António Nobre, the poet of Só, dies at Foz do Douro: 18 March 1900

The house was small and stood at Carreiros, on the seafront of Foz do Douro, where the river Douro meets the Atlantic on the western edge of Porto. Today the street is the Avenida do Brasil. Paula Morão, his modern editor, calls it the house of his brother Augusto, a naturalist. On 18 March 1900 António Nobre died there in Augusto's arms. Miranda de Andrade, who told the story from the poet's letters and friends, wrote that he had wanted to hear the sea in his last moments.3 sources3 sources

He was 32, and he had been ill with tuberculosis for almost five years. A fortnight earlier he had still wanted to go to the country to make clean copies of all his poems and finish O Desejado, a long poem he carried in his head. Then Justino de Montalvão, one of his oldest friends, arrived unannounced at the house of the writer Sampaio Bruno and asked him to be at the church that night to help carry the coffin.2 sources2 sources

Raul Brandão, a friend since their teenage summers, described the burial years later in his Memórias, in an entry headed with the date of the death. It was a cold, dirty day of rain, and what he called a scant half-dozen stood at the grave: a friend Brandão calls only Frei, Justino, Eduardo de Sousa and Brandão himself. The newspapers gave the death two quick lines.2 sources2 sources

Nobre was born in 1867 in a narrow three-storey house on Rua de Santa Catarina in Porto. His family was wealthy, and much of its income came from Brazil. In “Memória”, the poem that opens Só, he describes his father as the man who sailed away on the brig Boa Nova and came home years later on the barque Oliveira.2 sources2 sources

He came of age with the British Ultimatum of 11 January 1890, when London forced Portugal to drop its claims to the land between Angola and Mozambique. When Fernando Pessoa wrote in Nobre's memory in 1915, he began at “the hour of the ultimatum” and cast the two leading poets of the 1890s as the two faces of Janus.2 sources2 sources

Critics have filed him in more than one place. Morão reads Só as a mix of the Romantic tradition with the Decadent and Symbolist styles of the 1880s, written in a voice so close to speech that it can be mistaken for naive. Pessoa, sorting the Portuguese Symbolists in an undated note, called Nobre's branch the Lusitanian one and wrote that his school gave Portugal its new poetry.2 sources2 sources

The happiest years of his life were the summers at Leça da Palmeira, the fishing village and resort just north of Porto. With Alberto de Oliveira, Raul Brandão, Justino de Montalvão and other friends he read Junqueiro and Victor Hugo, went to sea in the fishermen's boats and swam in the river. He dressed like a fisherman, in a jersey and beret, and smoked a charred pipe. An English girl, Charlotte, shortened his name to Anto, and he kept it for the rest of his life.2 sources2 sources

The other country of his poems was Seixo, a village in the Douro region where he had a farm, spent long stays and wrote many of his verses. In October 1888 he went to Coimbra to study law, and it went badly. Students mocked his pride and his clothes and put him through the full rough initiation of the freshman. His sharp verses about the professors cannot have helped, and he failed the first year twice.3 sources3 sources

He found a small circle of admirers, among them Alberto de Oliveira and Agostinho de Campos, and with them launched a literary magazine, Boémia Nova, in February 1889. Oliveira edited it, and it lasted only a few months. For a time he lived in a medieval tower in the old city walls on Rua de Sub-Ripas, now known as the Torre de Anto. He hated the university and loved the city, which stayed in his poems long after he had left it.2 sources2 sources

One sonnet in Só, dated Coimbra, 1889, announces the birth of a poet in a kingdom on the corner of the planet, who would have done better never to see the light. It ends with this line.1 source1 source

On a cold, drizzly Sunday morning in October 1890 Nobre arrived at the Gare d'Orléans in Paris to take at the Sorbonne the law degree that Coimbra had refused him. He wanted to become a consul, like the novelist Eça de Queirós, who was then Portugal's consul in Paris. One of his first errands was to have his documents legalised at the consulate, carrying a letter of introduction from the poet Guerra Junqueiro. Eça liked him and invited him home.1 source1 source

He moved between cheap rooms in the Latin Quarter: Rue Racine, Rue Valette, Rue de la Sorbonne and, longest, a family boarding house at 14 Rue des Écoles. He lived on money from home, and when the family's Brazilian income shrank he went short of food and heat. According to Alberto de Oliveira, who visited him in 1892, the students of the Boulevard Saint-Michel called him le petit évêque, the little bishop.1 source1 source

Loneliness made the book. Nobre told a friend that it was in Paris that he began truly to love Portugal, and in about a year and a half the poems he had carried since Leça and Coimbra became a volume. Many of them describe the north from memory: pilgrimages and processions, fishermen, fig trees and the moon. The title, Só, means alone.2 sources2 sources

Léon Vanier, the publisher of Verlaine and the younger Symbolists, issued it from his shop on the Quai Saint-Michel, and the printer finished it on 2 April 1892. Nobre paid for paper and printing himself. Miranda de Andrade gives the print run as 200 copies, while other accounts put it at about 300.3 sources3 sources

Under almost every poem Nobre printed the place and year where it was written. Counting those datelines shows how the book was put together: a third of them say Paris, but 14 point back to Leça, Porto and Seixo and 13 to Coimbra. The poems written after the illness, gathered after his death in Despedidas, come from a different map.2 sources2 sources

Reviews in Portugal were mostly hostile or puzzled, and parodies circulated. Brandão praised it in the Correio da Manhã on 28 April 1892. The critic Moniz Barreto, a realist by conviction, rejected its aesthetics in the Revista de Portugal, which Eça edited, but still called it a considerable display of talent and one of the most notable books of recent years.3 sources3 sources

