He castigated monastic corruption, trounced the physicians, manhandled the priests, and his snickers echoed in the high places. He knew his Quevedo quite as well as did Gregorio and has been called “the first revolutionary, the most illustrious of colonial poets.”[20] And toward his end he makes his peace with the Lord in a sonnet that might have been signed by Gregorio.
Of Gregorio de Mattos I will quote a single sonnet written in one of his more sober moods. There is a pleasant, if somewhat conventional, epigrammatical quality to it, as to more than one of the others, and there is little reason for questioning its sincerity. Every satirist, at bottom, contains an elegiac poet,—the ashes that remain after the fireworks have exploded. If here, as elsewhere, only the feeling belongs to the poet, since both form and content are of the old world whence he drew so many of his topics and so much of his inspiration, there is an undoubted grafting of his salient personality upon the imported plant.
Nasce o Sol; e não dura mais que um dia,
Depois da luz, se segue a noite escura,
Em tristes sombras morre a formosura,
Em continuas tristezas a alegria.
Porém, se acaba o sol, porque nascia?
Se formosa a luz é, porque não dura?
Como a belleza assim se trasfigura?
Como o gosto, da pena assim se fia?