JOURNEY TRHOUGH RUY BELO’S TIME

BETWEEN MATURITY AND NON-EXISTENCE

Abstract

Poetry is capable of lyrically representing complex situations that instigate us to reflect on the purpose of our existence in a cruel universe. Thus, in this study, we consider the existentialist philosophical perspective of Martin Heidegger (2008) as an interpretative key within the poetry of the Portuguese poet Ruy Belo, which elucidates an existential aspect present in Belo’s poetics. The objective of this work is to establish connections between Heideggerian philosophy and the poetry of Ruy Belo (2017) to investigate the poetic persona present in the poem “Canto de Outono”. Accordingly, the methods used were based on hermeneutic-ontology research and bibliographical analysis. Critically, we emphasize the presence of time as the foundation of the poem. The poetic persona reflects on the ephemeral nature of the subject and encounters himself in the condition of existence in life as a passage, whereas nature, which initially grants vital energy to the individual, takes back for its own what is has borrowed. Therefore, time grants the subject a devastating action both on the individual himself, as his temporality is annihilated by the temporal movement, and of reality in its entirety, in the sense of the course of renewal of the seasons and of nature.