When Castro Alves prepared the Espumas Fluctuantes for publication he already felt the hand of death upon him. In the short foreword that he wrote for the book—in a style that is poetry, though written as prose—he compared his verses to the floating spume of the ocean, whence the title of the book. “Oh spirits wandering over the earth! O sails bellying over the main!… You well know how ephemeral you are … passengers swallowed in dark space, or into dark oblivion.… And when—actors of the infinite—you disappear into the wings of the abyss, what is left of you?… A wake of spume … flowers lost amid the vast indifference of the ocean.—A handful of verses … spume floating upon the savage back of life!…”
This mood, this language, this outlook, are more than half of the youngster that was Castro Alves. For the most part he is not original, either in form or idea; the majority of his verses seem to call for the rostrum and the madly moved audience. Yet more than fifty years after his death the numerous editions of his poems provide that rostrum, and the majority of his literate countrymen form that audience.
When his powers are at their highest, however, he achieves the true Hugoesque touch, as, for example, in the closing stanzas of the famous Voices from Africa, written in São Paulo on June 11, 1868:
Christo! embalde morreste sobre um monte.…
Teu sangue não lavou da minha fronte
A mancha original.
Ainda hoje são, por fado adverso,
Meus filhos—alimaria do universo,
Eu—pasto universal.