Fernando Pessoa

If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death
In between the one thing and the other all the days aremine

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,
May still by words be said to find a lack

Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing
Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes,
Still suggests form as aught whose proper
Mere finding touch with erring darkness drapes

The world is woven all of dream and
And but one sureness in our truth may lie--That when we hold to aught our thinking's
We know it not by knowing it thereby
For but one side of things the mirror knows,

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,
The obscure consequence of absent glow

I have a terrible cold,
And everyone knows how terrible
Alter the whole system of the universe,
Set us against life,

I do not know what truth the false
Of this sad sense of the seen world may own,
Or if this flowered plant bears also a
Unto the true reality unknown

When in the widening circle of
To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come,
And try again the unremembered
With the old sadness for the immortal home,

When I am sitting at the window,
Through the panes, which the snow blurs,
I see the lovely images, hers,
She passes… passes… passes by…Over me grief has thrown its veil:-Less a creature in this

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
Do make it better; its peril is its aid

Like a bad suitor desperate and
From the mixed sense of being not loved and loving,
Who with feared longing half would know,
With what he'd wish proved what he fears soon proving,

Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind--All who, stamped separate by curtailing birth,
Owe no duty's allegiance to
Nor stand a valuing in their scheme of worth
But I, whom Fate, not Nature, did curtail,