Fernando Pessoa

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.

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,

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,

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

We are in Fate and Fate's and do but
Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling,
And do but compel Fate aside or
By Fate's own immanence in the compelling.

My love, and not I, is the egoist.
My love for thee loves itself more than thee;
Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist,
And makes me live that it may feed on me.

My weary life, that lives
On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this,
To whom the power to will hath been
And the will to renounce doth also miss;

As to a child,
I talked my heart
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made

Should somebody one day knock at your
Announcing he's an emissary of mine,
Never believe him, nor that it is I;
For to knock does not go with my vainglory,

Something in me was born before the
And saw the sun begin from far away.
Our yellow, local day on its wont jars,
For it hath communed with an absolute day.

The edge of the green wave whitely doth
Upon the wetted sand.
I look, yet dream.
Surely reality cannot be this!

We never joy enjoy to that full
Regret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been,
Nor have the strength regret to
Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien.

They say I pretend or
All I write.
No such thing.
It simply is that

Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,
In one black mystery two void mysteries blends;
The stray stars, whose innumerable
Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;

I never kept sheep,
But it is as I did watch over them.
My soul is like a shepherd,
Knows the wind and the sun

When I have sense of what to sense appears,
Sense is sense ere 'tis mine or mine in me is.
When I hear,
Hearing, ere I do hear, hears.