Todas: e o limpio veo
Como lirios alvissimos, cobriram
De todas a mais bella
Não veio ainda, porem:
Falta uma estrella.… És tu!… Abre a janella,
E vem![9]
And if, in the closing piece of this section—A Tentação de Xenocrates—(The Temptation of Xenocrates) the courtesan’s charms seem more convincing than the resistance of the victorious philosopher, it must be because Bilac himself subtly sided with the temptress, and spoke with her when she protested that she had vowed to tame a man, not a stone. If, in the manner of the Freudians, we are to look upon the poem as a wish that the poet could on occasion show such scorn of feminine blandishments, it is doubly interesting to note that, though the moral victory lies with Xenocrates, the poet has willy-nilly made the courtesan’s case the more sympathetic. What, indeed, are the fruits of a philosophy that denies the embraces of a Laïs?
Just as Olavo Bilac’s voluptuousness brings to him inevitably thoughts of death, so does his cult of form lead him at times to a sense of the essential uselessness of all words and all forms. He has expressed this nowhere so well as in the sonnet Inania Verba from the section Alma Inquieta:
Ah! Quem ha-de exprimir, alma impotente e escrava,