Maritime Ode
A man alone on a Lisbon quay in the early morning watches a steamer grow out of the estuary haze, and the sight opens into everything a ship has ever meant to anyone who stayed behind. The voice climbs from nostalgia for voyages never taken into a shouted identification with slavers and pirates and the women they took, wanting to be the violence and the victim at once, then comes down again into the ordinary sound of a boat docking. Álvaro de Campos, the naval-engineer heteronym, is at his loudest here; Pessoa printed it in the single surviving issue of Orpheu that introduced Portuguese modernism.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ Song of Myself
Attributes
Genre
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 55% · 7 shared
- 53% · 8 shared
- 51% · 8 shared
- 51% · 7 shared
- 49% · 9 shared
- 49% · 8 shared