Selected Sonnets Read Online

There’s a clear sense in his epic, as well as in his lyrics, that Camões is living in a time of Portuguese decline, and his natural patriotism and his wariness of his country’s enemies, especially its Islamic enemies, inspire him to remind his Portuguese contemporaries of their heroic past.

Os Lusíadas is a masterfully crafted poem in 1,102 ottava rima stanzas, divided into ten sections (cantos) which depict the progression of da Gama’s journey. As with his sonnets, in which Camões begins with the model of Petrarch, in Os Lusíadas the poet similarly uses Virgil’s Aeneid as his initial model and then quickly extrapolates into a remarkable originality, most famously: the murder of Inês de Castro by King Afonso’s henchmen on the banks of the Mondego in 1355; the conjuring of the Titan sea god, Adamaster; the poetic descriptions of St. Elmo’s fire and the waterspout; and Venus’s creation of the “Island of Love” for the triumphant Portuguese sailors. Despite the centrality of the figure of Vasco da Gama and Camões’s obvious admiration for the great adventurer, it’s important to note that the poem is really about the Portuguese people as a whole, as its title, Os Lusíadas (The Portuguese), makes clear. Upon its publication in 1572, Camões’s extraordinary literary accomplishment was quickly recognized in Portugal, the entire Iberian peninsula, and subsequently across Europe. In Don Quixote (1605), Cervantes, one of the many admirers of Os Lusíadas,rightly calls Camões “the incomparable treasure of Lusus.”

the lyrics

In the appendix to his 1884 translations of Camões’s lyrics, Sir Richard Burton reminds his readers of the Portuguese truism, “If Camões had not written his Lusiads, Portugal would have had a Petrarch.” The international reputation of Os Lusíadas and the fact that Camões’s lyrics were published posthumously have often left the latter underappreciated, even though they are generally regarded by both poets and scholars as among the best of the Renaissance lyrics. Certainly Camões took them seriously, beginning with the early love poems that he wrote as a young man at the Lisbon court and then later those documenting his emotional and intellectual vicissitudes during his long sojourn in the East. As with Os Lusíadas,Camões’s lyrics reveal him as a master craftsman, writing sonnets (discussed below), odes, elegies, eclogues, and redondilhas with equal skill and with a deep emotional impact. The scholar J. D. M. Ford expresses a common contention when he points out that even if Camões had never written his famous epic, his “flawlessly crafted sonnets and lyrics would have won him lasting fame.”

the plays

Camões produced three comedies in verse which were published posthumously, although they may have had occasional local performances during his lifetime. Filodemo recounts a medieval love story; Rei Seleuch recasts Plutarch’s famous love story about the Syrian King Seleucus; and Amphitryões is a loose adaptation from Plautus. All of these plays have their literary distinctions, and they are now considered superior to the other Portuguese plays of their time. But they had little impact, given their posthumous publication, on either contemporary Portuguese drama or European drama, and, whatever their merits, they clearly suffer in comparison with the poet’s lyrics and his legendary epic.

The Sonnets

The distinguished Argentine poet J. L. Borges, who once wrote a sonnet of tribute to Camões, also wrote a sonnet titled “Un poeta del siglo XIII” (“A Poet of the Thirteenth Century”), which speculates about the creation of the very first sonnet. The poem claims that the form of the original sonnet was a divine gift from the god Apollo to an anonymous Italian poet of the 1200s. Borges describes this extraordinary gift as “un ávido cristal” (“a greedy crystal”) that attracts and reveals anything and everything. Certainly Borges is right about the power and the endless capabilities of the sonnet format. Born in the late middle ages, the fourteen-lined sonnet is one of the greatest human artistic creations, and its early perfections by Dante and Petrarch and its subsequent history in a wide range of languages and national literatures bear this out. Camões, like the other Renaissance poets who followed Petrarch’s lead (Garcilaso, du Bellay, Ronsard, Shakespeare, etc.), clearly recognized the powerful potential of the little soneto, and, over the course of his lifetime, he created a remarkable corpus of unforgettable sonnets.

As with Petrarch and Shakespeare, many of Camões’s finest lyrics are love poems, and his sonnet “Alma minha gentil, que te partiste . . .” (“Dear Gentle Soul”) is one of the most famous in Iberian history. Nevertheless, long before the English poets ever attempted to expand the thematic parameters of the sonnet, Camões was writing brilliant sonnets about a wide range of topics: nature, history, historical figures, classical mythology, biblical subjects, patriotism, religion, and even contemporary Portuguese politics. Yet whatever his subject, the trait that most distinguishes Camões’s sonnets is the undeniable and tangible presence of the writer himself. Camões’s poems about love, or despair, or human corruption are never simply poetic abstractions on a theme. Underneath all of Camões’s poems is the palpable presence of Camões himself, often suffering, always struggling, always exposed and fully human. Few poets of any period in history have been able to create such an emotional exposure of the suffering, individual self. In conjunction with this sympathetic presence, there is also the constant air of sorrow in Camões’s poems, what the Portuguese describe as saudade.