Pleasing the eye as things do, \ They are what they are - Alberto Caeiro, poet

In a comment yesterday, Vince of the Philosophy of Romance blog reminded me that Alberto Caeiro’s writing often functions more as aphorisms than as poems, however he labels them.  His plain pieces often seem like settings for his maxims, or wisdom, or punchlines, or whatever I should call them, which can often be stripped from the poem without too much damage.

Whether or not his paradoxes are resolvable, or his wisdom is wise, Caeiro does his work in chewy fragments:

Only Nature is divine, and she’s not divine. . . (XXVII, HB)

For the only hidden meaning of things
Is that they have no hidden meaning at all. (XXXIX, PR)

Like the Universe, I pass and I remain. (XLVIII, HB)

I don’t care about rhyme.  You seldom find
Two trees alike, standing side by side. (XIV, PR)

That “seldom” (“raras” in Portuguese) is a hilariously fussy touch.   I think this is how I have been responding to him, as a sage, or a trickster.  As a philosophical stance, which I then try to understand, or, if I am Ricardo Reis, try to cram into my own stuffy poems.  But Caeiro was a poet, too, a narrow one, but real.  Here’s my favorite poem of his:

The soap-bubbles which this child
Blows from a straw for amusement
Are transparently a philosophy in themselves.
Shiny, useless and transient as Nature,
Pleasing the eye as things do,
They are what they are
In a precisely spherical and airy way,
And no one, not even the child who launches them
Claims they are more than they seem.
There are some you can scarcely see in the clear air.

They’re like the passing breeze which scarcely stirs the flowers,
Its passing known to us only
Because something quickens within us
And accepts all things with clear insight.  (XXV, PR)

Caeiro takes a step or two outside of himself in this poem, which does not hurt.  “Transparently” is a pun, an actual joke, as is, I suspect, “precisely,” a word that is often invoked to conceal imprecision.

The soap-bubbles are an effective metaphor for Nature, Caeiro’s idea of Nature, exactly because they are created by a person.  In Caeiro’s poems, Nature is often a setting for the human – a river has meaning (or no meaning) because it flows through his village; in one poem a ticking watch beside his bed somehow becomes Nature (XLIV); and, even if the physical objects are just trees and plants, there is always the observer, the poet, “a human animal produced by Nature” (XLVI).

The bubbles are also poems, of course, Caeiro’s poems, inspired by “something,” shiny, useless, and transient.  Can they really be no more than what they seem?  A bluff, a gag, a writer’s false arrogance.

Maybe I’ll get this little Portuguese project going and see how Caeiro’s poems look a few months from now.

PR is Peter Rickard’s translation of Caeiro; HB is Honig and Brown, whose translation I also used yesterday but forgot to mention.

My soul is simple and doesn’t think - untranscendent Caeiro

The Keeper of Sheep, treated like a book, contains 49 poems, most quite short, a stanza or two, the longest, a trivial fantasy of Christ’s return, as long as six pages.  The importance of the collection is disproportionate to its size, and can hardly be indicated by any particular poem.  Almost every poem, though, has a blunt argumentative power.   Alberto Caeiro is kin to Thoreau, a prick for our thick hides.  Yelling “Knock it off!” is, to Caeiro, better than doing nothing.  Caeiro, like Thoreau, is kind of a jerk, or plays one in his writing.

I find it so natural not to think
That I start laughing sometimes when alone
At what, I really don’t know, but something
Having to do with people who think. . . .  (XXXIV, ellipses in original)

Hey, he’s laughing at me!  “Nothing thinks anything” he writes later in the same poem.  I don’t like where he puts me.   Poets get the same treatment in poem XXXVI:

And there are poets who are artists
And work on their poems
Like a carpenter on his planks! . . .

And Caeiro is almost cruel to this crusader for humanity:

And, looking at me, he saw tears in my eyes
And smiled with satisfaction, thinking I felt
The hatred he did, and the compassion
He said he felt.
(But I was scarcely listening…)  (XXXII, ellipses mine)

If I make Caeiro sound like too much of a Transcendentalist, it is my fault more than his.  What is bracing about Caeiro is his continual rejection of the transcendent, often just at the moment I expect the leap into the unknown:

If they want me to be a mystic, fine.  I’m a mystic.
I’m a mystic, but only of the body.
My soul is simple and doesn’t think.  (XXX)

And then the poet retreats to his “solitary whitewashed cabin.”  If he writes, if he uses language, it is for the sake of “deluded men” and “their stupidity of feeling” (XXXI).  In four poems in a row, Caeiro explicitly embraces transcendence of himself – “I’d give anything if only my life were an oxcart” (XVI) or “I’d give anything just to be the roadside dust” (XVIII), but these poems are preceded by another, in which Caeiro insists that “I wrote them when I was ill…They agree with what they disagree” (XV) which is either completely ridiculous or a fine joke.  That ungrammatical, nearly nonsensical last sentence is what one would expect from an untutored shepherd poet, yes?

Caeiro’s poems are packed with bad ideas, plainly stated, and better ideas, concealed, perhaps.  Ricardo Reis, for example, always seems to indulge in what I take as the shallowest side of Caeiro, the pointless search for authenticity, the rejection of subjectivity, like Caeiro’s example gives him an excuse for his pessimism.  Words like “subjectivity” belong to Reis.  Caeiro does not write like that. Reis is Caeiro gone sour.

This will take more reading and, although Caeiro forbids it, thought to sort out.  Maybe I should try to learn some Portuguese, too.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll look at his single best poem, make the case that Caeiro was a poet, not just a bundle of crude philosophical positions.

