O amor é uma companhia (1930) by Alberto Caeiro

 

O amor é uma companhia.
Já não sei andar só pelos caminhos,
Porque já não posso andar só.
Um pensamento visível faz-me andar mais depressa
E ver menos, e ao mesmo tempo gostar bem de ir vendo tudo.

Mesmo a ausência dela é uma coisa que está comigo.
E eu gosto tanto dela que não sei como a desejar.
Se a não vejo, imagino-a e sou forte como as árvores altas.
Mas se a vejo tremo, não sei o que é feito do que sinto na ausência dela.

Todo eu sou qualquer força que me abandona.
Toda a realidade olha para mim como um girassol com a cara dela no meio.

Alberto Caeiro, the man who wrote this poem, didn't actually exist. He was just one of many names under which Fernando Pessoa would write. But Alberto Caeiro, actually, did exist. He was born in 1889 in Lisboa and died in 1915 of tuberculosis, also in the capital city. He was an orphan who didn't study further than the fourth grade and lived most of his life in rural Ribatejo, writing humble and bucolic poetry. He was of medium built and height, shaved, blonde, blue-eyed.

Pessoa is considered one of the finest poets Portugal ever produced, certainly the most well-regarded of the 20th century. Besides writing in his own name, he created dozens of heteronyms, characters whom he devised with their own biographies, physical appearances and, most importantly, writing styles, of which Caeiro was one of the main four. Pessoa was trying to create "him" to prank Mário de Sá-Carneiro (another great poet of the early 20th century), with nothing coming of it, when in March 8th, 1914, "the triumphal day" of his life, close to giving up, he got near a high table and wrote, standing up, "thirty-something poems in a row, in a kind of ecstasy". Those would become the collection "O Guardador de Rebanhos". Feeling as if his "master had shown up in himself" he proceeded to write six further poems in his own name (collectively know as Chuva Oblíqua).

The poem above is part of the collection "O Pastor Amoroso", which Ricardo Reis (another heteronym) regarded as a moment of decadence for the master, after he was inflicted by love.