Não pode haver inferno com Senhoras![8]
he declares in O Poeta Moribundo.
He is Brazil’s sick child par excellence, ill, like so many after him, with the malady of the century. But one must guard against attributing this to the morbid pose that comes so easy at twenty. Pose there was, and flaunting satanism, but too many of these poets in Brazil, and in the various republics of Spanish-America died young for one to doubt their sincerity altogether. The mood is a common one to youth; in an age that, like the romantic, made a literary fashion of their weakness, they were bound to appear as they appeared once again when Symbolism and the Decadents vanquished for a time the cold formalism of the Parnassian school.
That Alvares de Azevedo, for all his millennial doubts and despairs was a child, is attested by the following pedestrian quatrain from the poem of the quadruplicative title:
Mas se Werther morreu por ver Carlotta
Dando pão com manteiga as criancinhas,
Se achou-a assim mais bella,—eu mais te adoro
Sonhando-te a lavar as camisinhas![9]
Thackeray’s famous parody seems here itself to be parodied. Alvares de Azevedo’s love, if Verissimo was right, was “um amor de cabeça,”—of the head rather than the heart, a poet’s love, the “love of love,” without objective reality.… “It is rather a desire to love, the aspiration for a woman ideally beloved, than a true, personal passion. What does it matter, however, if he give us poems such as Anima mea, Vida, Esperanças, and all, almost all, that he left us?”
The boy-poet is still an appreciable influence in the national letters, as well he might be among a people inclined to moodiness; for many years he was one of the most widely read poets of the country, in company of his fellow-romantics, Gonçalves Dias and Castro Alves. Among his followers are Laurindo Rabello (1826-1864), Junqueira Freire (1832-1855) and Casimiro de Abreu (1837-1860),—not a long lived generation. Rabello was a vagrant soul whose verses are saved by evident sincerity. “I am not a poet, fellow mortals,” he sings, “and I know it well. My verses, inspired by grief alone, are not verses, but rather the cries of woe exhaled at times involuntarily by my soul.” He is known chiefly as a repentista (improvisator) and himself spread the popularity of his verses by singing them to his own accompaniment upon the violin. He tried to improvise life as well as verses, for he drifted from the cloister to the army, from the army to medicine, with a seeming congenital inability to concentrate. Misfortune tracked his steps, and, as he has told us, wrung his songs from him. Verissimo calls him one of the last troubadours, wandering from city to city singing his sad verses and forcing the laugh that must entertain his varying audiences. The popular mind so confused him with the Portuguese Bocage that, according to the same critic, some of Bocage’s verses have been attributed to the Brazilian.