Round of hours: the train and the river as images of time in João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poetry

Abstract

In 2020, we celebrated the centenary of one of the greatest Brazilian poets of the twentieth-century: João Cabral de MeloNeto (1920-1999). Acknowledged by a rationalist writing and averse to confessional lyricism, Cabral unveiled thefundamental concepts of his composition process in his poetic and essayistic texts. In this pugilistic relation with language,the poet admitted the imponderable as an opponent, which is materialized, as an example, in the ideas of death and, asthe object of this study, of time. Through a qualitative research supported by theoretical underpinning about the poetic text(BACHELARD, 2018; BORGES, 2000; BOSI, 1977; CHKLOVISK, 1976), conceptions of time (AGOSTINHO, 2019; ELIAS,1998; WHITROW, 1993) and specialized criticism about the poet from Pernambuco (ARAÚJO, 2016; CANDIDO, 2002;SECCHIN, 2020), we aim to analyse the figuration of time in his poetry, considering, for this, the centrality of the text asmaterial for analysis (CANDIDO, 2006), without evading, however, the incorporation of multidisciplinary contributions to the construction of meanings. Based on the effective reading of Cabral's work, for the constitution of the corpus of analysis, wechose the images of the river and the train, once that, in our perspective, they are paradigmatic to reflect on the chronologicalintricacies in Cabral's production. Albeit the two figures resemble in their long-line geometry, they can be distinguished bythe rhythm that characterizes them, contrasting the immediacy of the locomotive with the fluidity of the river water. In thisregard, the poet assembles his textual framework through the different hues that constitute the threads of time weaved inhis verses.