SEBASTIAN, KING OF PORTUGAL
A madman, yes, because I wanted greatness
Such as Fortune never grants.
My certainty couldn’t fit in me,
And so what I left on those foreign sands
Is the me that I was, not am.
Let others take up my madness
And all that went with it.
Without madness what is man
But a healthy beast,
A postponed corpse that breeds?
20 FEBRUARY 1933
FROM PART TWO / PORTUGUESE SEA
HORIZON
O sea that preceded us, your terrors
Hid coral, beaches, and forests.
Tearing off the veil from night and fog,
From storms withstood and from the unknown,
The ships of initiation saw the Distance
Burst into bloom, and the starry South shimmered.
Severe line of that distant coast—
As the ship draws near, a slope emerges
With trees that from afar were invisible.
Nearer, the land opens in sounds and colors;
And, once ashore, there are birds and flowers
Where just a far-off, abstract line had run.
To dream is to see invisible forms
In the uncertain distance, and then,
With intuitive thrusts of hope and will,
To seek in that cold horizon
Beaches, trees, birds, flowers and fountains—
The kisses Truth gives to those who deserve them.
THE COLUMBUSES
Others are bound to have
What we are bound to lose.
Others are apt to find
What in our discoveries
Was found, or not found,
In accord with Destiny.
But what they cannot have
Is the Magic of the Faraway
Which makes it history.
For this reason their glory
Is a tempered brilliance, given
By a borrowed light.
2 APRIL 1934
THE WEST
With two hands—Doing and Destiny—
We unveiled it. As one hand
Raised skyward the flickering, divine torch,
The other pulled the veil away.
Whether the fateful or fortuitous hour
Was the hand that tore the veil from the West,
Science was the soul and Daring the body
Of that unveiling hand.
Whether Chance, sheer Will or Tempest
Was the hand that raised the glowing torch,
God was the soul and Portugal the body
Of that torch-bearing hand.
FROM PART THREE / THE HIDDEN ONE
THE FIFTH EMPIRE
Sad the man who lives at home,
Content with his hearth,
Without a dream whose fluttering wing
Makes the embers glow redder
In the warm fire to be abandoned!
Sad the man who is happy!
He lives because life endures.
His soul tells him no more
Than the lesson a root teaches:
To have for one’s life a grave.
Let era after era follow
In the time measured by eras.
To be a man is to be discontent.
Let the vision of his soul
Subdue blind forces!
And when the four ages
Of the one who dreamed are over,
The earth will be the stage
For the bright day that began
In the gloom of desolate night.
Greece, Rome, Christianity,
Europe—the four ages will go
To where all ages go. Who
Will come to live the truth
That King Sebastian died?
21 FEBRUARY 1933
No king or law, nor war or peace,
Defines with clarity and substance
The dimmed splendor of the land
That is Portugal wrapped in grief—
Brilliance without light or warmth,
Like the glow of the will-o’-the-wisp.
No one knows what he wants.
No one knows his own soul.
No one knows what’s good or bad.
(What distant yearning weeps close by?)
All is uncertain and dying.
All is scattered, nothing is whole.
O Portugal, today you are fog ...
The Hour has come!
10 DECEMBER 1928
RUBA’IYAT
Dusk shrouds the long and useless day.
Even the hope it denied us crumbles
To nothing . . . Life is a drunken beggar
Holding out his hand to his own shadow.
We sleep the universe away. The boundless
Mass of disparate things weaves dreams
In us, and the drunken human confluence
Hollowly echoes from race to race.
Pain follows pleasure, which follows pain.
Today we drink wine in celebration,
Tomorrow we’ll drink it because we grieve.
But nothing from either wine will remain.
Each day gives me cause to hope
For what no day can ever give me.
Each day makes me weary from hoping . . .
But to live is to hope and to grow weary.
Races the color of gold or of copper,
Placed on the same earth and warmed by the sun,
And no trace of either color will remain
Or be remembered, above or below . . .
