows of Bernardez in and
after his captivity, for he was taken prisoner in the rout of Alcacer
Kebir (1578), having been chartered by King Sebastian to chronicle his
deeds in verse, were powerless to introduce a discordant note into the
unfailing smoothness of his verse; his sonnets and eclogues, which love
of his native Lima coloured with local charm, rivalled those of his great
contemporary Luis de Camões. Camões, however, was not content with a mere
monotony of beautiful sound. He was one of those rare poets, perhaps
especially rare in Latin countries, who can at once think and sing, and
his outlook, moreover, was in every respect more universal than that of
Bernardez. His wanderings led him not only to North Africa but to India
and the Far East. The education of this child of the Renaissance, clearly
imbued with Platonic and neo-Platonic influences, had been classical,
but he had a deep sympathy for the popular poetry, both in its themes
and metres. Evidently if he reverenced Sá de Miranda he rejoiced in Gil
Vicente, and he succeeded in either school as no Portuguese poet before
or since. His was an imitative genius, he read widely and there are
passages in his poetry which are inspired translations; but he also
brought to his work rich stores of thought and personal experience and
observation, and, whereas Miranda, when he attempted to imitate, remained
hard and wooden, Camões turned whatever he touched into delicate and
flexible gold and ivory—popular _redondilhas_, Petrarcan _canzoni_, or
Ariosto’s _ottava rima_. Six years before King Sebastian sailed away to
his doom, Camões had published his _Os Lusiadas_, the epic which has
ever since remained the national poem of the Portuguese, but, although
his glowing patriotism inspired him to this magnificent effort, his
true genius was lyrical. His ear was not faultless, and while he could
soar to heights attained at most by half a score of the world’s poets,
he did not always stop to finish a passage with the unerring art of
many a lesser Italian craftsman. But occasional defects are forgotten
in the transparent flow of his chryselephantine verse, in which the
details of thought and description appear embedded clearly in their
due order as pebbles in a stream. Vicente is Portugal’s most national
poet, and potentially her greatest, but in actual achievement, and
achievement fulfilled in the teeth of almost every possible obstacle and
disappointment, Camões claims and retains the first place. When he died
in 1580 this noble patriot and inspired singer was content, he said,
to die with his country; but his fate has been happier, since largely
through him his country continued to live and can still seek in him an
impulse to fresh hope and effort.
The sixteenth century in Portugal was all flower and fruit: no one
seemed to take thought for sowing and planting, so busily were all
engaged in the work of gathering in the harvest. Thus spiritually and
intellectually as well as physically Portugal lay at Spain’s mercy when
the direct line in the succession to the Portuguese throne failed. Nor
was the gongorical school which now invaded Portuguese literature in any
way uncongenial to the Portuguese temperament since the Latinization of
the Renaissance and the conquest of the East, which led its conquerors
captive. Fernam Alvarez do Oriente carried on Portuguese bucolic poetry
in its more harmonious, imitative shape: shorn of almost every vestige of
the indigenous poetry but preserving the purity of the language used by
Bernardez and Camões; and the same purity of style a little later in the
Spanish domination marked the long pastoral works of Francisco Rodriguez
Lobo, in which prose and verse are combined as in Alvarez do Oriente’s
_Lusitania Transformada_ and in the _Arcadia_ of Sannazaro which he had
taken for his model. Rodriguez Lobo, though not an original poet, was
fortunately very Portuguese, a poet of a charming and authentic vein,
whose only fault seems to be that he poured forth excellent prose and
verse in too great abundance, and he could write such _vilancetes_ as
are the best, if not the only true poetry of the seventeenth century in
Portugal. Most of the lyric poets whose verse is preserved for us in the
_Fenix Renascida_, a collection which is more often a heap of weeds than
a selection of flowers, cannot for long forgo their points and conceits,
and this misuse of talent, often genuine enough, marred even the mystic
verse in which the long-lived nuns Sor Violante do Ceo and Sor Maria
do Ceo, and also courtiers such as D. Francisco de Portugal excelled.
