noun
a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation
Poem: Autopsychography by Fernando Pessoa
The poet is a man who feigns
And feigns so thoroughly, at last
He manages to feign as pain
The pain he really feels,
And those who read what once he wrote
Feel clearly, in the pain they read,
Neither of the pains he felt,
Only a pain they cannot sense.
And thus, around its jolting track
There runs, to keep our reason busy,
The circling clockwork train of ours
That men agree to call a heart.
This poem is an aphorism because it speaks of a general truth in concise and high (optional) diction. I like aphorisms because they make you think of different notions that require deeper thinking than just regular things you hear on the radio. In this poem, it basically tells me that a poet writes of things that may be fictitious but they are based on real things and real feelings. In this occasion, Pessoa focuses on a poet's pain. And the poet transfers his pain to the poem, and then the poem transfers the pain to the reader. However, the pain that the reader feels is not the same as the poet's pain because they have two different lives. The pain for the poet comes from the poet's life and the pain for the reader comes from the reader's life. It is a pain they do not sense, but it is there. And then Pessoa attributes that pain to the heart.
I like aphorisms because all of them have an emphatic, powerful and climactic closing line. That last line is something you think about long after I've read the poem. in this poem that line is, "That men agree to call a heart." When I read it, I do agree that the heart is the thing we think about when pain come from a lost love but the problem with that statement is that pain has proven to come from brain. Even pain from love. Even though pain does not come from the heart, the whole aphoristic poem does make me think about how feelings are transferred and communicated to one another through text.
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