Outros

I.

Thy hand with its lovely fingers
        And the heavy rings on them!
How my soul over them lingers
Each finger with a heavy gem,
Each ring like a small diadem!

When thou and I are alone,
One only wish my soul stings —
Holding thy hand in my own,
All night, while the night-bird sings,
To take off and replace thy rings.

Cantos, risos e flores alumiem
        Nosso mortal destino,
Para o ermo ocultar fundo, nocturno
        De nosso pensamento,
Curvado, já em vida, sob a ideia
        Do plutónico gozo,
Cônscio já da lívida esperança
        Do caos redivivo.

V.

My child, I see thine eyes upon
A shadow, as cast by the wings
When a swift bird passes close by
The castle-window before the sun:
So through thy glance the shadows fly...

The souls of things dead and bygone
Haunt the appearances of living things

Before a poor, ignorant crowd
A wild propagandist loud
Shrieked a socialistic speech,
But such pompous terms and thick,
Artistic, scientific
Went with each oratoric screech
That the crowd in silence heard
Wishing of course to applaud,
But expecting a strong word
They could understand, to laud.

«Procrastinators, banditti
Reactionary, servile,
Full‑considerately vile!ª
In this way, pompously witty
He talked and the crowd heard on.
«You», he continued, «each Don
Of financial bloated leer,
I excommunicate here
Before Justice throne severe;
You I detest, I abhor…»

Here a laugh applauding rough
The wide air from the crowd tore.
«That word», they cried in a roar,
«We understand well enough!»

III

Ah, mas aqui, onde irreais erramos,
Dormimos o que somos, e a verdade,
Inda que enfim em sonhos a vejamos,
Vemo-la, porque em sonho, em falsidade.

Sombras buscando corpos, se os achamos
Como sentir a sua realidade?
Com mãos de sombra, Sombras, que tocamos?
Nosso toque é ausência e vacuidade.

Quem desta Alma fechada nos liberta?
Sem ver, ouvimos para além da sala
De ser; mas como, aqui, a porta aberta?

......

Calmo na falsa morte a nós exposto,
O Livro ocluso contra o peito posto,
Nosso Pai Roseacruz conhece e cala.

III

Ah, mas aqui, onde irreais erramos,
Dormimos o que somos, e a verdade,
Inda que enfim em sonhos a vejamos,
Vemo-la, porque em sonho, em falsidade.

Sombras buscando corpos, se os achamos
Como sentir a sua realidade?
Com mãos de sombra, Sombras, que tocamos?
Nosso toque é ausência e vacuidade.

Quem desta Alma fechada nos liberta?
Sem ver, ouvimos para além da sala
De ser; mas como, aqui, a porta aberta?

......

Calmo na falsa morte a nós exposto,
O Livro ocluso contra o peito posto,
Nosso Pai Roseacruz conhece e cala.

Alone, on the deserted quay, this summer morning,
I look towards the bar, I look towards the Indefinite,
I look and find pleasure in seeing,
Little, black and clear, a steamer coming in.
It is very far yet, distinct and classic after its own fashion.
It leaves on the distant air behind it the vain curls of its smoke.
It is coming in, and morn comes in with it, and on the river
Here, there, naval life awakes,
Sails arise, tugs advance,
Small boats jut out from behind the ships in the port.
There is a vague breeze.
But my soul is with the things that I see least,
With the in-coming steamer,
Because it is with Distance, with Morn,
With the naval meaning of this Hour,
With the painful softness that rises in me like a qualm,
Like a beginning of sea-sickness, but in my soul.

I look from afar at the steamer, with a great independence of mind
And a whell begins to spin in me, very slowly.

The steamers that enter the bar in the morning,
Bring to my eyes with their coming
The glad and sad mystery of all who arrive and depart.
They bring memories of distant quays, and of other moments
Of another kind of the same mankind in other ports.
Every (...), every departure of a ship,
Is — I feel it in me like my blood —
Unconsciously symbolic, terribly
Threatening metaphysical meanings
That startle in me the being I once …

Ah, every quay is a regret made of stone!
And when the ship leaves the quay
And we note suddenly that a space is widening
Between the quay and the ship,
There comes to me, I know not why, a recent anguish,
A mist of feelings of sadness
That shines in the sun of my mosy anguishes
Like the first window the morning strikes on,
And clings round me like some one else's remembrance
Which is somehow mysteriously mine.

Ah, who knows, who knows,
If I did not leave long ago, before Myself,
A quay; if I did not depart, a ship in
The oblique sun of morning,
From another kind of port?
Who knows if I did not leave, before the hour
Of the exterior world as I see it
Dawned for me,
A large quay full of few people,
Of a great half-awakened city,
Of a great city commercial, overgrown, apopletical,
As much as that can be outside Time and Space?

Ay, from a quay, from a quay somehow material,
Real, visible as a quay, really a quay,
The Absolute Quay on whose type, unconsciously imitated,
Insensibly evoked,

We men have built
Our quays in our harbours,
Our quays, of actual stone overlooking true water,
Which, once built, suddenly show themselves to be
Real-Things, Things-Spirits, Entities in Stone-Souls,
At certain moments of ours of root-sentiments
When it seems that a door is opened in the outer world
And, without anything changing
Everything reveals itself to be different.

Ah, the Great Quay whence we embarked in Ship-Nations!
The Great Earlier Quay, eternal and divine!
Of what port? Over what waters? And why do I think of this?
A Great Quay like all other quays, but the Only One.
Full, as they are, of murmurous silences in the fore-dawns
And budding with the dawns in a noise of cranes
And arrivals of goods-trains
And under the black, occasional and light cloud
Of the smoke of the chimneys of the near factories
Which clouds its ground, black with small shining coal,
As if it were the shadow of a cloud passing over dark water.

Ah, what essentiality of mystery and arrested senses
In a divine revealing ecstasy
At the hours coloured like silences and anguishes
Is the bridge between any quay and THE QUAY!

Quay blackly reflected in the still waters,
Suddle [?] on board the ships,
Oh wandering and unstable soul of the people who live in ships,
Of the symbolic people who pass and for whom, nothing lasts
For when the vessel returns to the port,
There is always some change on board!

On continual flights, goings, drunknness of the Different!
Eternal soul of navigators and navigations!
Hulls slowly reflected in the waters
When the ship leaves the port!
To float as soul of life, to depart as voice,
To live the moment tremulously on eternal waters!
To wake to more direct days than the days of Europe,
To see mysterious ports over the loneliness of the sea,
To double distant capes and see sudden great landscapes
Of unnumbred astonished alones!

Ah, the distant beaches, the quays seen from afar,
And then the near beaches and the quays seen from near.
The mystery of each departure and of each arrival,
The painful instability and incomprehensibility
Of this impossible universe
At each naval hour ever more deeply felt right in my skin.
The absurd sob that our souls spill
Over the ever-different tracts of seas with islands afar,
Over the distant lines of the coasts we merely pass by,
Over the clear growing-clear of ports, with their houses and their people,
When the ship nears the land.

Ah, the freshness of morns when we arrive,
And the paleness of the morns when we depart,
When our entrails are gripped up
And a vague sensation resembling a fear
— The ancestral fear of going away and leaving,
The mysterious ancestral terror of Arrivals and New Things —
Grips up our skin and gives us qualms
And all our anguished body feels,
As if it were our soul,
An unexplained desire to feel this in some other way:
A regret at something,
A perturbation of tendernesses towards what vague fatherland?
What coast? what ship? what quay?
That thought sickens within us
And only a great vaccum remains in us,
A hollow satiety of naval minutes,
And a vague anxiety that would be weariness or pain
If it knew how to be that…

The summer morning is, nevertheless, slightly cool,
A slight night-dullness lies yet on the shaken air.
The wheel within me quickens its motion slightly.
And the steamer keeps on coming in, because surely it must coming in,
And not because I see it moving in its excessive distance.

