This article argues that the poem “Liberdade”, by Fernando Pessoa, written in a context of censorship, is a parody of the poem “The Tables Turned”, by William Wordsworth. The apology of nature opposed to culture presented in Wordsworth’s lines is resumed by Pessoa, but with a very different purpose. Pessoa, in a seemingly light tone, uses the contrast between nature and culture to adapt it to the ideology of Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, which narrowed the intellectuals’ freedom of speech. Whereas Wordsworth praises nature as the source of ethics, Pessoa empties the nobility of this encomium while praising nature for merely being the opposite of human obligations (such as reading). Pessoa’s subject, indolent and insouciant, seems to occupy the place which Salazar destined to the intellectuals: the one of critical acephaly. Yet, there are elements in the poem that show the underlying irony of the role played by the subject. The use of irony, one of the techniques of parody, implies not a connivance with Salazar’s politics of censorship, but a harsh criticism of it.
