Pessoa 35 Sonnets: 31-35

Fernando Pessoa

(1888-1935)

English Poems

35 Sonnets (1918)

Sonnets 31-35

 

31

I am older than Nature and her Time

By all the timeless age of Consciousness,

And my adult oblivion of the clime

Where I was born makes me not countryless.

Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape

Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed,

Which I cannot recall in colour or shape

But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed

And yet is not as light remembered,

Nor to the left or to the right conceived;

And all round me tastes as if life were dead

And the world made but to be disbelieved.

Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet

How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?

32

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.

When I see, before me abstract Seeing sees.

I am part Soul part I in all I touch–

Soul by that part I hold in common with all,

And I the spoiled part, that doth make sense such

As I can err by it and my sense mine call.

The rest is wondering what these thoughts may mean,

That come to explain and suddenly are gone,

Like messengers that mock the message’ mien,

Explaining all but the explanation;

As if we a ciphered letter’s cipher hit

And find it in an unknown language writ.

33

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.

This paradox of having, that is nought

In the world’s meaning of the things it screens,

Is yet true of the substance of pure thought

And there means something by the nought it means.

For thinking nought does on nought being confer,

As giving not is acting not to give,

And, to the same unbribed true thought, to err

Is to find truth, though by its negative.

So why call this world false, if false to be

Be to be aught, and being aught Being to be?

34

Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind–

All who, stamped separate by curtailing birth,

Owe no duty’s allegiance to mankind

Nor stand a valuing in their scheme of worth!

But I, whom Fate, not Nature, did curtail,

By no exterior voidness being exempt,

Must bear accusing glances where I fail,

Fixed in the general orbit of contempt.

Fate, less than Nature in being kind to lacking,

Giving the ill, shows not as outer cause,

Making our mock-free will the mirror’s backing

Which Fate’s own acts as if in itself shows;

And men, like children, seeing the image there,

Take place for cause and make our will Fate bear.

35

Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad.

The outer day, void statue of lit blue,

Is altogether outward, other, glad

At mere being not-I (so my aches construe).

I, that have failed in everything, bewail

Nothing this hour but that I have bewailed,

For in the general fate what is’t to fail?

Why, fate being past for Fate, ’tis but to have failed.

Whatever hap-or stop, what matters it,

Sith to the mattering our will bringeth nought?

With the higher trifling let us world our wit,

Conscious that, if we do’t, that was the lot

The regular stars bound us to, when they stood

Godfathers to our birth and to our blood.

 

35 Sonnets (1918)
by Fernando Pessoa
Sonnets 31-35

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