No doubt a slim volume of simple and attractive verse might be gleaned
from the seventeenth century, but the general effect is gongorical and
affected, and the rank growth of verse with no adequate criticism to
check it is distressing. Some satirical verse of merit was produced, and
the satirist occasionally turned his weapon against the affectations of
style in vogue. No merciful criticism was at hand to prevent the lengthy
epics with which one writer after another, for we will not call them
poets, sought to eclipse _Os Lusiadas_ and render themselves immortal
in song. The length and number of these epics must have frightened
away many readers from Portuguese literature, and partly justified an
eighteenth-century Italian in describing that literature as a fungus
growth. The greatest Portuguese prose-writer of the seventeenth century,
D. Francisco Manuel de Mello, was at least never dull. If we except
Rodriguez Lobo, as belonging indeed rather to the sixteenth than to the
seventeenth century, Manuel de Mello’s claim to be regarded as the latter
century’s chief poet in Portugal is not negligible. But it is truer,
perhaps, to say that in his verse he remains a minnow among minnows.
His trenchant energy is best fitted for prose; he could skilfully turn
a _quintilha_ or a sonnet, and his verse is always lively and spirited,
but for poetry to retain its charm and at the same time be as forcible
and incisive as Manuel de Mello’s temperament demanded would require the
technique and imagination of a Camões, and Manuel de Mello’s verse too
often resembles a plant from which the blossoms have been slashed away,
leaving but a vigorous and pungent growth of stalk. On the whole, the
poetry of this period was marked rather by a perversion of taste than by
a lack of vigour, and certainly contained within it elements of better
things. Yet no national poetry followed the Restoration of 1640, and over
literature as over politics hung what Antonio Vieira in 1673 describes as
‘o nosso indifferentismo’.
The _Fenix Renascida_ was not published until 1716, and the
eccentricities of the _seiscentistas_ lingered on into the eighteenth
century, which in Portugal was as barren of lyrical poetry as elsewhere.
Even when a new school, that of the _Arcadias_, arose and many poets
came to the front, lyrical poetry remained far to seek. Spanish
influence and the long-lived Portuguese _gongorismo_ were replaced by
the pseudo-classicism of a group of writers who believed that to imitate
Horace successfully was sufficient and possible. In their hatred of the
Spanish school they went to France and Italy, but they also turned to
the classical poets of Portugal, especially to Miranda and Ferreira; if
this could not give them the lyrical inspiration which they lacked, it
did help them to write idiomatic Portuguese, and this remains for us
the chief merit of their voluminous poetry. Corrêa Garção is perhaps,
with Filinto, the best, at least the best known poet of the time, and
his apparently harsh treatment by the Marqués de Pombal and death in
prison have won for him among the critics a sympathy which his verse
only occasionally justifies. Garrett, in one of those outbursts with
which Portuguese critics vary their habitual neglect of their native
literature, declared that Corrêa Garção’s _Cantata de Dido_ is ‘one of
the most sublime conceptions of human genius, one of the most perfect
works executed by the hand of man’; but, without denying that this
poem, as well as many of his sonnets, has merit, we are more inclined
to agree with Macedo’s verdict of ‘meagre’. Antonio Diniz da Cruz e
Silva won great fame among his contemporaries by his _Odes Pindaricas_;
to posterity he is known not as a lyric poet but as the author of a
burlesque poem entitled _O Hyssope_. Nicolau Tolentino de Almeida also
stands out from among the eighteenth-century poets by virtue of his
satire, which was of a more gentle vein than that of Diniz. Turning to Sá
de Miranda for his model, he succeeded in composing skilful _quintilhas_
and a few excellent sonnets. The Lisbon hairdresser, Domingos dos Reis
Quita is at his best when he is somewhat closely imitating Camões or
other Portuguese classics of bucolic poetry, from whom his idylls and
eclogues caught an unreal but graceful beauty. The Marquesa de Alorna,
who was born before the Lisbon earthquake and lived far into the reign
of Maria da Gloria, was a lady of wide culture who wrote accomplished
verse almost as voluminously as the more famous and equally long-lived
poet Francisco Manuel do Nascimento, better known by his Arcadian name
of Filinto Elysio. Of one of Filinto’s renowned odes Garrett exclaimed:
‘What is there in Pindar to compare with it?’ and we hasten to agree
that there is nothing, for one does not compare a sparrow with an eagle
or a star.[2] All that can be said of Filinto’s immense output of verse
is that it is written in excellent Portuguese and is of interest in its
references to popular customs and traditions, but is only occasionally
to be called poetry. The second half of the century witnessed a fierce
poetical rivalry between the crabbed ex-monk José Agostinho de Macedo,
who had the more virulent pen, and the runagate Manuel de Barbosa
du Bocage, who had the more genuine poetical talent. The latter was
encouraged by his admiring contemporaries to improvise continually, and
the whole of his poetry, even the sonnets which are considered among the
best in the Portuguese language, bear the mark of that straining after
effect or after perfection which characterized the whole of his short
life. The truest Portuguese poet of the eighteenth century, Bocage was
crushed by the weakness of his own character, by the circumstances of
his times, and by the prevalent lack of criticism. When he died at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, he left only a few elderly Arcadian
gods, Filinto, Tolentino, Macedo, the Marquesa de Alorna, solemnly
nodding across a barren waste, in which a genuine lyric would have been
as startling as a scarlet anemone springing up among the cobbles of a
crowded street. In the absence of true poetry, such graceful lyrics as
those of the _Marilia de Dirceu_ by the unfortunate Brazilian poet Thomaz
Antonio Gonzaga achieved a wide popularity.
