Magnificat
When will this inner night – the universe – end
And I – my soul – have my day?
When will I wake up from being awake?
I don’t know. The sun shines on high
And cannot be looked at.
The stars coldly blink
And cannot be counted.
The heart beats aloofly
And cannot be heard.
When will this drama without theater
– Or this theater without drama – end
So that I can go home?
Where? How? When?
O cat staring at me with eyes of life, Who lurks in your depths?
It’s Him! It’s him!
Like Joshua he’ll order the sun to stop, and I’ll wake up,
And it will be day.
Smile, my soul, in your slumber!
Smile, my soul: it will be day!
Notes
Where Robert Frost called out across an empty lake and mistook the brute, indifferent crash of a swimming buck for cosmic counter-love, Fernando Pessoa’s Álvaro de Campos turns the inquiry entirely inward, wandering an alienated psychological stage where waking life itself feels like an interminable, sleepless night. The fractured ego finds itself trapped inside an existential theater of its own projection, waiting for an absolute rupture that can halt the sun and wake the subject from the paralysis of hyper-conscious lucidity, only to realize that consciousness is itself an echo chamber where every unanswered question reverberates endlessly against an empty ceiling. It carries September’s theme of Echo straight into the internal abyss, showing that repetition is not merely an external acoustic trick, but the haunting, unceasing cadence of the soul speaking to an absent author and hearing only its own altered distress returned. #September #FernandoPessoa #Echo #Portugese #Existential