Already almost forty times
My sun has brought me to the same place
And aged me with the aging felt by all things
Done by Fate, since it also undoes them.
Thousands like you are at this moment struggling
To deny their desire for what exists.
Thousands like you, like a man waking up,
Are once more slaves of the endless, vain present.
Wise the man who lets Destiny mold him.
If I must have glory or misfortune,
It will come without my wanting or doing.
What’s to be will be and, having been, passes.
Drink up! Life isn’t good or bad.
What we’ve given it is what it gives us.
Everything is restored to what wasn’t.
And no one knows what it is or what will be.
Effort lasts as long as faith lasts.
But what lasts, and how long, for one who isn’t?
Ah, drink, drink, drink till you forget
How and why, where from and where to!
I’m weary of hearing “I’ll do this.”
Of doing or not doing, who is king?
An animal on whom the soul was foisted,
Man sleeps fitfully. That’s all I know.
Don’t say that the soul lives eternally
Or that the body, once buried, feels nothing.
What can you know about what you don’t know?
Drink! You know only the nothing of today.
Leave in a complex state of slumber
Your consciousness of science. Look
At your white face in the wine’s red mirror
And then drink the mirror . . . and your consciousness.
How many kabbalahs I’ve contemplated!
I can’t find them or myself in the end.
Leave the occult in its well and enjoy,
While they last, the sun and your house and garden.
Without hope or desire, love or faith,
Spend your life refusing life, until
It’s time to put away your toys and go
To bed. Everything is what it isn’t.
You can shape your life however you like,
It was already shaped before you lived it.
Why do you wish to trace on the ground
The fleeing shadow of the passing cloud?
You’ve died, I weep, and I weep still more,
Because I know why I weep and will weep:
Not from regret that you no longer are
But from regret for when I’ll cease to be.
All is useless, knowing this included.
Day leads to night, which recreates it.
On the august eve of renunciation,
Renounce renunciation itself.
Wise the man who locks up what he’s missing,
So that no one will know the nothing he is.
Every mask conceals a skull.
Every soul is the mask of nobody.
Don’t fret over science or how to use it.
What good, in this dusky room called life,
Will it do you to measure chairs and tables?
Use them, don’t measure; you’ll have to leave the room.
Let’s quietly enjoy the sun while it shines.
After it has left the sky, let’s rest.
When it returns, perhaps it won’t find us.
But it could be that we’ll also return.
Science is heavy, consciousness disquiets,
Art is lame, faith blind and remote.
Life must be lived, and it is useless.
Drink, for the caravan never arrives.
Drink! If you listen, you’ll hear just the sounds
Of grass or leaves, brought to your ears
By the wind, which is nothing. That’s the world:
A regular motion of oblivion.
You pick roses? Aren’t you just picking
Colorful motifs of death? But pick roses.
Why not pick them, since it pleases you
And everything is its own dissolution?
Twelve times the good-natured sun changes sign
And helps us without any outside help.
We go on living and are who we are
Until death comes to assist who we aren’t.
The whole of the universe is something else,
And toil, like dead seaweed or fallen leaves,
Floats on the surface of nothing. A slight wind
Stirs the waters a little, and this is life.
Exchange for wine the love you won’t have.
What you wait for, you’ll always wait for.
What you drink, you drink. Gaze at the roses.
Once you’re dead, what roses will you smell?
If you, like all visible things, must die,
To live thirty years or a hundred
Is the same. Drink and forget. Spit hope,
Vomit charity, and urinate faith.
Like dust raised up from the road for a moment
By the wind that comes and goes,
The hollow breath of life lifts us up
From nothing, stops, and returns us to nothing.
Waiting is tiresome. Thinking no less so.
Dully and serenely our worthless days
Pass us by without thinking or waiting,
Ever more fatal, and smaller.
Life is earth, and living it is mud.
Everything is style, difference or manner.
In all that you do be only you.
In all that you do be the whole of you.
Whoever rules rules because he rules,
Whether his rule is good or bad.
Everyone is great when his hour arrives.