How hard it is to be oneself and see only what is there! - radical Caeiro

Sometimes, on days of pure and perfect light,
When things are as real as real can be,
I quietly ask myself
Just what makes me suppose
That there is beauty in things.

The beginning of poem XXVI of The Keeper of Sheep is what we have here, this time in the translation of Peter Rickard (University of Texas Press, 1971).  Readers who follow me more closely than is wise may detect a hint of my interest in Alberto Caeiro, although I merely asked if there was beauty in literature, conceding the beauty of things from the start.  The naïve Caeiro is, unlike me, a real radical.

Is there beauty in a flower, then?
Is there beauty in a fruit?
No: they have colour and shape
And they exist, that’s all.
Beauty is non-existent, the name
I give to things in return for the pleasure they give me.
It has no meaning.
Why then do I say that things are beautiful?

Holy cow, Caeiro pushes this idea a lot farther than I dare – “they exist, that’s all”!  But that’s a lot, I think to myself, and why do we want to stop there?  Most of us, most of the time, stop all too soon, reflexively.  Caeiro makes an ideology of reduction.  He has a response for me, in poem XXII: “But who ordered me to want to understand? \ Who told me I had to understand?”

The simple pastoral poet seems to have been (not) reading Plato or Kant or who knows who – someone with genuine knowledge can help me out.  Or he is a throwback to the sorts of philosophers who talk about properties of matter, “extension,” that sort of thing.  Each brand of breakfast cereal is a specific combination of traits – sweetness, crunchiness, mouthfeel, and so on, all measured on a five point scale.  Everything is like breakfast cereal.  Color, shape, existence.  Why are these components not themselves understandable, or beautiful?  Perhaps Caeiro has an answer to his difficult question.

Yes, even to me, who live just by living,
Come all unseen the lies men tell
When faced with things,
When faced with things which simply exist.

How hard it is to be oneself and see only what is there!

Kinda strong, huh, “lies”?  The corruptions of men, received ideas, I guess, must be resisted.  At least the poet acknowledges the difficulty of his stance.  If Caeiro, who lives just by living, has so much trouble, what can I, who live not only by living, but also by thinking, possibly do?

Ricardo Reis, a contemporary of Caiero, wrote that “my knowledge of The Keeper of Sheep opened my eyes to seeing,” a paradox more interesting than anything I have seen in his own poems.  Did Reis’ knowledge just happen somehow, or did it require something more active, some kind of knowing?  My eyes were already open, and already saw, or so I claim.

I just read – I think I just read, but cannot find – a line by Annie Dillard, in Living by Fiction (1982) to the effect that good criticism has no obligation to be right but rather to be fruitful.  The same is true of poetry.  Is there beauty in the abundant fruitfulness of Caiero?

One who doesn’t understand what’s said \ And likes to pretend he does - Alberto Caeiro never kept sheep

I have been thinking about doing some Portuguese reading.  A project, a Challenge, maybe.  I don’t know.   Regardless, I decided to start at the top of the heap, so to speak, with the most influential Portuguese poet of the 20th century, Alberto Caeiro (1889-1915), the paradoxical pastoral poet, the shepherd without sheep.  Or so he says in the poem that leads The Keeper of Sheep, the collection he wrote in 1914.*

I never kept sheep,
But it’s as if I’d done so.
My soul is like a shepherd.
It knows wind and sun
Walking hand in hand with the Seasons
Observing, and following along.
All of Nature’s unpeopled peacefulness
Comes to sit alongside me.

And I’ll stop, because the next set of images is in bad taste and might spoil the effect.  Caeiro was what we would now call a naïve artist, untrained and unconnected to Portugal’s literary culture, born in Lisbon but spending most of his life living with an aunt in the countryside.  Thus the free verse, the informal language, the plain vocabulary.  As if he were a character in a Theocritus pastoral poem.  As if.

Thinking is discomforting like walking in the rain
When the wind increases, making it look as if it’s raining harder.
I’ve no ambitions or desires.
My being a poet isn’t an ambition.
It’s my way of being alone.

Caeiro conflates writing and walking.  Like William Wordsworth, he composes while walking.

I write lines on the paper of my thoughts,
I feel the staff in my hands
And glimpse an outline of myself
On top of some low-lying hill,
Watching over my flock and seeing my ideas,
Or watching over my ideas and seeing my flock,
And smiling vaguely like one who doesn’t understand what’s said
And likes to pretend he does.

The simple poet seems not-so-simple now.  The simile suggests that he actually does understand what’s said but likes to pretend he doesn’t.   Is the whole thing a pose?  I do not remember Wordsworth advising his reader like Caeiro does, as the poem ends ("they" are the imagined readers):

And when reading my poems thinking
Of me as something quite natural –
An ancient tree, for instance,
In whose shade they thumped down
When they were children, tired after play,
Wiping the sweat off their hot foreheads
With the sleeve of their striped smocks.

An unusual depiction of reading, isn't it?  It's something I do after exhausting play.  The twenty-five year poet is an ancient tree; his poems are the shade.  A couple of lines before, the reader is in "Somebody's favorite chair."  Poetry puts us in two places at once.

Well, let’s spend some more time with Alberto Caeiro and see if we can get to the bottom of this.  He is a long ways from a perfect poet, sometimes a long ways from a good one, clumsy, facile, sneering.  Then there are those other times.

“I never kept sheep” now exists in several English translations.  I’m using the version by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown in The Keeper of Sheep, Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.

*  The publication history of The Keeper of Sheep is a little complicated.