Page:35 Sonnets by Fernando Pessoa.djvu/17



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. The doubleness of mind fails us, to glance At our exterior presence amid things, Sizing from otherness our countenance And seeing our puppet will's act-acting strings. An unknown language speaks in us, which we Are at the words of, fronted from reality.

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.