Mensagem

Mensagem is the only book of poems by Fernando Pessoa published in Portuguese during his lifetime. It is also "truly a single poem," as he wrote, given the perfect unity achieved by his song of the nation's past greatness—reflected in the future, enhanced by the Fifth Empire. Without the compositional symmetry or narrative vastness of the classical epic, it is the minimalist work of a Supra-Camões focused on constructing a myth, that of King Sebastian, understood as the synthesis of the audacity of previous heroes and as the promise of a "clear day" to come.