The Machine of the World
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Qual a matéria seja não se enxerga, Mas enxerga-se bem que está composto De vários orbes, que a Divina verga Compôs, e um centro a todos só tem posto. Volvendo, ora se abaxe, agora se erga, Nunca s'ergue ou se abaxa, e um mesmo rosto Por toda a parte tem; e em toda a parte Começa e acaba, enfim, por divina arte,
What its substance is cannot be seen; but one sees clearly that it is composed of various orbs, which the Divine wand fashioned, setting a single center for them all. Turning, now it lowers, now it rises; yet it never rises nor lowers, and shows one same face on every side; and everywhere it begins and ends — in short, by divine art.
Near the epic's end, the goddess Tethys shows Gama a glowing model of the universe — a globe of nested crystalline spheres. Here she describes what it is and how it moves.
This is the heart of the great vision that closes the poem: the goddess has conjured a glowing model of the whole universe, and here she narrates it. The stanza works by paradox stacked on paradox. You cannot see what it is made of, only that it is made; it is many spheres yet has one center; it turns, rising and sinking, yet never truly rises or sinks; it shows the same face everywhere, and everywhere it both starts and finishes.
A first reader takes this as an astronomy lesson — the nested crystalline spheres of the Ptolemaic cosmos. But the piled-up contradictions are the giveaway that Camões is describing more than machinery. "One center for all," "the same face on every side," "begins and ends everywhere": these echo the old scholastic figure of God as a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. The globe is a riddle about the divine unity holding the cosmos together, handed to Gama in the shape of a physics model.
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