Nocturnal Wanderings

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night when a new thought rises to the surface. Last night it was a line from one of my favorite poems by Fernando Pessoa — the poem dedicated to D. Dinis in Message, his celebrated book honoring the seafaring monarchs and dons of Portugal. I have always loved the imagery in that poem, but I realized I had never fully understood how it related to the king himself. What I discovered surprised me.

Dom Dinis, son of Afonso III and king for forty years in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, was known as both the Farmer King and the Poet King. His reign was admired for its industry and farsighted administrative reforms, which strengthened Portugal’s prosperity. 
One of the most revealing things I learned was that, to protect the agricultural lands from encroaching sand, Dinis greatly expanded a project begun by his father: planting vast stretches of pine along the coast near Leiria — later known as the Pinhal de Leiria. The forest not only shielded crops but supplied the lumber for the many ships Portugal would need for commerce and exploration. Dinis developed new exports, encouraged trade, and became a popular builder of the kingdom’s future.

I was struck by how these pines connected to a memory of my own. Years ago, traveling through that region on the way to Fátima and then on to Coimbra, I remember opening the car window and breathing in the breathtaking scent of sweet pine. It instantly called up an image of my mother’s Aunt Ethel’s living room — the faint pine aroma and the little ceramic plates with pink dogwood resting on her coffee table. I had hoped, on a recent trip to Nazaré, to find those pines again, though I hadn’t yet known their story or realized the great forest lay farther north, near Fátima.

Learning their history filled me with hope that I might someday return to that place and those evocative trees. But then I discovered that the forest was 86% destroyed by a wildfire in 2017. Reforestation is underway, and perhaps someday the pines will rise again in their former splendor — the forest that inspired both D. Dinis and, centuries later, Fernando Pessoa. But it may not return in my lifetime.
Important to my interest in D. Dinis is that he was also a poet and troubadour. Pessoa honors him with this image:

D. Dinis — Message (my translation)

 At night he writes his friend-song,
​The planter of ships to be,
And he hears within himself a murmuring silence:
It is the sound of the pine trees that, like wheat of Empire,
undulate, each unaware of the other.
A brook, whose song — young and pure — seeks the ocean;
And the whisper of the pine forests, the dark swell,
Is the present sound of that future sea,
The voice of the land longing for the sea.

Original Portuguese:
Na noite escreve um seu Cantar de Amigo
O plantador de naus a haver,
E ouve um silêncio múrmuro consigo:
É o rumor dos pinhais que, como um trigo
De Império, ondulam sem se poder ver.
Arroio, esse cantar, jovem e puro,
Busca o oceano por achar;
E a fala dos pinhais, marulho obscuro,
É o som presente desse mar futuro,
É a voz da terra ansiando pelo mar.

In my search, I found a recording of one of Dinis’ own songs — one version sung in medieval Galician-Portuguese and another by Amália Rodrigues. Both are beautiful calls to the sea to reveal the whereabouts of a distant lover.

And it touched me to learn that this same king — poet, planter of pines, builder of ships — helped unite the country around the Portuguese language itself, the language in which Pessoa would one day sing of him.

Even knowing the forest may never fully return in my lifetime, I find myself comforted by the thought that its scent still lingers somewhere — in memory, in poetry, in the murmur of Pessoa’s lines that woke me from sleep. Perhaps that is what D. Dinis understood as he planted his pines and wrote his songs: that the land and the sea, the past and the future, speak to one another in ways we can feel but not always see. And each time I return to Portugal, I sense that same quiet conversation inside myself — a longing not for what once was, but for the deeper continuity that endures.

In Pessoa’s poem I envision the forest of pines, ships waiting to be built, and eager seamen longing for the sea. It appears almost mystical. I continue to hear Pessoa’s voice and feel his love for nature as he sings his love song to "O Mar". Antonio Costa Pinheiro in his works honoring the spirit of Pessoa speaks to us of this longing.

Young seafaring men leave wives and loved ones for the siren of the sea (Painting in Fado Museum Lisbon)

A sea of Pines as planted by the Farmer King in the Middle Ages

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Antonio Costa Pinheiro painting of  the poet's glasses

Exhibit at the Gulbenkian Foundation of works by Antonio Costa Pinheiro honoring the life of Fernando Pessoa

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