Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Holland: Vols. XIV–XV. 1876–79.
Elegy Written in Banishment at Santarem
By Luís de Camões (c. 15241580)T
Sulmonian Ovid, banished, weeping turned;
His household gods, wife, children,—all the ties
Of sacred love in parting grief he mourned.
No lingering look, but still in sadder strain
Gave his keen feelings, as he wandering passed,
To rivers, mountains, and the cheerless plain.
O’er earth, o’er air, and all the star-gemmed sky,
Bade Order’s laws around their course preside,
And owned the universal harmony.
By instinct guided in their liquid way;
The beasts, proceeding for their mountain cave,
Confess alike her great, her secret sway.
Pursue their path in tributary pride;
Saw them, obedient to their destined course,
Steal in soft splendor to the sparkling tide.
The unequalled woe that cannot find relief,
While o’er his verse soft tears of sorrow flow;
His Muse alone companion of his grief.
Condemned the hapless exile’s fate to prove;
In life-consuming pain thus doomed to mourn
The loss of all I prized,—of her I love.
To joys by memory graven on the heart,
I see how transient earthly happiness,
How weak is glory and how vain her art.
Increasing thus the sources of my woe;
The pang unmerited that rends the breast
But bids a tear of keener sorrow flow.
A chastened comfort from the cause receives,
And reason may a consolation find
Which undeserved affliction never gives.
And wasting dewdrops vanish from the plain,
What time the nightingale her weeping lay
In sadness pours, and tunes the lovelorn strain,
With tenfold force my sorrows all arise;
Steal from repose the transitory hour,
When others find a respite from their sighs.
When waking sense recalls the hour of care;
Slow o’er some hill with laboring steps I rove,
And give my tortured bosom to despair.
The hallowed spot from whence my sorrows flow;
Here naught in kind compassion meets my gaze,
But mountain heights, where flowers nor herbage grow.
The fields no more are green, the flowerets fair;
Ah! late I marked their rich luxuriant hue,
But Nature sheds no more gay blossoms there.
Skim the light barks by gentlest wishes sped;
Trace their still way midst many a rosy gleam
That steals in blushes o’er its trembling bed.
Some with fixed sails to woo the tardy gale;
Whilst others with their oars that stream divide,
To which I weeping tell the exile’s tale.
Or if without me ye unpitying go,
At least my tears, my sighs, my vows convey,
Those faithful emblems of my cherished woe.
Your unrestrained, though not unenvied way,
Till I like you regain that hallowed place,
And hail the dawn of joy’s returning day.
To bless the exile in his anguish, come;
Life may fulfil its transitory power,
Ere happier destiny revoke my doom.