Everyone, at heart, is the same nobody.
from FAUST
The only mystery in the universe
Is that there’s a mystery of the universe.
Yes, this sun that unconsciously lights up
The earth, the trees and all the seasons;
The stones I walk over, the white houses,
People, human fellowship, history,
All that passes—tradition or speech—
Between one soul and another, voices, cities—
None of this comes with an explanation for why
It exists, nor does it have a mouth for speaking.
Why doesn’t the sun come up announcing
What it is? What secret reason explains
The existence of the stones under my feet,
Of the air I breathe, and of my need to breathe?
It’s all an absurd and monstrous machine.
We’re ignorant with the whole of our body
And our seeing, which is the soul’s body.
Why is there what is? Why is there a universe?
Why is the universe the one it is?
Why is the universe made the way it’s made?
Why is there what is? Why is there anything?
Why is there a world, and why is it how it is?
Why is there “here,” “this,” coincidence and difference?
Monologue in the night
O lying system of the universe,
Vacuous stars, unreal suns,
The whole of my exiled being hates you
With a physical and mind-boggling hatred!
I’m hell in person. I’m the black Christ
Nailed to the fiery cross of myself.
I’m the knowledge that doesn’t know,
The insomnia of suffering and thinking
Hunched over the book of the world’s horror.
Life’s brief and fleeting nature proves
It must be a dream. For me, as the dreamer
Who vaguely feels the sorrow of knowing
I’ll have to wake up, death frightens
Less as death than as the horror
Of it taking away my dream and giving me
Reality.
Ah, the metaphysical horror of Action!
My gestures break away from me,
And I see them in the air like the vanes
Of a windmill, utterly not mine, and I feel
My life circulating inside them!
I’m always the same, always, always!
Always the one who sees and feels everything
In all its mystery and enormity,
Mystery being the blood of my veins . . .
Always . . . Nothing cures or extinguishes me!
If only something
Would abolish my being but not me! . . .
The metaphysical dread of Someone Else!
The horror of another consciousness,
Like a god spying on me!
How I wish
I were the only consciousness in the universe,
So that no one else’s gaze would observe me!
The living mystery of seeing stares at me
From everyone’s eyes, and the horror of them
Seeing me is overwhelming.
I can’t imagine myself any different,
Nor imagine this consciousness—my twin—
Having any other form, or a differently
Different content. All I see are
Men, animals, wild beasts and birds
Horribly alive and staring at me.
I’m like a supreme God who one day
Realized that he’s not the only one
And whose infinite gaze now confronts
The horror of other infinite gazes.
Ah, if at least I reflect the transcendent
Glow from beyond God!
Today if someone I cherish dies
(If some part of me can still be engrossed
By what’s outside me)—if someone I love
(Let’s admit the possibility) should die,
I no longer weep or feel grief: I’m chilled,
That’s all, by the speechless presence of death,
Which triples my feeling of mystery.
Sometimes a song of love rises
To my lips, and I instinctively pine
For a dead beloved—yes,
For the forever dead fiancée of an I
Who couldn’t love.
Ah, how happy
I’d be if I could annihilate
Thought and emotion (what I most hate
And most cherish) and devote myself
To an empty and toilsome life,
Full of loves and affection! I’d drink joy
From the brook of existing without asking
Where it sprang from or where it ends.
Happiness was made for those who can’t feel it.
Utter and palpable horror of the mystery
Now returning to haunt my thoughts!
When two youthful
Beings fall naturally in love,
Harmonies seem to pour like perfumes
Across the flowering earth,
But the idea of me being in love
Sets off a horrid burst of laughter
Deep down, since I look so ridiculous,
Since I’m so unused to something so natural.
Never, as when I think about love,
Do I feel so foreign and out of place,
So full of hatred for my destiny,
So enraged against life’s very essence.
And these sentiments stir up in me
A black cloud of disgust and loathing
That makes the greatest and vilest crimes
Inadequate to convey the humble
And common sordidness of what I feel.