If you are a lover of Brazilian literature then you should already know that Manuel Bandeira is a must-have name for your bookshelf, isn't it? This important poet, who despite his physical fragility (he fought tuberculosis all his life) crossed the 20th century and became one of the most productive and long-lived in the history of our letters, left an enormous contribution to literature, which even today arouses the interest of countless readers in the field. Brazil. Through his retinas, countless historical, social and cultural events passed, and went to inhabit the verses permeated with great lyricism, his main characteristic.
Bandeira, along with Oswald and Mário de Andrade, was the forerunner of Brazilian modernism. However, contrary to the demolition poetry and prose of his peers, the poet offered his readers his free verses and lyrical, more concerned with translating everyday events than necessarily shocking or imposing a new identity literary. Not that such a project did not inhabit his poetics, but it is unquestionable that, among the modernists, Bandeira was different. Perhaps in this peculiarity lies the timelessness of his verses, which constantly visit tests of the most diverse entrance exams and competitions throughout the country. Bandeira is definitely required reading, essential to understanding the evolution of Brazilian poetry.
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In order for you to know a little more about this one of the most important and brilliant poets of our literature, the Escola Educação website selected fifteen poems by Manuel Bandeira that will guarantee an incursion into the poetic universe of this person from Recife who deserves all the reverence of the public Brazilian. Good reading!
Best Poems by Manuel Bandeira
Poem: Christmas Eve – Manuel Bandeira
Christmas Eve
When the Undesired of the people arrives
(I don't know if it lasts or is expensive),
Maybe I'm afraid.
Maybe smile, or say:
– Hello, inescapable!
My day was good, the night may come down.
(The night with its spells.)
You will find the field plowed, the house clean,
The table set,
With everything in its place.
Poem: Flame and Smoke – Manuel Bandeira
flame and smoke
Love – flame, then smoke…
Meditate on what you are going to do:
The smoke comes, the flame passes...
Cruel enjoyment, scarce happiness,
Owner of mine and your being,
Love – flame, then smoke…
So much it burns! and, unfortunately,
Burning what's best,
The smoke comes, the flame passes...
Passion pure or wanton,
Sad or happy, pity or pleasure,
Love – flame, then smoke…
With each pair that the dawn ensnares,
How poignant is the evening!
The smoke comes, the flame passes...
Rather, all of it is taste and grace.
Love, bonfire burning line!
Love – flame, then smoke…
Because, ill be satisfied
(How can I tell you...),
The smoke comes, the flame passes...
The flame burns. Smoke fogs.
So sad it is! But it has to be…
Love... - calls, and then smoke:
The smoke comes, the flame passes...
Poem: The Star – Manuel Bandeira
The star
I saw a star so high,
I saw such a cold star!
I saw a shining star
In my empty life.
It was such a high star!
It was such a cold star!
I was a single star
Shining at the end of the day.
why your distance
for my company
Didn't lower that star?
Why does it shine so brightly?
And I heard it in the deep shadow
Reply that it did
to give hope
Sadder at the end of my day.
Poem: Pneumothorax – Manuel Bandeira
pneumothorax
Fever, hemoptysis, dyspnea and night sweats.
The whole life that could have been and that wasn't.
Cough, cough, cough.
He sent for the doctor:
– Say thirty-three.
– Thirty-three… thirty-three… thirty-three…
- Breathe.
– You have an excavation in your left lung and an infiltrated right lung.
– So, doctor, is it not possible to try the pneumothorax?
- No. The only thing to do is play an Argentine tango.
Poem: The river – Manuel Bandeira
The river
Be like the flowing river
Silent within the night.
Do not fear the darkness of the night.
If there are stars in the sky, reflect them
And if the skies are covered with clouds,
Like the river the clouds are water,
Reflect them also without sorrow
In the quiet depths.
Poem: Old Farm – Manuel Bandeira
old farm
The house was this way...
Where? I look for it and I don't find it.
I hear a voice I forgot:
It is the voice of this same stream.
Oh how much time has passed!
(It's been over fifty years.)
So many that death took!
(And life… in the disappointments…)
usury made a clean slate
From the sad old farmhouse:
The house no longer exists...
“But the boy still exists.
Poem: Road – Manuel Bandeira
Road
This road where I live, between two turns of the road,
Interesting more than an urban avenue.
