Vida e Existência

Quatro vezes mudou a estação falsa
No falso ano, no imutável curso
        Do tempo consequente;
Ao verde segue o seco, e ao seco o verde;
E não sabe ninguém qual é o primeiro,
        Nem o último, e acabam.

1.
Little flower that wert on the hill,
Where art thou to-day?
Thou that saw'st thyself in the rill
Art thou gone away?
Ah, now I see that thou art dead
And that thy charm from us is fled.

1.
Little flower that wert on the hill,
Where art thou to-day?
Thou that saw'st thyself in the rill
Art thou gone away?
Ah, now I see that thou art dead
And that thy charm from us is fled.

If I could carve my poems in wood,
By children they would be understood,

So near to the sense things have in God
Are both my poems and children's thought.

For a child knows that logic and meaning
Are only nothing nothing screening,

And a child is one divinely aware
That all things are toys and all things are fair,

That a thimble, a stone and a cotton‑reel
Are things we can quite divinely feel,

And that, if we make men out of those things,
They are really men, not imaginings.

I would therefore l could take my verse
Out of mere ideas and better it worse

To visible carving or drawing or what
My verses could be resembling that.

Then would I be the children's poet,
And, though perhaps I might never know it

With the outer sense that makes life sadder,
In every innocent face made gladder

God would be giving my soul the sense,
Lost back of knowledge, of recompense ­-

The sense of children more children still
When, acting my poems at their glad will,

They, playing with toys, with legs incurled,
Lightly err the visible world.

If I could carve my poems in wood,
By children they would be understood,

So near to the sense things have in God
Are both my poems and children's thought.

For a child knows that logic and meaning
Are only nothing nothing screening,

And a child is one divinely aware
That all things are toys and all things are fair,

That a thimble, a stone and a cotton‑reel
Are things we can quite divinely feel,

And that, if we make men out of those things,
They are really men, not imaginings.

I would therefore l could take my verse
Out of mere ideas and better it worse

To visible carving or drawing or what
My verses could be resembling that.

Then would I be the children's poet,
And, though perhaps I might never know it

With the outer sense that makes life sadder,
In every innocent face made gladder

God would be giving my soul the sense,
Lost back of knowledge, of recompense ­-

The sense of children more children still
When, acting my poems at their glad will,

They, playing with toys, with legs incurled,
Lightly err the visible world.

Seldom have I so inly comprehended
With a deep sense so awful and so rude
My complete being's complete solitude
In all its arid loneliness extended

So wholly solitude, so much unblended
With aught else, good or ill, that might intrude
Upon its horror limitless and nude
Whereat my reason reels, not by (...) defended.
And save it from itself (…)

Aquela que tinha pobre
A única saia que tinha,
Por muitas roupas que dobre
Nunca será mais rainha.

Aquela que tinha pobre
A única saia que tinha,
Por muitas roupas que dobre
Nunca será mais rainha.

My thoughts are something my soul fears.
        I tremble at my very glee.
        Sometimes I feel arrive in me
A dim, a cold. a sad, a fierce
        A lust‑like spirituality.

It makes me one with all the grass.
        My life takes colour at all flowers.
The breeze that seemeth loth to pass
        Shakes off red petals from my hours
        And my heart sulters without showers.

Then God becomes a vice of mine
        And divine feelings an embrace
That sinks my senses in its wine
        And leaves no outline in my ways
Of seeing God flower, grow and shine.

My thoughts and feelings mingle and form
        A vague and hot soul‑unity.
Like a sea that expects a storm,
        A lazy ache and fret make me
A murmur like a coming swarm.

My parched thoughts mix and occupy
        Their interpresences and swell
To each others' places. I descry
        Nought in me save impossible
Mixtures of many things all I.

I am a drunkard of my thoughts.
        My feelings' juice o'erruns my soul.
        My will becomes soaked in them all.
Then life stagnates a dream and rots
        To beauty in my verses' dole.

My thoughts are something my soul fears.
        I tremble at my very glee.
        Sometimes I feel arrive in me
A dim, a cold. a sad, a fierce
        A lust‑like spirituality.

