Fernando Pessoa could have consulted the Encyclopedia Britannica, one unspecified volume of which sat on Álvaro de Campos's desk.⁵⁸ Had he done so he would have gotten right the name of the English borough on the west coast of England that furnished him with a title for Campos's sonnet sequence «Barrow-on-Furness» (181-84); the actual name of that borough, as Pessoa apparently did not know, was (is) Barrow-in-Furness. The mistake made by the poet is excusable, especially for a foreigner who, Anglophile that he was, never managed to make his much-desired visit to the British Isles.⁵⁹ Yet he had heard of this borough, a seaport, with a doubly hyphenated place-name; hence his assumption that the place took its name from the river on which it was located.

Minor though it might appear at first, the mistake is crucial to the poem. It can be said even that the mistake itself enabled Pessoa to include Barrow-in-Furness among his possible choices for the setting of Álvaro de Campos's meditations. The poetic existence of this non-existent river called the Furness is of the essence to our understanding of the peculiar qualities of Álvaro de Campos's meditation.

In this dramatic-lyrical poem in the form of a five-sonnet sequence, Campos speaks of his unhappiness. Employed in an English seaport located on a river as it reaches the sea, he sees himself as being excruciatingly «exiled» from his beloved Lisbon. He utters his words while sitting atop a barrel on a wharf along the river. As the water flows by, cold and dirty, he muses that he too will «flow» by, but that this «poor engineer» need not tolerate this actual «river» Furness much longer -manly three days. It is narratively fitting that this naval engineer, trained in Glasgow and a quondam employee of the Forsyth company, should find himself in this «seaport and municipal, county and parliamentary borough of Lancashire, England», as the 1910 Britannica puts it, «264 1/2 m. N. W. by N. from London, on the Furness railway» (III, 443).⁶⁰ But in other ways it is not, for the borough, as we have seen, is Barrow-in-Furness, not Barrow-on-Furness, and this seaport lies on the seaward side of a «hammer-shaped peninsula forming part of the district of Furness, between the estuary of the Duddon and Morecambe Bay, where a narrow channel intervenes between the mainland and the long low island of Walney...» In short, if, except in Campos's lyric, the river Furness does not exist, what does exist is the dock (docks actually) that correspond to the one in the poem. In the channel between the mainland and a so-called Barrow Island, which is «connected with the mainland», we read in the Britannica, «reclamation... [has] been carried on until only a narrow channel was left, which was utilized as docks». Moreover, Pessoa did know that by 1910 or so the principal industry in this seaport «of modern and remarkably rapid growth» was shipbuilding.

Pessoa's errors -missing the exact name of the seaport and assuming and thereby inadvertently inventing the river so logically indicated by the mistaken name- do no damage to Álvaro de Campos's troubled meditation. On the contrary. It may be true, as Jorge de Sena once said, that the Great Britain in which Álvaro de Campos sometimes lived and had been educated was a never-never land, it was «Fernando Pessoa's' own mythological Great Britain» («[a] Grã-Bretanha mitológica de 'Fernando Pessoa'», II, 213). Yet it was also essential to Pessoa that Campos's meditation take place by a «real» river, for it is the real river as a trope for the lived (or unlived) life that the «Furness» furnishes the poem. He identifies with the river; he too flows inevitably by.   —532→   «Run on, you damned river», he says wryly, «and carry out to the sea my subjective indifference» («Corre, raio de rio, e leva ao mar / a minha indiferença subjectiva!»). After further turnings and torturings of the spirit, he concludes his meditation with a sigh, «Ah, que ânsia humana de ser rio ou cais!» -what human yearning, in short, to be one or the other- the river or the quay -but not knowing which one. And to cream the jest even the «real» river over which he contemplates has no geographical existence. But it does have a poetic source -certain poetic practices of the first English Romantics- though the explanation for it requires a bit of detailed examination. That Pessoa knew the work of the English Romantic poets, especially the poetry of William Wordsworth, is a scholarly commonplace. He annotated and marked references to Wordsworth in his copies of books such as James Russell Lowell's English Poets Lessing, Rousseau and J. F. Nisbet's The Insanity of Genius, and he owned Stopford A. Brooke's Theology in the English Poets, one of those poets being Wordsworth.⁶¹ He placed the highest value on «Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood», more than once referring to it in his notes for essays as Wordsworth's «great 'Ode'» (Páginas Íntimas, 129, and Páginas de Estética, 152). He paid Wordsworth the further compliment of taking up «The Solitary Reaper» and composing his own answering redaction of the poem (extant in more than one version) «Ela canta, pobre ceifeira».⁶² And we now know -a recent discovery- that rather early on he published translations of Wordsworth. In the Enciclopédia Internacional de Obras Celebres (published circa 1911), a multi-volume work running to some 13,000 pages, appear several translations by Fernando Pessoa of English-language poetry, including translations of three of Wordsworth's so-called Lucy poems (see Chiaretti, F-1, and Campos, F-4, 5).⁶³ And of course even Pessoa's heteronyms knew something about Wordsworth. Álvaro de Campos reports on an exchange he once had with his master Alberto Caeiro over Wordsworth's image of the yellow primrose in the poem «Peter Bell» («Notas para a recordação», 268-69). It can come as no surprise that Wordsworth's poetry should have spoken forcefully to Fernando Pessoa on still other occasions -even to the end of his life. Such is the case with some of Álvaro de Campos's last poems.

