"Mais ía per diante o monstro horrendo
Dizendo nossos fados, quando alçado
Lhe disse eu: 'Quem es tu? que esse estupendo
Corpo, certo me tem maravilhado."
A bocca, e os olhos negros retorcendo,
E dando um espantoso e grande brado,
Me respondeu com voz pesada e amara,
Como quem da pergunta lhe pezara:
"'Eu son aquelle occulto e grande cabo,
A quem chamais vós outros Tormentorio;
Que nunca a Tolomeu, Pomponio, Estrabo,
Plinio, e quantos passaram, fui notorio:
Aqui toda a africana costa acabo
N' este meu nunca visto promontorio,
Que pera o pólo antárctico se estende,
A quem vossa ousadia tanto offende.
"Fui dos filhos aspérrimos da terra,
Qual Encélado, Egeu, e o Centimano;
Chamei-me Adamastor; e fui na guerra
Contra o que vibra os raios de Vulcano:
Não que puzesse serra sòbra serra;
Mas conquistando as ondas do Oceano,
Fui capitão do mar, per onde andava
A armada de Neptuno, que eu buscava.'"
—Camoens.
[A STUDY]
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS.
The greatest achievements in poetry have been made by men who lived close to their times, and who responded easily to their environment. Not that Taine was altogether right in his climatic theory. The individual counts for much, and his output is really the result of the combined action of two influences, his personality and his surroundings—a sort of intellectual parallelogram of forces. Nor is great poetic accomplishment necessarily a sympathetic expression of contemporary tendencies. On the contrary, it may often antagonize them. But whether it antagonize or approve, it is apt to be vitally related to them. No man ever set his face more strenuously against the trend of his age than Dante, nor denounced its manners and morals more severely; yet Dante was directly concerned in the practical affairs of his day, and his epoch is epitomized in his poems. Of course, great poetry bases itself below the shifting surfaces of eras and nationalities upon the immovable bed-rock of our common humanity; and so the greatest poets, the poets who express life most fundamentally, come to have a certain likeness to one another, even though they be as widely separated in time and space as Homer and Shakspere. But the poet must learn his human lesson at first hand; he must find the essential realities of life where he can see them with his own eyes, under the transitory garments which they wear in his day; and to do this he must be interested in his day.