It makes me one with all the grass.
        My life takes colour at all flowers.
The breeze that seemeth loth to pass
        Shakes off red petals from my hours
        And my heart sulters without showers.

Then God becomes a vice of mine
        And divine feelings an embrace
That sinks my senses in its wine
        And leaves no outline in my ways
Of seeing God flower, grow and shine.

My thoughts and feelings mingle and form
        A vague and hot soul‑unity.
Like a sea that expects a storm,
        A lazy ache and fret make me
A murmur like a coming swarm.

My parched thoughts mix and occupy
        Their interpresences and swell
To each others' places. I descry
        Nought in me save impossible
Mixtures of many things all I.

I am a drunkard of my thoughts.
        My feelings' juice o'erruns my soul.
        My will becomes soaked in them all.
Then life stagnates a dream and rots
        To beauty in my verses' dole.

When slattern Time, worn out with toil of wearing,
With loose‑tied pack shall trudge upon my years,
And I shall feel that forced occasion nearing
That despair's self (that must live to be) fears,

I, being beggared of all wealth of hope -
So prodigal have I to wishes been -
Shall with known uselessness for the coin grope
To pay that the hour’s ending be serene.

I shall not enter the great silent cave
With curious ardour, or ease out of sun,
But all that with me I shall then still have
Will be a coward rage that all is done.

No hope the cave's a passage shall control
Fear of the immediate night of the shown hole.

When slattern Time, worn out with toil of wearing,
With loose‑tied pack shall trudge upon my years,
And I shall feel that forced occasion nearing
That despair's self (that must live to be) fears,

I, being beggared of all wealth of hope -
So prodigal have I to wishes been -
Shall with known uselessness for the coin grope
To pay that the hour’s ending be serene.

I shall not enter the great silent cave
With curious ardour, or ease out of sun,
But all that with me I shall then still have
Will be a coward rage that all is done.

No hope the cave's a passage shall control
Fear of the immediate night of the shown hole.

When slattern Time, worn out with toil of wearing,
With loose‑tied pack shall trudge upon my years,
And I shall feel that forced occasion nearing
That despair's self (that must live to be) fears,

I, being beggared of all wealth of hope -
So prodigal have I to wishes been -
Shall with known uselessness for the coin grope
To pay that the hour’s ending be serene.

I shall not enter the great silent cave
With curious ardour, or ease out of sun,
But all that with me I shall then still have
Will be a coward rage that all is done.

No hope the cave's a passage shall control
Fear of the immediate night of the shown hole.

Quando te vais a deitar
Não sei se rezas se não.
Devias sempre rezar
E sempre a pedir perdão.

Duas vezes jurei ser
O que julgo que sou,
Só para desconhecer
Que não sei para onde vou.

Duas vezes jurei ser
O que julgo que sou,
Só para desconhecer
Que não sei para onde vou.

Beside a summer's day
        I lay me down and dreamed.
The light from far away
        In my withinned self gleamed,
An unreal true glow,
Spiritually somehow.

I saw the inner side
        Of summer, earth and morn.
I heard the rivers glide
        From Within. l was borne
To see, through mysteries,
How God everything is.

The motes of sun that dance
        Are audibly whispered.
All is an utterance.
        The sight may hear. I shed
Vision of things as things.
My thoughts are angels' wings.

The corpses of known hours
        In barks unsteered and left
Float, covered with mute flowers,
        Down my dream that is cleft
In banks of mystery ­-
This summer day and I.

And something like a greed
        And yet unlike a wish,
The power to have a need
        Which doth not needing reach,
But is dissolved again
Ere its sad joy reach pain,

A shadowy lightness woven
        Of the day and of me,
Like sparkling water driven
        Never but where we see,
A gap, a pause, a dim
Looking over things' rim,

Starts like a sudden flute
        Pastoral with tuneless notes
Out of the unseen root
        Of all my being denotes,
Spreads, till I feel it not,
O'er my lost sense of thought.

And lo! I am another.
        My senses taste not‑mine.
A hand my sight doth smother
        To a blind sight divine.
I am a lost tune, a mood
Of the finger‑tips of God.