The reader of Álvaro de Campos's poetry is encouraged to infer by its placement at the end or close to the end of collections of the engineer-poet's work, as well, apparently, by Fernando Pessoa's own intention (Simões and Montalvor, I, 17), that the sonnet sequence «Barrow-on-Furness» brings Campos's work to conclusion. The sequence is comprised of five sonnets, ranging in form (with variations) through the three major types of English sonnet: the Petrarchan, the Spenserian, and, in the fifth sonnet -the only one that concludes with a couplet- the Shakespearean.⁶⁴ With great skill and ease Pessoa is able in «Barrow-on-Furness» to shape the sonnet's various forms to his heteronym's own temperament. Impressive though his dexterity with the sonnet form might be, there is something more immediately interesting about this sonnet sequence, a fact that has gone unnoticed but which is unmistakable and which will shed light on Pessoa's poetic intentions in this five-sonnet poem.

Not only in its English setting does «Barrow-on-Furness» pay homage to England. The fact that the poem is made up of sonnets -themselves discrete poems- joined by a title that indicates a place -a town or city- situated on a river -locates it in the Romantic tradition of English poetry. That strain, as M. H. Abrams describes it, «[is] the design of a tour represented in a sequence of local-meditative sonnets» (214, n. 7). Carried on and extended by two of the first great English Romantics, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, this tradition seems to derive (at least for them) from the poetry -mainly the sonnets- of the earlier minor poet, William Lisle Bowles. By 1805 Bowles's Sonnets, which first appeared in 1789, had achieved nine editions. Most of Bowles's poems, «obvious adaptations» of the «local-meditative formula to the sonnet form», as Abrams notes, carried titles specifying place and, occasionally, time: «To the River Wensbeck», «To the River Itchin Near Winton», «On Dover Cliffs. July 20, 1787», «Written at Ostend. July 22, 1787» (213). His work in this vein «constitutes a sonnet-sequence uttered by a latter-day wandering penseroso who, as the light fades from the literal day, images his life as a metaphoric tour from its bright morning through deepening shadow to enduring night. Within this over-arching equation, the typical single poem begins with a rapid sketch of the external scene... then moves on to reminiscence and moral reflection» (213). Typical of Bowles's local-meditative sonnets is «To the River Itchin»:

This poem so impressed Coleridge that under it influence he wrote his own important sonnet «To the River Otter» (Abrams, 213). As Abram writes, «Bowles's sonnets represent the lonely mind in meditation, and their fin de siècle mood of weary and self-pitying isolation -what Coleridge called their 'lonely feeling'- proved irresistible to a vigorous young newcomer to poetry» (214-15). But in addition to their having influenced Coleridge, Bowles's sonnets also impressed Robert Southy and -what is more important for our immediate purposes- the young William Wordsworth. To see Bowles' influence at work in Wordsworth, one need only point to that classic of local-meditative verse, «Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798». Abrams quotes Wordsworth's account of how he acquired and read Bowles's poems: «I bought them in a walk through London with my dear brother... I read them as we went along; and to the great annoyance of my brother, I stopped in a niche of London Bridge to finish the pamphlet» (214).

