Time, like an ever-rolling stream (so E. M. Forster maintained), bears all her sons away unless they are very careful. here I shall be looking at some ways of being careful that have commended themselves to two of the few Portuguese poets who have yet succeeded in breaking through the glass ceiling of their still rather unfashionable language and been admitted to the Western canon: Francisco Sá de Miranda (1481?–1558) and Luís de camões (c. 1524–80).

For Antonio Machado, ‘toda la imaginería/ que no ha brotado del río’ was nothing but ‘barata bisutería’ (‘De mi cartera’, st. 4). Dámaso Alonso found Machado's sense of Time less significant than his sense of place, but while he may only have scraped a Pass in Philosophy at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, as an assiduous reader of Schopenhauer he would have been well aware that the mere flowing of a stream is meaningless without a point of reference: the fact that no one can bathe twice in the same river only becomes significant after someone has bathed in it once; and mutability and duration alike acquire meaning only when the downward course of life both converges with the onward flow of time and, as in the tradition of temporal imagery presided over by horace's Solvitur acris hiems (Odes I, iv), forms a tangent with what T. S. Eliot called ‘the point of intersection of the timeless/ with time’ (‘The Dry Salvages’, v, 201–2).