You don’t have it, because you don’t know you have it,
And I don’t have it, because I know I do.
It exists on its own, and falls on us like the sun,
Which hits you on the back and warms you up, while you
indifferently think about something else,
And it hits me in the face and dazzles my eyes, and I think
only about the sun.
12 APRIL 1919
Between what I see of one field and what I see of another
field
The figure of a man passes by.
His footsteps move with “him” in the same reality,
But I see him and see them, and they are two separate things.
The “man” moves along with his ideas, in error and a
foreigner,
While his footsteps move by the ancient system that makes
legs walk.
I look at him from afar without any opinion.
How perfect in him is the substance he is: his body,
His true reality with no desires or hopes,
Just muscles and the right, impersonal way of using them!
20 APRIL 1919
I’m not in a hurry. In a hurry for what?
The sun and moon aren’t in a hurry; they’re right.
To hurry is to suppose we can overtake our legs
Or leap over our shadow.
No, I’m not in a hurry.
If I stretch out my arm, I’ll reach exactly as far as my arm
reaches
And not half an inch farther.
I touch where my finger touches, not where I think.
I can only sit down where I am.
This sounds ridiculous, like all absolutely true truths,
But what’s really ridiculous is how we’re always thinking of
something else,
And we’re always outside it, because we’re here.
20 JUNE 1919
Live, you say, in the present.
Live only in the present.
But I don’t want the present, I want reality.
I want the things that exist, not the time that measures them.
What is the present?
It’s something in relation to the past and the future.
It’s something that exists by virtue of other things existing.
I want only reality, the things themselves, without any
present.
I don’t want to include time in my awareness of what exists.
I don’t want to think of things as being in the present; I want
to think of them as things.
I don’t want to separate them from themselves, calling them
present.
I shouldn’t even call them real.
I shouldn’t call them anything.
I should see them, just see them,
See them until I can no longer think about them,
See them without time or space,
See with no need of anything besides what I’m seeing.
This is the science of seeing, which is no science at all.
19 JULY 1920
You say I’m something more
Than a stone or a plant.
You say: “You feel, you think, and you know
That you think and feel.
Do stones write poems?
Do plants have ideas about the world?”
Yes, there’s a difference,
But it’s not the difference you suppose,
Because being conscious doesn’t oblige me to have theories
about things;
It only obliges me to be conscious.
If I’m more than a stone or a plant? I don’t know.
I’m different. I don’t know what more is or what less is.
Is being conscious more than being colorful?
It might be or might not be.
I know only that it’s different.
No one can prove that it’s more than just different.
I know the stone is real and the plant exists.
I know this because they exist.
I know this because my senses show it to me.
I know I’m real as well.
I know this because my senses show it to me,
Though less clearly than they show me the stone and the
plant.
That’s all I know.
Yes, I write poems, and the stone doesn’t write poems.
Yes, I have ideas about the world, and the plant has none.
But stones are not poets, they’re stones;
And plants are just plants, not thinkers.
I can say this makes me superior to them
Or I can say it makes me inferior.
But I say nothing. I say of the stone, “It’s a stone.”
I say of the plant, “It’s a plant.”
I say of myself, “It’s me.”
And I say no more. What more is there to say?
5 JUNE 1922
The first sign of the storm that will strike the day after
tomorrow,
The first clouds, still white, hanging low in the dull sky . . .
The storm that will strike the day after tomorrow?
I’m certain, but my certainty is a lie.
To be certain is to not be seeing.
The day after tomorrow doesn’t exist.
This is what exists:
A blue sky that’s a bit hazy and some white clouds on the
horizon,
With a dark smudge underneath, as if they might turn black.
This is what today is,
And since for the time being today is everything, this is
everything.
I might be dead—who knows?—the day after tomorrow,
In which case the storm that will strike the day after
tomorrow
Will be a different storm than it would be if I hadn’t died.