A new poetry sprang out of the unpromising political welter in Portugal
in the first decades of the nineteenth century. While the energetic
Macedo in fierce pamphlets was calling down fire from Heaven, not to
inspire his own verse, for he considered that already sufficiently
inspired, but to blast his political opponents, Garrett was learning in
exile that there were more things in heaven and earth than a stilted
Filintian ode, the object of his youthful emulation. He returned to
Portugal with romanticism, so to speak, in his pocket, his Arcadian
manner shelved and forgotten. What was more, prompted by _The Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border_, he came with the determination to collect the
popular ballads of Portugal, and set to work in his early home, the
island of Terceira, in the interval which elapsed before the landing of
the small Liberal army at Mindello in 1832. Thus the century was already
well advanced when Garrett, seeking a double inspiration in the romantic
school and in popular poetry, founded a new national literature in
Portugal. The vague sentiment and subjective melancholy of romanticism
had, of course, characterized the work of many Portuguese poets before
Garrett; that of Bernardim Ribeiro no less than that of Bocage; but
Garrett made himself the standard-bearer of the new tendencies which
had spread themselves over the rest of Europe. Neither of his two
great contemporaries possessed his lyrical genius. Alexandre Herculano
impressed the poems written in his youth, before he had undertaken
his historical labours, with the biblical fervour and strength of his
character, in such a way as to give them a deep and permanent value.
Antonio Feliciano de Castilho was a year younger than Garrett, and
Garrett was but twenty-two when Castilho’s _Primavera_ was published,
harbinger of numerous poems of a dreamy charm prolificly expressed
in verse of classical perfection. The Arcadian school still reigned
unchallenged, and Castilho to the end of his long life belonged quite
as much to the pseudo-classicism of the eighteenth century as to the
romanticism of the second third of the nineteenth. Blind from childhood,
he was not endowed with imaginative genius of the first order, which
alone might have compensated for the irremediable lack of observation;
but in the purity of his style he rendered a real service to Portuguese
literature and became a model to younger writers. The singular,
many-sided Garrett himself was not slow to react against an excessive
romanticism, and his later lyrics in their concentrated intensity and
clear outline can scarcely be assigned to the romantic school. But it
was natural that younger writers, who could not inherit the glow and
charm of Garrett’s poetry, should tend to exaggerate the characteristics
of the new dispensation, and it soon became a mannerism with a crowd of
minor poets to sing vaguely and sentimentally of moonlight, death, and
autumn leaves. From these poets João de Lemos stands out by reason of a
more definite lyrical gift, and Soares de Passos in his _O Firmamento_
composed a fine poem which was something more than a metaphysical
_tour de force_. The patriotic voice of Thomaz Ribeiro and the faintly
satirical murmur of Bulhão Pato continued to sing sentimentally into the
twentieth century; nor did Castilho ever bow the knee to the younger
school which in 1865, ten years before his death, had ventured to dispute
his supremacy. The group of students who inaugurated this ‘Coimbra
School’ contained some distinguished poets. The delightful verse of João
de Deus Nogueira does not belong to them, or indeed to any school but
that of the Portuguese poetry of the soil and the popular _cantigas_,
those charming quatrains of which many thousands are now in print. The
agitated thinker Anthero de Quental, the greatest poet of the Coimbra
group, although an inspired sonnetteer, was not a lyrical poet. In other
writers of the realist reaction poetry succumbed to various influences;
