Morte e Vida Severina (literally, Severine Life and Death, translated by Elizabeth Bishop as The Death and Life of a Severino) is a play in verse by Brazilian author João Cabral de Melo Neto, one of his most famous and frequently read works.

The auto evolves into an allegorical account that parallels the Nativity of Jesus and reflects on the possibility for a meaningful life amid the harshness of the sertão.

The auto is formally divided in 18 parts, each compromising a scene, either a dialogue between the retirante and someone or a group of people he encounters in his way or a monologue.

In terms of the subject of the poem, it can be analyzed in two sections: a first part, chronicling the retirante's travel to the city, and a second, compromising what follows his arrival.

In the first part, Severino passes through several large sugarcane crops, which makes explicit the inequality of land ownership in the region, as well as discover the arid and desolated characteristics of the life in the sertão, so that the Melo Neto crafts a paradox by describing a life that most truly resembles death than anything else.

Morte e Vida Severina begins describing Severino, a retirante traveling from the barren, drought-striking hinderlands of Pernambuco to Recife, the state's capital.

Much further in the poem, the retirante reaches the city; however, where he expected to find a better scenario than his previous one, he encounters only the belief that he had just been pursuing his own death.

Two Egyptian fortune tellers predict a simple future for the boy, who, they say, will remain forever attached to the miserable reality in which he was born.

Even when it's so puny, Even when it's that of A severe, Severino life.”[1] In 1965, Roberto Freire asked the then-young Chico Buarque to make the work into a musical play.