So, like a child‑king crowned,
        I feel new with fear‑pride.
I am robed with sky and ground.
        My inmost soul's outside
Is sunlit seas and lands.
My dreams are seraphs' hands.

I shall not come when thou wilt call,
        For when thou call'st I am with thee.
        When I think of thee, within me
Thyself art, and thy thought self’s all.

Thy presence is thy absence drest
        In thy body that hides thy soul.
Tis in me that thou art possessed,
        'Tis in my thoughts that thou art whole.

Outside thee, given to time and space,
        Thy body, thy mere loss to me,
Partakes of change and age and place?
        Belongs to other laws than thee.

In my dream of thee nothing changes
        Thyself to other than thou art.
        Thy corporal presence is that part
Of thee that thee from thee estranges.

Therefore call me, but await not.
        Thy voice, summed to my dreaming thee,
Shall put new beauty on that thought
        Of thy body that dwells in me.

Thy voice heard from afar shall bring
        Nearer to me thy presence dreamed.
        Brighter and clearer than it seemed
It grow'th in my imagining.

Then call no more. Thy voice twice heard
        Along the real space would be
        Too near now to reality.
Thy second voice were thy first blurred.

Call me but once. I close mine eyes
        And let the second call be dreamed,
        Thy body's vision lightly gleamed
On my seeing memory of thy cries.

The rest, eyes shut lest thou appear.
        Shall be thy clear continuance
        In my dream's constancy askance.
Keep far, keep silent, come not here,

For thou wouldst come too near for sight
        And out of my thoughts step to thee,
        Putting on thy dreamed body in me
        (Thy body's form‑dream infinite)
        Thy limit, visibility.

Rezas porque outros rezaram,
E vestes à moda alheia...
Quando amares vê se amas
Sem teres o amor na ideia.

O rosário da vontade,
Rezei-o trocado e a esmo.
Se vens dizer-me a verdade,
Vê lá bem se é isso mesmo.

Here in this wilderness
        Each tree and stone fills me
        With the sadness of a great glee.
God in His altogetherness
        Is whole‑part of each stone and tree.

An inner outward seeingness
        Makes my clear self unknown.
        (O Godfully alone!)
God in His overbeingness
        Survives His death each tree and every stone

Ay, in the barkness and clodfulness
        Of tree and sand and stone
        God is only His Own,
God in all His godfulness,
        Whose concrete soul's each thing's abstraction.

I

All things that shine are God's eyes.
        All things that move are God's speech.
        Every thing has all to teach
To our awakening surmise.

Green are God's thoughts when they are leaves,
        Yellow when sunflowers they are.
        Yet they shine separate and far
From the hands wherewith God weaves.

Light are my steps on the ground
        Yet they do echo through space,
        Through terrible abysses that face
God at the side never found.

II

My dreams are angels' kisses.
Lightly they touch my heart,
Tip‑toe shadow caresses.
They are my Godder part.

There is a flower in my hand.
It is not found in fields.
God looks and can understand,
For He is the dreamer who builds.

He knows how dreams are set up,
He knows how flowers are made glad.
Look: I hold up my cup
And God gives me wine to be mad.

Sorrow no more for the faded rose,
Nor of the yellow lily despair.
These, as we see them, are but their shows.
They are elsewhere.

Tis but their shadow lives in our light.
As we see them (...)
They live more truly in our delight
Than in their forms.

The beauty they had was never lost,
It moved away
From the present hour and the form once tossed
Into space and day.

But the undying essence of the (...)

The rose that faded from yesterday
Is where yesterday is.
I shall have again the flower and the day,
The self and the bliss.

Sorrow no more for the faded rose,
Nor of the yellow lily despair.
These, as we see them, are but their shows.
They are elsewhere.

Tis but their shadow lives in our light.
As we see them (...)
They live more truly in our delight
Than in their forms.

The beauty they had was never lost,
It moved away
From the present hour and the form once tossed
Into space and day.

But the undying essence of the (...)

The rose that faded from yesterday
Is where yesterday is.
I shall have again the flower and the day,
The self and the bliss.