Page:35 Sonnets by Fernando Pessoa.djvu/14



Beauty and love let no one separate, Whom exact Nature did to each other fit, Giving to Beauty love as finishing fate And to Love beauty as true colour of it. Let he but friend be who the soul finds fair, But let none love outside the body's thought, So the seen couple's togetherness shall bear Truth to the beauty each in the other sought. I could but love thee out of mockery Of love and thee and mine own ugliness; Therefore thy beauty I sing and wish not thee, Thanking the Gods I long not out of place, Lest, like a slave that for kings' robes doth long, Obtained, shall with mere wearing do them wrong.

When in the widening circle of rebirth To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come, And try again the unremembered earth With the old sadness for the immortal home, Shall I revisit these same differing fields And cull the old new flowers with the same sense, That some small breath of foiled remembrance yields, Of more age than my days in this pretence? Shall I again regret strange faces lost Of which the present memory is forgot And but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossed Out of the closed sea and black night of Thought? Were thy face one, what sweetness will't not be, Though by blind feeling, to remember thee!