The Gods' Tumult, Like a Storm in the Woods
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Qual Austro fero, ou Bóreas na espessura De silvestre arvoredo abastecida, Rompendo os ramos vão da mata escura, Com ímpeto e braveza desmedida; Brama toda a montanha, o som murmura Rompem-se as folhas, ferve a serra erguida: Tal andava o tumulto levantado, Entre os Deuses, no Olimpo consagrado
Just as the fierce south wind, or Boreas, within the thicket of a wild, dense grove go breaking the branches of the dark wood, with boundless impetus and fury; the whole mountain roars, the sound murmurs, the leaves are torn away, the towering ridge seethes: such was the tumult raised among the Gods in consecrated Olympus.
Closing the divine council's uproar, Camões likens the quarrelling gods on Olympus to a gale tearing through a dense forest. It is the epic's first extended nature-simile.
The stanza is one long simile that finishes the scene of the gods arguing over Portugal's voyage. Camões holds off the point of comparison until the very end: seven lines of storm in a forest, then two lines telling us this is what the divine council sounded like. The sensory verbs pile up (roars, murmurs, tear, seethes) so the reader hears the uproar before learning what it describes.
What a first reader misses is that the simile is borrowed technique, not just decoration. Epic poets from Homer and Virgil onward measured a battle or an assembly against wind in trees, and Camões is signaling that his gods belong in that lineage. The two named winds, Austro and Bóreas, are Greek personifications doing Portuguese work, which is the whole method of the poem: pagan machinery pressed into a Christian, national story.
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