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.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things,
For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take
And for truth commune with imaginings,
    Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse,
    This common sleep of men, the universe.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century. Born in Lisbon, Portugal, he was a prolific writer, famed for his heteronyms—alternative personas with distinct biographies and writing styles. Pessoa's poetry and prose made substantial contributions to Portuguese literature. He died in 1935, leaving behind a considerable body of work that continues to be analyzed and celebrated.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa

Sonnet VII.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, Simple Poetry

Sonnet XXXV.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, Simple Poetry

Sonnet XVII.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, Simple Poetry

Sonnet II.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, Simple Poetry

English

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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.
For this endless succession of empty hours,
Like deserts after deserts, voidly one,
Doth undermine the very dreaming powers
And dull even thought's active inaction,
    Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act
    Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa

Sonnet II.

If that apparent part of life's delight
Our tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen
By aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,
Joy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen.
Haply Truth's body is no eyable being,
Appearance even as appearance lies,
Haply our close, dark, vague, warm sense of seeing
Is the choked vision of blindfolded eyes.
Wherefrom what comes to thought's sense of life? Nought.
All is either the irrational world we see
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
Its use for our thought's use. Whence taketh me
    A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep
    Soul-hate of what we seek and what we weep.

Fernando António Nogueira 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.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words' sense from words--knowledge, truth, change.
    We know the world is false, not what is true.
    Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.

Fernando António Nogueira 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
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?

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa

Sonnet XVIII.

Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,
In one black mystery two void mysteries blends;
The stray stars, whose innumerable light
Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;
The stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles;
The gulf of silence, empty even of nought;
Thought's high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles
Because the string's lost and the plan forgot:
When I think on this and that here I stand,
The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise,
Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand
And looking at it with thought-alien eyes,
    The prayer of my wonder looketh past
    The universal darkness lone and vast.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa

Sonnet XXX.

I do not know what truth the false untruth
Of this sad sense of the seen world may own,
Or if this flowered plant bears also a fruit
Unto the true reality unknown.
But as the rainbow, neither earth's nor sky's,
Stands in the dripping freshness of lulled rain,
A hope, not real yet not fancy's, lies
Athwart the moment of our ceasing pain.
Somehow, since pain is felt yet felt as ill,
Hope hath a better warrant than being hoped;
Since pain is felt as aught we should not feel
Man hath a Nature's reason for having groped,
    Since Time was Time and age and grief his measures,
    Towards a better shelter than Time's pleasures.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa