For many years I was haunted by a Fernando Pessoa poem. Not one of his more obviously troubling works, the likes of In the Terrible Night, perhaps, or To Me Now Death’s Coming. No, the comparatively innocuous I See Boats Moving was the source of my unease.

The first line is simple. “I see boats moving on the sea,” writes Pessoa, a man who died of cirrhosis in 1935, aged 47.

By the time of his death the Portuguese poet was barely known to the great maritime city of Lisbon, where he lived for most of his life. He frequented A Brasileira, a coffee shop in the Chiado district, but though immortalised in 1988 by the creation of a statue outside the café the chances are that its staff were largely unaware of the demise of this strange and melancholy man.

I paid due homage to A Brasileira on my honeymoon in 1993, a copy of Penguin’s Selected Poems by Pessoa in hand. As men of letters the Portuguese are eloquence personified. Thus to Pessoa and his boats moving on the sea: “Their sails, like wings of what I see/ Bring me a vague inner desire to be/ Who I was without knowing what it was.”

On honeymoon, intimations of who I was rumbled like the trams on the cobbled streets, evanescent and unobjectionable. But as life went by that vague desire gnawed with greater insistence. I was living in London, a long way from my coastal upbringing. Having children prompted a move out of the city, to the bucolic calm of the Cotswolds. But I’d perennially, compulsively return to the sea and the remaining lines of Pessoa’s poem would loom: “So all recalls my home self and, because/ It recalls that, what I am aches in me.”

Now, nearly three years after settling with my family in Cornwall, I find myself in a house with a sea view. We have just moved from Porthcurno, in whose valley we lived, to Mousehole. Here the sea stretches as far as the eye can see. On the day of our move I unpacked a box of books and found my edition of Pessoa’s Selected Poems. From it, a long-forgotten piece of paper fluttered to the floor. It was a transcription of I See Boats Moving by my wife, given to me on our honeymoon. I looked across Mount’s Bay and saw a red-sailed gaffer steering a course for Newlyn. The ache was gone and I felt at home.