In my imagination it is already near and visible
In all the extent of the lines of its portholes,
And everything trembles in me, all my flesh and all my skin,
On account of that creature that never arrives in any ship
And whom I have come to await to-day on this quay, through an oblique command.

Vem de lá do monte verde
A trova que não entendo.
É um som bom que se perde
Enquanto se vai vivendo.

Amo o que vejo porque deixarei
        Qualquer dia de o ver.
        Amo-o também porque é.

No plácido intervalo em que me sinto,
        Do amar, mais que ser,
        Amo o haver tudo e a mim.
Melhor me não dariam, se voltassem,
        Os primitivos deuses,
        Que também, nada sabem.

I

My tale is simple, sad and brief -
As simple as all tales of grief,
As brief as all that is ours, though
It seem eternal to its woe;
No tale of glorious deeds or fair,
But one short poem of despair;
Dark as all things where man is caught
In the fine‑poisoned nets of thought.
Here is no flame of love's old fire,
Nor song of pent or free desire,
No thousand herses [?] fill its plan,
But it is centred round one man.
A man? A boy, if boyhood be
That where is sober misery.
About a boy all moves, an elf
Careless of happiness or pelf,
But fated to sing but himself.

I was not born to joy nor love.
The earth below, the sky above
Compel a sense within my soul
That deeply, heavily doth roll,
Like a tremendous, mystic sea
In lands where dreams alone can be;
A feeling that a sadness is,
Weeping in broken‑hearted bliss;
A sense that is a deep despair -
I know not why I should feel this
Before the things that are most fair.

Beauty is more than pleasure's joy:
That which must please is made to cloy,
And Nature cloys not with distaste
But gives a sorrow [?], as of past
Things whence the Present does inherit
Something where [...] is and deep
Beauty delicious in a sleep
That is half‑sadness to the spirit.

For Pleasure is not Joy - we know
Joy lives as sorrow in the heart;
One or the other lives; the dart
That Sorrow kills comes from Joy's bow.
Pleasure and distaste are not so.
Sorrow and Joy are as the strange
And unknown forms of life and change
That are ignored in depths of ocean:
Pure is the depth of their emotion.
Pleasure and Pain are not like these,
But as on surfaces of seas
The alternation of their motion
And shows of shifting without end.
Joy may like the sun's light transcend
The clouds of Pain; Pleasure may be
The face and look of Misery.

III

Ay, Nature chills me with deep fear,
For Nature, to my seeing, spent
With looking on my woes too near,
It is but Mystery eloquent.
The plainest stone, the simplest flower -
All have a meaning deep and vast,
Mocking their living of an hour.
But this significance, that hath past
So oft to poet’s song and word,
Makes them but madmen, even as I,
Speaking in outline [?] sense absurd
Strange thoughts for beings that must die.
But Man to me is dreader still,
The thing of thought, feeling and will,
Which is so dark unto mine eyes
That of the sense he calls his soul
- Let not of seeing speak the mole [?] -
I cannot dream to theorize.

For men, who have wrought creeds and codes
And guided nations by the roads
Of feeling and of speculation,
Have seen as much - nothing - as I
Into the world. All could perceive
That Nature aught doth signify:
Beyond this they could stop or rave.
Most raved and therefore could believe.

Yet I, naturally wrapt about,
Normally, as in feathers the bird,
With hesitation and with doubt,
Find all the world a thing absurd.
Because myself, a part of it,
Am an absurdity unfit.

Too young I learnt to reason coldly
And draw conclusions firmly, boldly,
From thoughts and facts to shatter creeds,
Careless of man's mendacious needs.
Preciseness cast in me the seeds
Of madness, and the soil was good
For that abnormal growth of pain
Whose flowers are red, colour of blood.