in the work of Theophilo Braga (1843-1924), for instance, whose first
volume of verse appeared when he was sixteen and whose _Visão dos
Tempos_ received its definitive shape a generation later, true poetry is
slain on the dull altar of Positivism, with scarcely a candle to cast
a ray of light over the lugubrious sacrifice. In others it yields to
politics, as in the poems of Guilherme Braga, whose _Heras e Violetas_
are still remembered, and in much of the work of Guerra Junqueiro; or
to a superficial satire, as in the verses of João Penha and many of
the poems of Gomes Leal. The influence of Victor Hugo and the French
Parnassians, Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle, predominated, but it
was not a mere imitation, and if we consider the splendid sonnets of
Quental, the spontaneous lyrics of João de Deus, the wistful and even
morbid but genuine art of Antonio Nobre, the exquisite Parnassian verse
of Gonçalves Crespo, Antonio Feijó, and of a very large number of less
celebrated poets, the less ambitious among the poems of Gomes Leal, the
jewelled symbolism of Snr. Eugenio de Castro, the dreaming music of
Snr. Teixeira de Pascoaes, the natural and artistic inspiration of Snr.
Corrêa d’Oliveira and Snr. Affonso Lopes Vieira, above all the original
and arresting work of Guerra Junqueiro, one of the greatest modern Latin
poets, we will readily admit that Portuguese poetry during the last fifty
years can boast not only great variety but great success. If it has
failed to produce a Pascoli or a Carducci, that is due perhaps rather to
the absence of a basis of exact scholarship, of classical education, than
to any dearth of talent.
A goodly foison of Portuguese poets confronts us in the twentieth
century. Portugal has always been a land of numerous poets, and the blank
spaces in her literature are usually those in which no collector was
forthcoming to garner the harvest of song. One may not yet definitively
judge the younger poets. It is for the Portuguese critics to warn them
that if they are content to babble pleasantly in song they should do so
not publicly but in private; while as to the cubists and dadaists it
must always seem unjust that they should be granted the full light of
publicity whereas schoolgirls practising over their scales are relegated
to the schoolroom. Many of the recent poets, Parnassian, cloud-treader,
decadent, symbolist, have realized the high seriousness of their art, and
the poems poured forth in such abundance are so natural and occasionally
charming that the critic is disarmed. The material is sound, and when it
descends from vagueness and magniloquence to reality, to the life of the
peasants, the scenery of Portugal and its rich indigenous vocabulary, it
can, as in part of the poetry of Guerra Junqueiro, produce surprising
results. Perhaps, too, one may say that it profits by deeper acquaintance
with the literature of non-Latin countries and with the classics of
Portugal, Greece, and Rome. On some such lines it may be hoped that the
Portuguese poets of the twentieth century will be able to fill their
cunningly shapen bottles with the sweet savour of their soil and the
clear wine of light and life.
AUBREY F. G. BELL.
S. JOÃO DO ESTORIL, PORTUGAL.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Although all _cossantes_ are _cantigas de amigo_, the reverse is not
true.
[2] ‘Comparais uma estrela a um pardal’ (Gil Vicente, _Obras_ ii. 193).
NOTE
The Compiler’s thanks are especially due to Senhores Eugenio de Castro,
Teixeira de Pascoaes, Affonso Lopes de Vieira, and Corrêa d’Oliveira for
kind permission to print some of their poems. For the most part, living
poets have been omitted.
KING SANCHO I
[Sidenote: 1154-1211]
_1. Cantiga de amigo_
Ai eu coitada como vivo
en gran cuidado por meu amigo
que ei alongado: muito me tarda
o meu amigo na Guarda.
Ai eu coitada como vivo
en gran desejo por meu amigo
que tarda e non vejo: muito me tarda
o meu amigo na Guarda.
