Carlos Drummond de Andrade: Multitudinous Heart

Death of the Milkman

Declaration in Court

Destruction

Disappearance of Luisa Porto

Domicile

Don’t Kill Yourself

Don’t open

Don’t write poems about what happened

Elegy

Elegy 1938

Empathetic Poem

Eternal

Family Portrait

Feeling of the World

Field of Flowers

Flight from reality

For the time being we won’t sing of love

Garden

God gave me a love when, late in the season

Green Library

Hand in Hand

How to Make a Landscape

I beg pardon for being

I feel time’s heavy hand weigh down

I have just two hands

I kiss the hand of the priest

I knocked on the doors of lost time. No one answered

I lived for some years in Itabira

I missed the streetcar and am missing

I’m Making a Song

I’m making a song

I never saw the sea

In Search of Poetry

International Symposium on Fear

In that small town

In the desert of Itabira

In the half-empty café

In the Middle of the Road

In the middle of the road there was a stone

In this city of Rio

I saw girls shouting

It happened in Rio

It’s always in the past, that orgasm

I used to consider absence a lack

I’ve earned (I’ve lost) my day

I want to know the whore

I wish I could write this

I won’t be the poet of a decrepit world

I won’t sing of loves that I don’t have

João loved Teresa who loved Raimundo

Journey Through the Family

Lake

Lesser Life

Letter

Like primitive men who devoutly hold on to the lower jawbone of their dead

Looking for What

Love

Love is a privilege of maturity

Lovers love each other cruelly

Make-believe Lullaby

Maturity, that terrible gift

May Afternoon

Meditations on the Word Man

Middle Age

Middle age unlearns

Mother, whose dress is that

Multitudinous Heart

My body’s not my body

My father rode off on his horse to the fields

My love flickers inside the marrow

Nakedness

Nausea and the Flower

One cold, uncertain hour

On the road where a god walked

O solitude of the ox in the field

Plants also suffer

Poetry can’t be communicated

Porcelain

Purification Poem

Questions

Reaching the dangerous curve of my fifties

Residue

Roll, World, Roll

Sadness in Heaven

Science Fiction

Secret

Seven-sided Poem

Social Notes

Sonnet of Missing Hope

Sponge Song

Square Dance

Story of the Dress

Swipe of the Sword

… The apartment opened

The Body’s Contradictions

The country’s short on milk

The door of truth was open

The Elephant

The House of Lost Time

The Infernal Powers

The Last Days

The Machine of the World

The Minute After

The Misinformed God

The more I live, the more I embody this truth: they don’t live except in us

The Moth

The Ox

The poet arrives at the station

The Priest Walks Down the Street

There’s also a melancholy hour in heaven

The shards of life, glued together, form a strange teacup

The Table

The Time of Love

The Ungay Science

The Voice

The Whore

The world’s not worth the world

They say that Márgara goes out at night

This family portrait is looking

This landscape? It doesn’t exist. What exists

Threesome in a Café

Truth

Unity

Verses on the Brink of Evening

We’re even, brother, you got your revenge

What can one creature among other creatures

What I’m always and anxiously looking for isn’t this or that. It’s

What noise is that on the stairs

When I was born, one of those twisted

With my scant resources

With only nakedness, its final

Woman Dressed as a Man

You Carry the World on Your Shoulders

You work without joy for a worn-out world

Carlos Drummond de Andrade(1902–1987) was born in a small town in Minas Gerais. While he spent most of his life working as a government bureaucrat, he regarded poetry as his true vocation, and his first book was published in 1930. During six decades of writing, his work went through many phases, transcending styles and schools while being strongly influenced by modernism. Few critics or serious readers would dispute his status as Brazil’s greatest poet. You can sign up for email updates here.

Richard Zenithlived in Brazil and France before immigrating to Portugal in 1987. He has translated the poetry of Luís de Camões, Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and João Cabral de Melo Neto. You can sign up for email updates here.