If I died tomorrow
If I died tomorrow, would I at least come
Close my eyes my sad sister;
My longing mother would die
If I died tomorrow!
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How much glory I foresee in my future!
What a dawn to come and what a morning!
I will lose crying these crowns
If I died tomorrow!
What a sun! What a blue sky! How sweet in the morning
Wake up the most lovable nature!
Don't beat me so much love in the chest
If I died tomorrow!
But this pain of life that devours
The desire for glory, the aching hunger...
The pain in the chest will at least be muted
If I died tomorrow!
The poem you are reading now is authored by the poet Álvares de Azevedo, considered the main name of the Second Generation of Brazilian Romanticism, also known as Ultra-Romanticism. In If I died tomorrow, one of his best-known poems, it is possible to perceive the main themes that permeate the brief literary trajectory of the poet, among them suffering, existential pain and anguish, themes common to all writers of this movement that marked the second half of XIX century.
During Romanticism, in the 50s and 60s of the 19th century, young university poets from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro gathered in a group that gave rise to the Brazilian romantic poetry known as Ultraromanticism. This generation was called a “lost generation”, given that they did not share the values defended by the poets of the first generation of Romanticism, that is, the Nationalism, whose literary project was based on the need to found a genuinely Brazilian literature, committed to the cultural identity of our people. Faced with this feeling of inadequacy to reality and also a strong pessimism, the ultra-romantics led a disorderly life, divided between academic studies, leisure, love affairs and the reading of literary works such as those of Musset and Byron, whose lifestyle imitated.
The publication of the book Poesias, by Álvares de Azevedo, in 1853, is considered the starting point of Gothic-inspired poetry. Other writers also made ultra-romanticism their literary project, among them Fagundes Varela, Junqueira Freire and Casimiro de Abreu, strongly inspired by the English Lord Byron, the Italian Giacomo Leopardi and the French Alphonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Musset. On the literary level, Ultra-Romanticism was characterized by the spirit of the evil of the century, a wave of pessimism disease that was translated into the attachment to certain decadent values, such as drink and addiction, the attraction for the night and the death. In the work of Álvares de Azevedo, macabre and satanic themes are also highlighted, found in one of his main books, Macário.
Macário is a work of difficult conceptualization, since it oscillates between the theater, the intimate diary and the narrative, that is established through the dialogue between Satã and Pensaroso, having as its center the vices and follies of the city big. Macário narrates the saga of a young man who travels to the city to study and, at one of his stops along the way, makes friends with a stranger who is none other than Satan personified. Read the transcription of an excerpt from the final chapter of the work:
Satan: Where are you going?
Macarius: Always you, damn it!
Satan: Where are you going? Do you know about Pensaroso?
Macarius: I'll go to him.
Satan: Go, crazy, go! that you will arrive late! Thoughtful died.
Macarius: They killed him!
Satan: Killed himself.
Macarius: Good.
Satan: Come with me.
Macarius: Go.
Satan: You are a child. You have not yet tasted life and you are already gravitating towards death.
Macarius: Go away, damn it!
Satan (walking away): To open the soul to despair is to give it to Satan. You are mine. I marked you on the forehead with my finger. I don't lose sight of you. That way I'll keep you better. You will more easily hear my voice coming from your flesh than entering your ears.
(A street) (Macarius and Satan arm in arm.)
Satan: Are you drunk? You stagger.
Macarius: Where are you taking me?
Satan: To an orgy. You're going to read a page of life full of blood and wine - what does it matter?
Macarius: It's here, no? I hear the saturnal bellow inside.
Satan: Let's stop here. Spy in that window.
Macarius: I see them. It's a smoky room. Around the table sit five drunk men. Most revolve on the ground. Disheveled women sleep there, some livid, others red What a night!
Satan: What life! it's not like this? Well then! Listen, Macario. There are men for whom this life is smoother than the other. Wine is like opium, it is the Lethe of oblivion... Drunkenness is like death... .
Macarius: Shut up. Let's hear it.
(Fragment of Macário, by Álvares de Azevedo.)
Among the main characteristics of the Second Generation of Romanticism are:
In addition to Álvares de Azevedo, the following are among the main representatives of the Second Generation of Romanticism:
Casimiro José Marques de Abreu (1837-1860): Casimiro de Abreu was a Brazilian poet, author of the famous poem “Meus Oito Anos” (1857). We can also highlight the following works: As Primaveras (1859), Saudades (1856) and Suspiros (1856).
A Brazilian poet and patron of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Fagundes Varela was an important writer of Ultra-Romanticism in Brazil. Considered Byronic, he also presented characteristics of the third romantic generation in his work. Among his main works are Voices of America (1864), Nocturnes (1860).
Junqueira Freire was a Brazilian monk, priest and poet. His work, often considered conservative by literary critics, addressed themes such as: horror, repressed desire, the feeling of sin, revolt, remorse and the obsession of death. His book Inspirações do Cloister (1855) can be mentioned.
Never before had Brazilian poetry and prose experienced themes that reached such a degree high level of subjectivism, covering themes such as love and death, doubt and irony, enthusiasm and boredom. There is a drastic break with current literary standards and also with society's values, since the literature of the second romantic phase confronts materialism and bourgeois rationalism, tackling antilogical zones of the subconscious, presenting unorthodox themes that were capable of causing disgust and estrangement in literary criticism and in public.
Luana Alves
Graduated in Letters
