The Sun Never Leaves Your Empire
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Vós, poderoso Rei, cujo alto Império O Sol, logo em nascendo, vê primeiro; Vê-o também no meio do Hemisfério, E quando desce o deixa derradeiro; Vós, que esperamos jugo e vitupério Do torpe Ismaelita cavaleiro, Do Turco oriental, e do Gentio, Que inda bebe o licor do santo rio;
You, mighty King, whose lofty Empire the Sun sees first the moment it rises, sees again at the middle of its arc, and when it sinks leaves last of all; you, from whom we look for nothing but the yoke and the reproach of the base Ishmaelite knight, of the Eastern Turk, and of the Gentile who still drinks the water of his holy river.
The second half of the dedication to the boy-king Sebastião, still before the narrative begins. Camões praises the reach of the Portuguese crown and names the infidel enemies awaiting it.
This is the second half of the dedication to the young King Sebastião begun in the previous stanza. Camões flatters him by claiming his empire is so vast the sun cannot escape it: it greets that realm first at dawn, sees it again at noon, and leaves it last at dusk. The boast is geographic hyperbole made courtly compliment.
What a first reader misses is that the three enemies named are a program, not decoration. The Ismaelita (the Moroccan Moor), the oriental Turco (the Ottoman), and the Gentio who drinks the santo rio (the Hindu on the Ganges) together map the crusade Camões is urging on his king. The irony is only ours: Sebastião carried that crusade to Morocco and died at Alcácer-Quibir in 1578, extinguishing the House of Aviz — the very catastrophe the poem's hope here is riding toward.
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