Too soon I learned to see too clear,
And therefore nothing now can capture
My heart, to which reasoning is rapture,
That sees night where most poets say
«'Tis day - I see it all - ­'tis day.ª
They sing of joy, T sing of fear.

Alas! Why should I stop thus long
Over the illness of my life,
That has Insanity for wife?
Turn I back with an impulse strong.
Leave I this shallowness and sing.
The deeper sorrow of my song.

Here lieth A[lexander] S[earch]
Whom God and man left in the lurch
And nature mocked with pain and woe
He believed not in state or church
Nor in God, woman, man or love
Nor earth below nor heaven above.
His knowledge did to this about:
(...) and love is not
Nothing is everywhere sincere
Save sorrow, hatred, lust and fear
And even these sometimes do look
Less than in the ill they work.

He died at twenty odd
This was is dying sentiment:
Accurst be Nature, Man and God.

I love this world and all these men because
I shall not love them long. That we do die
I believe not, bound fast to higher laws,
But that we lose this world do not deny.

This light that in the sea makes many a light,
This breeze so soft when least we feel it most,
May be replaced by a diviner sight
Or by a truer breeze; but these are lost.

Like some strange trick of childhood that was ill
Yet had the childhood, in it I regret
Perchance in some far world sublime and stiIl,
The childhood that I never shall forget —

No, nor these toys of sense —this world, these men —,
Dear now when had because dear when lost then.

Baila o trigo quando há vento
Baila porque o vento o toca
Também baila o pensamento
Quando o coração provoca.

Vai longe, na serra alta,
A nuvem que nela toca...
Dá-me aquilo que me falta —
Os beijos da tua boca.

First there was but the moon
        And the black‑tramelled trees
In the lunar lagoon
        Of the forgotten breeze.

Then some unseen thing stirred
        Where the moon‑silence snowed
And a vague whirl unheard
        Vacantly tip‑toed.

Slowly, idly, alone,
        Beyond the eyes of sight,
Somewhere invisibly shown,
        They danced their delight.

Their far vagueness wound
        Round the heart a pain,
A phantom fear found
        Voluble and vain.

The heart remembered lives
        Before loves and homes,
Whose rare memory revives
        Only when this dance comes.

A wish for a vague thing soon,
        A loosened sense of selves,
A thing in the soul like moon,
        Aught in the hopes like elves -

Tip‑toe aerial gliding
        Shadow‑lunar blent,
Bending, mingling, hiding,
        To and fro they went.

Left and right, belonging
        To no place, they swayed.
A low pipe, like longing,
        To their dancing played.

There, in the silence dropped
        Like a thing on the ground,
Whirled they awhile, then stopped,
        Then renewed their round,

Till with their slowing turns
        The cold air grows more bare.
Then the mere moonlight returns
        And there had been nothing there.

First there was but the moon
        And the black‑tramelled trees
In the lunar lagoon
        Of the forgotten breeze.

Then some unseen thing stirred
        Where the moon‑silence snowed
And a vague whirl unheard
        Vacantly tip‑toed.

Slowly, idly, alone,
        Beyond the eyes of sight,
Somewhere invisibly shown,
        They danced their delight.

Their far vagueness wound
        Round the heart a pain,
A phantom fear found
        Voluble and vain.

The heart remembered lives
        Before loves and homes,
Whose rare memory revives
        Only when this dance comes.

A wish for a vague thing soon,
        A loosened sense of selves,
A thing in the soul like moon,
        Aught in the hopes like elves -

Tip‑toe aerial gliding
        Shadow‑lunar blent,
Bending, mingling, hiding,
        To and fro they went.

Left and right, belonging
        To no place, they swayed.
A low pipe, like longing,
        To their dancing played.

There, in the silence dropped
        Like a thing on the ground,
Whirled they awhile, then stopped,
        Then renewed their round,

Till with their slowing turns
        The cold air grows more bare.
Then the mere moonlight returns
        And there had been nothing there.

