[3] Because the poem evokes, at times, a glorious national past only as a counterpoint to modern decadence, some critics like Eduardo Lourenço have referred to it as a "counter-epopee", a subversion of the epic poetry genre.

[1] This perhaps explains why it was found unremarkable by contemporary critics (Verde would bemoan, on a letter to António de Macedo Papança, that "a recent poem of mine, published in a widely-circulated periodical in celebration of Camões, did not receive a considered glance, a smile, a note of scorn, an observation!

", line 23) — a recollection of a gallant tale that is immediately counterpointed by the presence of an English battleship docked nearby (a symbol of the loss of national importance); and once as "a war-sized monument cast in bronze / [that] stands, on a pillar, for an epic that was!"

[3] The poem opens with "Vespers", as dusk begins to fall and the city is cloaked in shadows, the narrator is overcome with a surge of melancholy that gives him "an absurd desire to suffer".

By the Tagus riverfront, he observes the bustle of the crowd and it makes the narrator's mind wander: the hired coaches that take people to the railway station make the narrator fantasise about foreign cities, exhibitions, modernity; the dirty workers leaving the shipyards evoke by contrast the glorious past of Portugal during the Age of Discovery, in the days of Luís de Camões, when carracks would depart from Lisbon to explore the unknown.

A group of raucous, manly fishwives who had been unloading coal on frigates make their way home to their impoverished, disease-stricken neighbourhood, rocking inside their baskets infant sons "who'll one day drown in storms".

The foreboding "black, funereal spectre" of the crosses, the tolling bells, and the churches harkens to the days of the Inquisition and its persecutions: the thought alone makes him physically ill.

The sight of some Mecklenburgers pawing the pavement while pulling a victoria makes the narrator satirise the frivolity of the bourgeois dress, with its corsets, printed shawls, coiled plaits, trains, and excessive adornment, all imported and sold by subservient store clerks buried under clouds of satin and choking in the rice powder hovering through the air.

All he sees appalls him: a decadent society that lives walled in stone, murky streets, sorry drunkards staggering home, night watchmen making their rounds, sick prostitutes smoking in their balcony windows.

The closing verse speaks not of the narrator's anguish, but of human pain in itself: how it thrives in decadence and has its horizons set on the city's irregular mass of tomblike buildings, like a baleful sea.