Viagem (Voyage) is the title of the major collection of poetic works by Cecília Benavides de Carvalho Meireles up to 1939, which includes a poem by the same name. The volume won an award from the Brazilian Academy of Letters in the year it was published.
The title of the book (as of the poem) refers in a general way to the poet’s spiritual journey and to her view of that point when life and poetry come together as one. In Meireles’s view, that is the moment when a poet realizes that all human emotions can be expressed through poetry.
While Meireles was a devout Catholic, Viagem is an expression of the poet’s existence as a human being and does not openly express her religious or social beliefs. She simply questions the human voyage through life. “Por onde é que vou?” (Where am I going?), Meireles asks at the beginning and end of the poem. While this is a personal question for Meireles, it becomes a universal question with regard to the sometimes pointlessness of life and the lack of direction that many face in their journey through life.
When she penned the poem, she had suffered the deaths of her parents and the tragic death of her first husband by suicide. The poem opens with an unmistakable reference to that suffering: “In the perfume of my fingers / There is the taste of suffering.”
Viagem is an excellent example of the highly pensive, personal, pain-filled, and philosophical poetry produced by one of Brazil’s most adept poets. Here we observe many of the major themes prevalent throughout Meireles’s work: the transitions of life, the brevity of life, love, the infinite, the influences of nature, and the significance of artistic creation. Her poems mirror the uncertainty and dubiousness of life’s fleeting nature. Critics agree universally that Viagem marked Meireles’s poetic maturity.
Bibliography
Keith, Henry, and Raymond Sayers. Cecília Meireles: Poemas em Tradução/Poems in Translation. Washington, D.C.: Brazilian-American Cultural Institute, 1977.
Categories: Latin American Literature, Literature
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