Nobre finished his studies in Paris, though the sources disagree on when: Paula Morão says he graduated in 1893, while a 2010 article dates the degree to 1895, and other accounts have him in Paris for almost five years, until 1895. He sat the Foreign Ministry's competitive examination for consuls and, by Miranda de Andrade's account, came top with Alberto de Oliveira. Brandão remembered it differently: the examiners wanted to fail him until Oliveira explained who the poet was.5 sources5 sources

Before he could choose a consulate, the illness declared itself. Tuberculosis showed in the summer of 1895, and that same summer he went to Clavadel, near Davos in the Swiss Alps, and put himself in a doctor's care there. Repeated haemorrhages from the lungs left him frightened and restless, and in 1896 he moved on to Davos-Platz, Bern, Lausanne and Bex.2 sources2 sources

The doctors then advised the opposite: low ground and a mild sea climate. Nobre believed in what he called Doctor Ocean, and in 1897 he crossed the Atlantic to New York, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. He made a pilgrimage to the grave of Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore and wrote home that America was a country without a heart, all electricity. The voyage did nothing for his lungs.2 sources2 sources

In the spring of 1897 he had met Alfredo de Freitas Leal, a Madeiran friend from Coimbra, in Lisbon and asked him many questions about Madeira's climate for consumptives. On 3 February 1898 he arrived in Funchal. He lived at the Royal Hotel, at the Pensão Almeida and for a time in a small house at Boliqueme, in the parish of Santo António.1 source1 source

Leal found him there trying to look cheerful. He liked the people and the scenery, he said, but he thought he had come too late. In Madeira he fell in love with Constança Teles da Gama, a daughter of the Countess of Cascais, and wrote sonnets to her. He left on 24 April 1899, after a stay of less than fifteen months, blaming the climate and his doctor.2 sources2 sources

Back in Lisbon, the worst months began. His cough gave him away, and hotels and boarding houses around the capital turned him out one after another; he pawned belongings to pay his way. His family sent him back to Switzerland, where he dated a poem at St. Johann am Platz, in Davos, in October 1899. In December he came home to Portugal for good, thin and without hope.2 sources2 sources

He spent the winter between Foz do Douro and Seixo, where he went for the country air. In one of his low moments he asked that, if he died before he could publish another book, it should be called Despedidas, Farewells. He meant it at first as a farewell to literary life; later he made clear that he had chosen it because these were his last poems and he no longer hoped to be cured.2 sources2 sources

Sources differ slightly on his age. Miranda de Andrade gives a life of 32 years and some months and EBSCO's reference entry says 32, while a 2010 article says 33 and Paula Morão rounds it to thirty. Brandão wrote that he went to the grave to complete thirty-three years, which fits a man of 32 in his thirty-third year.5 sources5 sources

Brandão's memoir is the harshest account of how Nobre's contemporaries treated him. People avoided him before Só appeared and the poets of his generation hated him after it. Brandão confessed that they had all wanted to be rid of the eternal consul without a consulate, the Coimbra student the professors failed, who made the rest of them look small.1 source1 source

Augusto Nobre published the last poems in Porto as Despedidas, in an edition of 2,000 copies that the printer finished on 18 March 1902, the second anniversary of the death. At his and Justino de Montalvão's request, Sampaio Bruno wrote the preface. He warned readers that the poet had never been able to revise these poems, and that no one else had dared to correct them. The juvenilia, Primeiros versos, written between 1882 and 1889, followed in 1921.2 sources2 sources

Augusto went on to become rector of the University of Porto and minister of public instruction. He was devoted to his brother's memory. In September 1927 he visited the little house at Boliqueme in Madeira, met the hammock bearer who had worked for the poet, and paid a monthly allowance to the old servant who had looked after him, and then to her daughter. Augusto himself died at Foz do Douro in 1946.2 sources2 sources

The poet's tomb is in the cemetery of Leça da Palmeira, the resort of his happiest summers. On the 74th anniversary of his death, in March 1974, pupils of Porto's Liceu António Nobre, a secondary school named after him, took buses there to lay a laurel wreath on it, then left flowers on the rocks of Boa Nova beach.1 source1 source

Younger writers took Nobre up. In 1914 Mário de Sá-Carneiro counted Só among the finest Portuguese books of the previous thirty years, and in 1915 the Coimbra magazine A Galéra gave its last issue, a double number, to his memory. Pessoa's essay for it ends on a line Portuguese critics still quote.1 source1 source

An undated note in English among Pessoa's papers is blunter.1 source1 source

Funchal named a square near the Ponte Monumental after him in 1927, close to the hotel where he had stayed, and unveiled a bust of him there on 28 December 1941. At Leça da Palmeira, the architect Álvaro Siza worked with the sculptor Barata Feyo on a bronze monument near the Boa Nova tea house in 1967, and in 1980 he set up a stone engraved with a quotation from the poet, with steps and a ramp up to it.3 sources3 sources

Só has been reprinted many times, and Morão links that success to a singing rhythm any reader can follow, built from careful, varied metres. Its subjects are homesickness, the pull of the sea and the village, and a young man's feeling that he was born in the wrong country at the wrong time.2 sources2 sources

Critics now read him as a link between the nineteenth century and the modernists of Orpheu, the 1915 magazine of Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro. In Morão's reading, the poet who split himself into António and Anto, adult and child, anticipated the divided self of the modernists. Pessoa took it furthest with his heteronyms, the invented poets with their own names and styles under whom he wrote. Morão places Nobre with Cesário Verde and Camilo Pessanha: poets of almost a single book who remain landmarks of Portuguese literature.2 sources2 sources