In cities all people look alike.
Everyone is the same. everyone is everyone.
Not here: it feels good that everyone brings their own soul.
Each creature is unique.
Even the dogs.
These country dogs look like businessmen:
They are always worried.
And how many people come and go!
And everything has that impressive character that makes you meditate:
Burial on foot or the milk wagon pulled by a little goat
sly.
Nor is the murmur of water lacking, to suggest, through the voice of symbols,
That life goes by! that life goes by!
And that youth will end.
Poem: The impossible affection – Manuel Bandeira
the impossible affection
Listen, I don't want to tell you my wish
I just want to tell you my tenderness
Oh if in exchange for so much happiness you give me
I could replace you
– I knew how to rest –
In the broken heart
The purest joys of your childhood!
Poem: The example of the roses – Manuel Bandeira
The example of roses
A woman complained about her lover's silence:
- You don't like me anymore, because you can't find words to praise me!
Then he, pointing to the rose that was dying in her breast:
"Wouldn't it be foolish to ask this rose to speak?"
Can't you see that she gives herself up to her perfume?
Poem: Satellite – Manuel Bandeira
Satellite
Late afternoon.
In the leaden sky
the dull moon
hovers
very cosmographically
Satellite.
Demetaphorized,
Demystified,
Stripped of the old secret of melancholy,
It is not now the gulf of schisms,
The star of the crazy and the lovers.
but only
Satellite.
Ah moon of this late afternoon,
Resignation of romantic assignments,
No show for sentimental availabilities!
Weary of surplus value,
I like you like this:
thing itself,
– Satellite.
Poem: Art of Loving – Manuel Bandeira
art of loving
If you want to feel the happiness of loving, forget your soul.
The soul is what spoils love.
Only in God can she find satisfaction.
Not another soul.
In God alone - Or out of the world.
Souls are incommunicable.
Let your body understand itself with another body.
Because bodies understand each other, but souls don't.
Poem: Disenchantment – Manuel Bandeira
disenchantment
I write verses like someone who cries
Of dismay... of disenchantment...
Close my book if for now
You have no reason to cry.
My verse is blood. Burning lust...
Sparse sadness... vain remorse...
It hurts in my veins. Bitter and hot,
It falls, drop by drop, from the heart.
And in these verses of hoarse anguish,
So from the lips life flows,
Leaving an acrid taste in the mouth.
– I write verses like someone who dies.
Poem: Lyrics for a romantic waltz – Manuel Bandeira
Lyrics to a romantic waltz
the afternoon agonizes
To the holy lullaby
Of the night breeze.
And I, who also die,
I die without consolation,
If you don't come, Elisa!
Oh, it doesn't even humanize you
The crying that so much
On the faces slides
Of the lover who asks
imploringly
Your love, Elisa!
Laugh, sneer, step!
My song, however,
But it deifies you,
different woman,
so indifferent,
Inhuman Elisa!
Poem: Poetics – Manuel Bandeira
poetic
I'm fed up with measured lyricism
Of well-behaved lyricism
From the lyricism civil servant with a timesheet book
protocol and expressions of appreciation to Mr. director
I'm fed up with the lyricism that stops and goes to find out in the dictionary
the vernacular character of a word
Down with the purists
All words, especially universal barbarisms
All constructs, especially exception syntax
All rhythms, especially the innumerable ones
I'm fed up with flirtatious lyricism
Political
Rickety
Syphilitic
Of all lyricism that capitulates to whatever is outside itself.
After all, it's not lyricism
It will be accounting table of cosines secretary of the exemplary lover
with one hundred card templates and the different ways to
pleasing women, &c.
I want instead the lyricism of the crazy
The Lyricism of Drunkards
The difficult and poignant lyricism of drunks
The Lyricism of Shakespeare's Clowns
– I don't want to know any more about the lyricism that is not liberation.
Poem: Verses Written in Water – Manuel Bandeira
Verses Written in Water
The few verses that go there,
I put them in place of others.
You who read me, I leave it to your dream
Imagine how they will be.
In them you will put your sadness
Or rather your jubilation, and perhaps
You will find them, you who read me,
Some shade of beauty…
Those who heard them did not love them.
My poor moved verses!
so be forgotten
Where the bad wind threw them.
Luana Alves
Graduated in Letters