It is in the Occidentaes of 1900 that we find more of the real Machado de Assis than in the series that preceded it. The ripened man now speaks from a pulsing heart. Not that any of these verses leap into flame, as in the sonorous, incendiary strophes of Bilac, but at least the thoughts live in the words that body them forth and technical skill revels in its power. Here the essence of his attitude toward life appears—that life which, rather than death, is the corroding force, the universal and ubiquitous element. The Mosca Azul is almost an epitome of his outlook, revealing as it does his tender irony, his human pity, his repressed sensuality, his feeling for form, his disillusioned comprehension of illusions. His resigned acceptance of life’s decline is characteristic of the man—part, perhaps, of his balanced outlook. One misses in him the rebel—the note that lends greatness to the hero in his foreordained defeat, raising the drama of surrender to the tragedy of the unconquered victim. But this would be asking him to be some one else—an inartistic request which we must withhold.
I give the Mosca Azul entire, because of its central importance to the poetry of the man, as well as to that more discerning outlook upon life which is to be found in his prose works.
Era uma mosca azul, azas de ouro e granada,
Filha da China ou da Indostão,
Que entre as folhas brotou de uma rosa encarnada
Em certa noite de verão.
E zumbia e voava, e voava, e zumbia,
Refulgindo ao clarão do sol
E da lua,—melhor do que refulgia
Um brilhante do Grão-Mogol.