JOAN ZORRO
[Sidenote: fl. 1250]
_2. Barcarola_
Per ribeira do rio
vi remar o navio,
e sabor ei da ribeira!
Per ribeira do alto
vi remar o barco,
e sabor ei da ribeira!
Vi remar o navio
u vai o meu amigo,
e sabor ei da ribeira!
Vi remar o barco
u vai o meu amado,
e sabor ei da ribeira!
U vai o meu amigo:
quer-me levar consigo,
e sabor ei da ribeira!
U vai o meu amado:
quer-me levar de grado,
e sabor ei da ribeira!
_3. Barcarola_
En Lixboa sobre lo mar
barcas novas mandei lavrar
ai mia senhor velida!
En Lixboa sobre lo les
barcas novas mandei fazer,
ai mia senhor velida!
Barcas novas mandei lavrar
e no mar as mandei deitar,
ai mia senhor velida!
Barcas novas mandei fazer
e no mar as mandei meter,
ai mia senhor velida!
_4. Barcarola_
El rei de Portugal
barcas mandou lavrar,
e levará nas barcas sigo,
mia filha, o voss’ amigo.
El rei portugues
barcas mandou fazer,
e levará nas barcas sigo,
mia filha, o voss’ amigo.
Barcas mandou lavrar
e no mar as deitar,
e levará nas barcas sigo,
mia filha, o voss’ amigo.
Barcas mandou fazer
e no mar as meter,
e levará nas barcas sigo,
mia filha, o voss’ amigo.
_5. Barcarola_
Pela ribeira do rio
cantando ia la dona virgo
d’ amor:
venhan as barcas pelo rio
a sabor.
Pela ribeira do alto
cantando ia la dona d’ algo
d’ amor:
venhan as barcas pelo rio
a sabor.
_6. Bailada_
Bailemos agora, por Deus, ai velidas,
so aquestas avelaneiras frolidas
e quen for velida como nos velidas,
se amigo amar,
so aquestas avelaneiras frolidas
verrá bailar!
Bailemos agora, por Deus, ai loadas,
so aquestas avelaneiras granadas,
e quen for loada como nos loadas,
se amigo amar,
so aquestas avelaneiras granadas
verrá bailar!
_7. Pastorela_
Quen visse andar a fremosinha
com’ eu vi, d’ amor coitada,
e tan muito namorada
que chorando assi dizia:
Ai amor, leixedes m’ oje
de so-lo ramo folgar,
e depois treides migo
meu amigo demandar!
Quen visse andar a fremosa,
com’ eu vi, d’ amor chorando,
e dizendo e rogando
por amor da Gloriosa:
Ai amor, leixedes m’ oje
de so-lo ramo folgar,
e depois treides migo
meu amigo demandar!
Quen lh’ i visse andar fazendo
queixumes d’ amor d’ amigo
que ama, sempre sigo
chorando, assi dizendo:
Ai amor, leixedes m’ oje
de so-lo ramo folgar,
e depois treides migo
meu amigo demandar!
_8. Barcarola_
Mete el rei barcas no rio forte:
quen amigo ha que Deus lh’ o amostre,
alá vai, madre,
e oj’ ei soidade.
Mete el rei barcas na Estremadura:
quen amigo ha que Deus lh’ o aduga,
alá vai, madre,
e oj’ ei soidade.
_9. Barcarola_
Jus’ a lo mar e o rio
eu namorada irei,
u el rei arma navio,
amores, convosco m’ irei.
Jus’ a lo mar e o alto
eu namorada irei,
u el rei arma o barco,
amores, convosco m’ irei.
U el rei arma navio
eu namorada irei,
para levar a virgo,
amores, convosco m’ irei.
U el rei arma o barco,
eu namorada irei,
para levar a d’ algo,
amores, convosco m’ irei.
MEENDINHO
[Sidenote: 13th c.]
_10. Cantiga de romaria_
Sedia-m’ eu na ermida de San Simon
e cercaron-m’ as ondas que grandes son,
eu atendend’ o meu amigo!
Estava na ermida, ant’ o altar,
e cercaron-m’ as ondas grandes do mar,
eu atendend’ o meu amigo!