I realize that the storm doesn’t fall from my eyes,
But if I’m no longer in this world, the world will be
different—
There will be one person less—
And the storm, falling in a different world, won’t be the
same storm.
In any case, the storm that’s going to fall will be the one
falling when it falls.
10 JULY 1930
RICARDO REIS
I was born believing in the gods, I was raised in that belief, and in that belief I will die, loving them. I know what the pagan feeling is. My only regret is that I can’t really explain how utterly and inscrutably different it is from all other feelings. Even our calm and the vague stoicism some of us have bear no resemblance to the calm of antiquity and the stoicism of the Greeks.
(FROM RICARDO REIS’S UNFINISHED PREFACE TO HIS ODES)
I love the roses of Adonis’s gardens.
Yes, Lydia, I love those wingèd roses,
Which one day are born
And on that day die.
Light for them is eternal, since
They are born after sunrise and end
Before Apollo quits
His visible journey.
Let us also make our lives one day,
Consciously forgetting there’s night, Lydia,
Before and after
The little we endure.
11 JULY 1914
To Alberto Caeiro
Peaceful, Master,
Are all the hours
We lose if we place,
As in a vase,
Flowers on our
Losing them.
There are in our life
No sorrows or joys.
So let us learn,
Wisely unworried,
Not how to live life
But to let it go by,
Keeping forever
Peaceful and calm,
Taking children
For our teachers
And letting Nature
Fill our eyes . . .
Along the river
Or along the road,
Wherever we are,
Always remaining
In the same, easy
Repose of living . . .
Time passes
And tells us nothing.
We grow old.
Let us know how,
With a certain mischief,
To feel ourselves go.
Taking action
Serves no purpose.
No one can resist
The atrocious god
Who always devours
His own children.
Let us pick flowers.
Let us lightly
Wet our hands
In the calm rivers,
So as to learn
Some of their calmness.
Sunflowers forever
Beholding the sun,
We will serenely
Depart from life,
Without even the regret
Of having lived.
12 JUNE 1914
The god Pan isn’t dead.
In each field that shows
Ceres’ naked breasts
To the smiles of Apollo,
Sooner or later
You will see the god Pan,
Immortal, appear.
The Christians’ sad god
Killed none of the others.
Christ is one more god,
One that was perhaps missing.
Pan still offers
The sounds of his flute
To the ears of Ceres
Reclining in the fields.
The gods are the same,
Always clear and calm,
Full of eternity
And disdain for us,
Bringing day and night
And golden harvests
Not in order to give us
Day and night and wheat
But for some other, divine
And incidental purpose.
12 JUNE 1914
Snow covers the sunlit hills in the distance,
But the tranquil cold that smoothes and whets
The darts of the high sun
Is already mild.
Today, Neaera, let us not hide:
Since we are nothing, we lack nothing.
We hope for nothing
And feel cold in the sun.
But such as it is, let us enjoy
This moment, somewhat solemn in our joy,
While waiting for death
As for something we know.
16 JUNE 1914
The day’s paleness is tinged with gold. The curves
Of the withered trunks and branches gleam
Like dew in the winter sun.
The chill air shivers.
Exiled from the ancient homeland of my
Beliefs, consoled only by remembering the gods,
I warm my trembling body
With a different sun from this:
The sun of the Parthenon and Acropolis
Which lit up the slow and weighty steps
Of Aristotle speaking.
But Epicurus speaks more
To my heart with his caressing, earthly voice;
His attitude toward the gods is of a fellow god,
Serene and seeing life
At the distance where it lies.
19 JUNE 1914
Wise the man who’s content with the world’s spectacle,
And who drinks without recalling
That he has drunk before,
For whom everything is new
And forever imperishable.
Crown him with vine leaves, ivy or twining
Roses. He knows that life
Is passing by him and that
The shears of Atropos cut
The flower and cut him.
He knows how to hide this with the color of the wine
And to erase the taste of time
With its orgiastic flavor,
The way a weeping voice is hushed
When the bacchantes pass by.
