Fernando Pessoa Poems
A collection of select Fernando Pessoa famous poems that were written by Fernando Pessoa or written about the poet by other famous poets. PoetrySoup is a comprehensive educational resource of the greatest poems and poets on history.
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by
Fernando Pessoa
We never joy enjoy to that full point
Regret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been,
Nor have the strength regret to disappoint
Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien.
Yet joy was joy when it enjoyèd was
And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled,
It must have been joy ere its joy did pass
And, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled.
Alas! All this is useless, for...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Like a bad suitor desperate and trembling
From the mixed sense of being not loved and loving,
Who with feared longing half would know, dissembling
With what he'd wish proved what he fears soon proving,
I look with inner eyes afraid to look,
Yet perplexed into looking, at the worth
This verse may have and wonder, of my book,
To what thoughts shall't in alien hearts give...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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.
Whatever hap-or...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
As a bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled,
Doth overflow his purpose with made heat,
And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed
What should have been an inner instinct's feat;
Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned,
Lacking the subtler music in his measure,
With useless care labours but to be spurned,
Courting in alien speech the Muse's pleasure;
I study how to love or how to hate,
Estranged by...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
I could not think of thee as piecèd rot,
Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead;
Yet thou liv'dst entire in my seeing thought
And what thou wert in me had never fled.
Nay, I had fixed the moments of thy beauty--
Thy ebbing smile, thy kiss's readiness,
And memory had taught my heart the duty
To know thee ever at that deathlessness.
But when...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing.
Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes,
Still suggests form as aught whose proper being
Mere finding touch with erring darkness drapes.
Yet whence, except from guessed sight, does touch teach
That touch is but a close and empty sense?
How does mere touch, self-uncontented, reach
For some truer sense's whole intelligence?
The thing once touched, if touch...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Oh to be idle loving idleness!
But I am idle all in hate of me;
Ever in action's dream, in the false stress
Of purposed action never set to be.
Like a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair,
My will to act binds with excess my action,
Not-acting coils the thought with raged despair,
And acting rage doth paint despair distraction.
Like someone sinking in a treacherous sand,
Each...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever consciousness begins the task
The task's accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
To be great, be whole: nothing
Yours exaggerate nor delete.
Be whole at everything. Be yourself
at the little things you do.
So that in each lake the whole moon
Shines because high it lives....Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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:
Even so deem we...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Para ser grande, sê inteiro: nada
Teu exagera ou exclui.
Sê todo em cada coisa. Põe quanto és
No mínimo que fazes.
Assim em cada lago a lua toda
Brilha, porque alta vive....Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee--
That entire death shall null my entire thought;
And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,
But that I cannot disbelieve thee not.
Shall that of me that now contains the stars
Be by the very contained stars survived?
Thus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth bars
An all unjust Fate's truth from being believed?
Conjecture...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Oh salted sea, how much of your salt
Are tears of Portugal!
For crossing you, how many mothers wept,
How many children prayed in vain!
How many brides remained unmarried
For you to be ours, Oh sea!
Was it worth it? everything is worthwhile
If the soul is not small.
The ones who want to go beyond Boyador
Have to go beyond pain.
God overboard danger and the abyss gave
But...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
When I do think my meanest line shall be
More in Time's use than my creating whole,
That future eyes more clearly shall feel me
In this inked page than in my direct soul;
When I conjecture put to make me seeing
Good readers of me in some aftertime,
Thankful to some idea of my being
That doth not even my with gone true soul rime;
An anger...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a thought of what their sense did say.
For did it care for sense, would it not wake
And question closer to the morrow's pleasure?
Would it not edge nearer my words, to take
The promise in the meting of...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,
When the miserly press of each day's need
Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed?
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
The poet is a faker.
Pretends so completely
That comes to pretend that is pain
The pain that he really feels.
And those who read what he writes,
In the pain read they feel right ,
Not the two that he had,
But only the one which they have not.
And so on the wheel rails
It spins to entertain the reason,
This train of rope
Called heart....Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
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...Read more of this...