Weep, violin and viol,
        Low flute and fine bassoon.
Lo, an enchanted isle
        Moon‑bound beneath the moon!
My dream‑feet rustle through it
        Chequered by shade and beam.
Oh, could my soul but woo it
        From being but a dream!

Violin, viol and flute.
        Lo, the isle hangs in air!
Through it I wander, mute
        With too much loss of care.
And the air where't doth float
        No air's, but light of moon.
Its paths are known to each note
        Of viol and bassoon.

Yet is it real, that isle,
        As our clear islands mortal?
Do flute, bassoon and viol
        But ope with sound a portal,
And show, somehow, somewhere,
        To what looks out from me
That pendulous island rare
        In a moon‑woven sea?

Maybe 'tis truer than ours.
        How true are these? But lo!
That isle that knows no hours
        Nor needeth hours to know,
And that hath truth and root
        Somewhere known of the moon,
Fades in the fading of flute,
        Violin and bassoon.

Weep, violin and viol,
        Low flute and fine bassoon.
Lo, an enchanted isle
        Moon‑bound beneath the moon!
My dream‑feet rustle through it
        Chequered by shade and beam.
Oh, could my soul but woo it
        From being but a dream!

Violin, viol and flute.
        Lo, the isle hangs in air!
Through it I wander, mute
        With too much loss of care.
And the air where't doth float
        No air's, but light of moon.
Its paths are known to each note
        Of viol and bassoon.

Yet is it real, that isle,
        As our clear islands mortal?
Do flute, bassoon and viol
        But ope with sound a portal,
And show, somehow, somewhere,
        To what looks out from me
That pendulous island rare
        In a moon‑woven sea?

Maybe 'tis truer than ours.
        How true are these? But lo!
That isle that knows no hours
        Nor needeth hours to know,
And that hath truth and root
        Somewhere known of the moon,
Fades in the fading of flute,
        Violin and bassoon.

Cada momento que a um prazer não voto
Perco, nem curo se o prazer me é dado;
        Porque o sonho de um gozo
        No gozo não é sonho.

II

Mas antes era o Verbo, aqui perdido
Quando a Infinita Luz, já apagada
Do Caos, chão do Ser, foi levantada
Em Sombra, e o Verbo ausente escurecido.

Mas se a Alma sente a sua forma errada,
Em si, que é Sombra, vê enfim luzido
O Verbo deste Mundo, humano e ungido.
Rosa Perfeita, em Deus crucificada.

Então, senhores do limiar dos Céus,
Podemos ir buscar além de Deus
O Segredo do Mestre e o Bem profundo;

Não só de aqui, mas já de nós, despertos,
No sangue actual de Cristo enfim libertos
Do a Deus que morre a geração do Mundo.

Apollo unto Neptune said:
        «Come, I shall drink the sea!»
But Neptune laughed out like a lad
        In his boyish jollity,
And cried: «You would drink the earth, if you could,
        And infinity.»
And the poet the symbol who understood
        Felt his misery.

«Ribeirinho, ribeirinho,
Que vais a correr ao léu
Tu vais a correr sozinho,
Ribeirinho, como eu.»

Life tastes to me like golden tobacco.
I have never done anything but smoke life.

After all of what use was it to me to have
Gone to the East and seen India and China?
The earth is similar and little
And there is only one way of living.

I pretended to study engineering.
I lived in Scotland. I visited Ireland.
My heart is a poor grandmother who goes about
Begging at the doors of Joy.

I am unfortunate by primogeniture.
The gipsies stole my luck.
Perhaps I shall not even find near death
A place to shelter me from my cold.

And I was a child like other people.
I was born in a Portuguese province,
And have met English people
Who say I speak English perfectly.

O capilé é barato
E é fresco quando há calor.
Vou sonhar o teu retrato
Já que não tenho melhor.