Poems by Fernando Pessoa

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Sonnet XXVIII

The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss

Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream.

Surely reality cannot be this!

Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!

The sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed

Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,

Is not something, but something interposed.

Only what in this is not this is real.

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXXIV

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.

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXXIII

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.

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXXII

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.

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXV

We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack

Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling,

And do but compel Fate aside or back

By Fate's own immanence in the compelling.

We are too far in us from outward truth

To know how much we are not what we are,

And live but in the heat of error's youth,

Yet young enough its acting youth to ignore.

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXIX

My weary life, that lives unsatisfied

On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this,

To whom the power to will hath been denied

And the will to renounce doth also miss;

My sated life, with having nothing sated,

In the motion of moving poisèd aye,

Within its dreams from its own dreams abated--

This life let the Gods change or take away.

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXII

My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,

Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older,

Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,

Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder.

Whate'er its sense may mean, its age is twin

To that of priesthoods whose feet stood near God,

When knowledge was so great that 'twas a sin

And man's mere soul too man for its abode.

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXXV

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.

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXXI

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

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXIII

Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day,

When clouds are one cloud till the horizon,

Our thinking senses deem the sun away

And say «'tis sunless» and «there is no sun»;

And yet the very day they wrong truth by

Is of the unseen sun's effluent essence,

The very words do give themselves the lie,

The very thought of absence comes from presence:

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXVII

How yesterday is long ago! The past

Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day,

And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,

In irreparable sameness far away.

How the to-be is infinitely ever

Out of the place wherein it will be Now,

Like the seen wave yet far up in the river,

Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!

Fernando Pessoa

Sonnet XXVI

The world is woven all of dream and error

And but one sureness in our truth may lie--

That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror

We know it not by knowing it thereby.

For but one side of things the mirror knows,

And knows it colded from its solidness.

A double lie its truth is; what it shows

By true show's false and nowhere by true place.

Fernando Pessoa