E cercaron-m’ as ondas que grandes son:
nen ei barqueiro nen remador,
eu atendend’ o meu amigo!
E cercaron-m’ as ondas grandes do mar:
nen ei barqueiro nen sei remar,
eu atendend’ o meu amigo!
Nen ei barqueiro nen remador,
e morrerei, fremosa, no mar maior,
eu atendend’ o meu amigo!
Nen ei barqueiro nen sei remar,
e morrerei, fremosa, no alto mar,
eu atendend’ o meu amigo!
NUNO FERNANDEZ TORNEOL
[Sidenote: 13th c.]
_11. Alvorada_
Levad’, amigo que dormides as manhanas frias:
toda-las aves do mundo d’ amor dizian,
leda m’ and’ eu.
Levad’, amigo que dormides as frias manhanas:
toda-las aves do mundo d’ amor cantavan,
leda m’ and’ eu.
Toda-las aves do mundo d’ amor dizian,
do meu amor e do voss’ enmentarian,
leda m’ and’ eu.
Toda-las aves do mundo d’ amor cantavan,
do meu amor e do voss’ i enmentavan,
leda m’ and’ eu.
Do meu amor e do voss’ enmentarian,
vos lhi tolhestes os ramos en que siian,
leda m’ and’ eu.
Do meu amor e do voss’ i enmentavan,
vos lhi tolhestes os ramos en que pousavan,
leda m’ and’ eu.
Vos lhi tolhestes os ramos en que siian,
e lhi secastes as fontes en que bevian,
leda m’ and’ eu.
Vos lhi tolhestes os ramos en que pousavan,
e lhi secastes as fontes u se banhavan,
leda m’ and’ eu.
_12. Cantiga de amigo_
Que coita tamanha ei a sofrer
por amar amig’ e non o veer,
e pousarei so-lo avelanal.
Que coita tamanha ei a endurar
por amar amig’ e non lhi falar,
e pousarei so-lo avelanal.
Por amar amig’ e non o veer,
non lh’ ousar a coita que ei dizer,
e pousarei so-lo avelanal.
Por amar amig’ e non lhi falar,
non lh’ ousar a coita que ei mostrar
e pousarei so-lo avelanal.
Non lh’ ousar a coita que ei dizer,
e non mi dan seus amores lezer,
e pousarei so-lo avelanal.
Non lh’ ousar a coita que ei mostrar,
e non mi dan seus amores vagar,
e pousarei so-lo avelanal.
_13. Barcarola_
Vi eu, mia madr’, andar
as barcas en o mar,
e moiro-me d’ amor.
Foi eu, madre, veer
as barcas en o les,
e moiro-me d’ amor.
As barcas en o mar,
e foi-las aguardar,
e moiro-me d’ amor.
As barcas en o les,
e foi-las atender,
e moiro-me d’ amor.
E foi-las aguardar
e non o pud’ achar,
e moiro-me d’ amor.
E foi-las atender
e non o pud’ i veer,
e moiro-me d’ amor.
E non o achei i
o que por men mal vi,
e moiro-me d’ amor.
[E non o pud’ achar,
o que vi por meu mal,
e moiro-me d’ amor.]
MARTIN DE GINZO
[Sidenote: 13th c.]
_14. Cantiga de amigo_
A do mui bon parecer
mandou lo adufe tanger,
louçana, d’ amores moir’ eu.
A do mui bon semelhar
mandou lo adufe sonar,
louçana, d’ amores moir’ eu.
Mandou lo adufe tanger
e non lhi davan lezer,
louçana, d’ amores moir’ eu.
Mandou lo adufe sonar
e non lhi davan vagar,
louçana, d’ amores moir’ eu.
PERO VIVIANEZ
[Sidenote: 13th c.]
_15. Bailada_
Pois nossas madres van a San Simon
de Vai de Prados candeas queimar,
nos as meninhas punhamos d’ andar
con nossas madres, e elas enton
queimen candeas por nos e por si,
e nos meninhas bailaremos i.
Nossos amigos todos lá iran
por nos veer, e andaremos nos
bailand’ ant’ eles fremosas sos,
e nossas madres, pois que alá van,
queimen candeas por nos e por si,
e nos meninhas bailaremos i.