But the greatest tribute Wordsworth paid Bowles was not the Bowlesian influence apparent in «Tintern Abbey», but his book The River Duddon. A Series of Sonnets. Written over a fifteen-year period, 1806-1820, and published as a collection in 1820, the book presents no less than thirty-four linked sonnets. In Wordsworth's The River Duddon is the probable immediate example for a series of sonnets of a local-meditative nature by a Scottish-trained engineer from Lisbon on temporary English assignment to a manufacturing city built along the banks of a river. When Wordsworth, in a note annotating his thirty-four sonnet sequence, notes that «the power of waters over the minds of Poets has been acknowledged from the earliest ages», (710) he offers a general acknowledgment of the Western poet's indebtedness to «the locus amoenus (pleasance)», as Ernst Robert Curtius asserts, «[that] from the Empire to the sixteenth century... forms the principal motif of all nature description. It is... a beautiful, shaded natural site», the «minimum ingredients» of which «comprise a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook» (195). Curtius then offers an example from Tiberianus, a poem beginning: «Through the fields there went a river; down the airy glen it wound, / Smiling mid its radiant pebbles, decked with flowery plants around» (196). Here is the topos of the poet observing a brook or a river, but the English Romantics made an important change in its poetic treatment. It was the impulse to wed the inspirational power of water first to the sonnet and then, by extension, to the sonnet sequence, innovations in English poetry deriving ultimately from William Lisle Bowles but conveyed to him by Coleridge, that Wordsworth (who warned the critics: «Scorn not the sonnet...» [quoted in Curtius, 396]) made available to Fernando Pessoa. Bowles's sonnets to the Tyne, Wensbeck, Tweed, and Itchin rivers, as well as Wordsworth's sonnets to the Duddon, are the precursors of Álvaro de Campos's sonnets to the Furness.

Having said that, however, one must now turn to some important and interesting distinctions. First of all, Bowles and Wordsworth address and celebrate actual localized rivers, unlike the Furness, as will be seen. Moreover, Bowles and Wordsworth celebrate the river in pastoral terns (as part of sylvan scenes), while Campos addresses a river that contributes to a setting that is largely commercial and industrial. Campos sits not high above the flowing river, or even on the river's grassy banks (like Bowles and Wordsworth) but on a quay -atop, tellingly, a barrel. Of the Tweed, Bowles writes: «The waving branches that romantic bend / O'er thy tall banks a soothing charm bestow;/ The murmurs of thy wandering wave below / Seem like the converse of some long-lost friend» («The Tweed Visited», I, 9). And of the River Duddon, Wordsworth writes (297):

But here is Álvaro de Campos's fifth and final   —534→   sonnet of the sequence «Barrow-on-Furness» in English translation:

Interestingly enough, Álvaro de Campos's meditation pays its homage to its English predecessor not by imitation merely but by attempting to out-romanticize the great Wordsworth himself. While Wordsworth thinks of the high purpose of the river's flow, a river which seems to laughingly dare the poet (they «Adventurer») who has climbed so high to fulfill a «rival purpose» -that is to say, a purpose as worthy as the river's, Campos's river serves not to challenge the poet to strive to achieve higher purposes or even to think higher thoughts but only to put the ironies of the poet's life into relief. It serves, in its flow, to «accompany» the stationary poet. The standing river flows even as the standing-still poet ruminates. Wordsworth's poet doubts only whether he will be up to the river's challenge to achieve a high purpose; Campos sighs over the human condition, over the anxiety felt in not knowing whether one is a flowing river, on the move, going somewhere, or whether one is merely a quay, stationary, going nowhere.

One thing Fernando Pessoa was sure of -his shaky geography apart- was that Álvaro de Campos's meditations must take place while he stands looking out at or over the flow of a river. The best authorities he knew said so. And in this case, those best authorities were the English Romantic poets. Consequently, although there was no River Furness, as there was a River Wye, a River Itchin, and a River Duddon, the engineer-poet, in an inadvertent feat of poetic engineering, simply created one. And so sure was he of the geographical accuracy of his original and originating title that he boldly decided to introduce his sonnet sequence with a poem that does not even deign to mention place.

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Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 74, Number 3, September 1991