And he waits, a calm drinker and almost happy,
Only desiring
With a desire scarcely felt
That the abominable wave
Not wet him too soon.
19 JUNE 1914
Each thing, in its time, has its time.
The trees do not blossom in winter,
Nor does the white cold
Cover the fields in spring.
The heat that the day required of us
Belongs not to the night that’s falling, Lydia.
Let’s love with greater calm
Our uncertain life.
Sitting by the fire, weary not from our work
But because it’s the hour for weariness,
Let’s not force our voice
To be more than a secret.
And may our words of reminiscence
(Which is all the sun’s black departure brings us)
Be spoken at intervals,
Haphazardly.
Let’s remember the past by degrees,
And may the stories told back then,
Now twice-told stories,
Speak to us
Of the flowers that in our distant childhood
We picked with another kind of pleasure
And another consciousness
As we gazed at the world.
And so, Lydia, sitting there by the fire
As if there forever, like household gods,
Let’s mend the past
As if mending clothes
In the disquiet that repose must bring to our lives
When all we do is think of what
We were, and outside
There’s just night.
30 JULY 1914
Let us, for our own good,
See ourselves as exiled deities
In possession of life
By virtue of an ancient authority
Coeval with Jove.
Proud masters over our own selves,
Let’s use existence
Like a villa the gods have given us
To forget the summer.
It’s not worth our while to use in another,
More fretful manner
Our wavering existence, a condemned stream
Of the somber river.
Like the calm, implacable Destiny
That reigns above the gods,
Let’s construct a voluntary fate
Above ourselves,
So that when it oppresses us, it is we
Who’ll be our oppressors.
And when we enter the night, we’ll enter
By our own two feet.
30 JULY 1914
The only freedom the gods grant us
Is this: to submit
Of our own free will to their sovereignty.
We should do just that,
Since only in the illusion of freedom
Does freedom exist.
It is what the gods, subject
To eternal fate, do
To maintain their calm and unwavering
Ancient conviction
That their life is divine and free.
Imitating the gods,
Who are no freer on Olympus than we are,
Let’s build our lives
Like those who build castles of sand
To delight their eyes,
And the gods will know how to thank us
For being so like them.
30 JULY 1914
Remember, with quick steps, on the white beach
Darkened by the foam, the ancient rhythm
That bare feet know,
That rhythm repeated
By nymphs when they tap the sound of the dance
In the shade of the trees; you, children
Not yet concerned
With concerns, revive
That noisy circle while Apollo bends,
Like a high branch, the blue curve he gilds,
And the tide, high or low,
Flows without ceasing.
9 AUGUST 1914
We’ve always had the confident vision
That other beings, angels or gods,
Reign above us
And move us to act.
Just as in the fields our actions
On the cattle, which they don’t understand,
Coerce and compel them
Without them knowing why,
So too our human will and mind
Are the hands by which others lead us
To wherever they want us
To desire to go.
16 OCTOBER 1914
Lost from the way, you clutch your sterile,
Toilsome days in bundles of hard wood
And think you are living
Life without illusions.
Your wood is only weight you carry
To where you’ll have no fire to warm you,
Nor will the shades we become
Endure weight on their shoulders.
To rest up you don’t rest; and if you pass
Something on, pass not wealth but the example
Of how a brief life is enough,
Brief and not too hard.
We use little of the little we scarcely have.
Work tires, and the gold isn’t ours.
Our own fame laughs at us,
For we won’t see it
When, brought down by the Fates, suddenly
We’ll be ancient and solemn figures,
Ever more shadowy,
Until the fatal meeting—
The dark boat on the gloomy river,
And the nine embraces of Stygian cold,
And the insatiable lap
Of the land of Pluto.
[LATE 1914 OR 1915]
THE CHESS PLAYERS
I’ve heard that once, during I don’t know
What war of Persia,
When invaders rampaged through the City