Tagus - The Tagus in Song and Story

The Tagus in Song and Story

A major river, the Tagus is brought to mind in the songs and stories of the Portuguese. A popular fado song in Lisbon notes that while people get older, the Tagus remains young ("My hair getting white, the Tagus is always young"). The author, Fernando Pessoa, wrote a poem that begins: "The Tagus is more beautiful than the river that flows through my village...."

Richard Crashaw's poem "Saint Mary Magdalene, or the Weeper" refers to the "Golden" Tagus as wanting Mary Magdalene's silver tears. In classical poetry the Tagus was famous for its gold-bearing sands (Catullus 29.19, Ovid, Amores, 1.15.34, Juvenal, Satires, 3.55, etc.

Read more about this topic:  Tagus

Famous quotes containing the words song and/or story:

    Do you hear the wind? It’s not dying,
    It’s singing, weaving a song about the president saluting the trust,
    The past in each of us....
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.
    Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)