Fernando Ant'nio Nogueira Pessoa
It rained outside right into Hadrian's soul. The boy lay dead On the low couch, on whose denuded whole,
Whether we write or speak or do but look We are ever unapparent. What we are Cannot be transfused into word or book.
If that apparent part of life's delight Our tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen By aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,
When I do think my meanest line shall be More in Time's use than my creating whole, That future eyes more clearly shall feel me
I could not think of thee as piec'd rot, Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead; Yet thou liv'dst entire in my seeing thought
Oh to be idle loving idleness! But I am idle all in hate of me; Ever in action's dream, in the false stress
How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action, When the miserly press of each day's need Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
As a bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled, Doth overflow his purpose with made heat, And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed
Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee-- That entire death shall null my entire thought; And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,
How many masks wear we, and undermasks, Upon our countenance of soul, and when, If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
As to a child, I talked my heart asleep With empty promise of the coming day, And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Like to a ship that storms urge on its course, By its own trials our soul is surer made. The very things that make the voyage worse
As the lone, frighted user of a night-road Suddenly turns round, nothing to detect, Yet on his fear's sense keepeth still the load
When I should be asleep to mine own voice In telling thee how much thy love's my dream, I find me listening to myself, the noise
We are born at sunset and we die ere morn, And the whole darkness of the world we know, How can we guess its truth, to darkness born,
Beauty and love let no one separate, Whom exact Nature did to each other fit, Giving to Beauty love as finishing fate
Like a bad suitor desperate and trembling From the mixed sense of being not loved and loving, Who with feared longing half would know, dissembling
We never joy enjoy to that full point Regret doth wish joy had enjoy'd been, Nor have the strength regret to disappoint
My love, and not I, is the egoist. My love for thee loves itself more than thee; Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist,
Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night, In one black mystery two void mysteries blends; The stray stars, whose innumerable light
When in the widening circle of rebirth To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come, And try again the unremembered earth
Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing. Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes, Still suggests form as aught whose proper being
My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man, Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older, Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,
Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day, When clouds are one cloud till the horizon, Our thinking senses deem the sun away
Something in me was born before the stars And saw the sun begin from far away. Our yellow, local day on its wont jars,
My weary life, that lives unsatisfied On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this, To whom the power to will hath been denied
We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling, And do but compel Fate aside or back
The world is woven all of dream and error And but one sureness in our truth may lie-- That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
How yesterday is long ago! The past Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day, And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream. Surely reality cannot be this!
I do not know what truth the false untruth Of this sad sense of the seen world may own, Or if this flowered plant bears also a fruit
I am older than Nature and her Time By all the timeless age of Consciousness, And my adult oblivion of the clime
When I have sense of what to sense appears, Sense is sense ere 'tis mine or mine in me is. When I hear, Hearing, ere I do hear, hears.
He that goes back does, since he goes, advance, Though he doth not advance who goeth back, And he that seeks, though he on nothing chance,
Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind-- All who, stamped separate by curtailing birth, Owe no duty's allegiance to mankind
Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad. The outer day, void statue of lit blue, Is altogether outward, other, glad
