The Whirl of the Heavens
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Com este rapto e grande movimento Vão todos os que dentro tem no seio; Por obra deste, o Sol, andando a tento, O dia e noite faz, com curso alheio. Debaxo deste leve, anda outro lento, Tão lento e sojugado a duro freio, Que enquanto Febo, de luz nunca escasso, Duzentos cursos faz, dá ele um passo.
With this whirling seizure and great movement go all the spheres it holds within its bosom; by the work of this outermost heaven the Sun, moving carefully, makes day and night with a course not its own. Beneath this swift one moves another, slow, so slow and reined to so hard a bridle that while Phoebus, never scant of light, runs two hundred courses, it takes but a single step.
From the Machine of the World that Tethys unveils to Gama: the Ptolemaic cosmos in motion. The outermost sphere's swift whirl drags every heaven within it, while far beneath moves a sphere so slow the Sun runs two hundred courses to its single step.
Tethys is walking Gama through the Ptolemaic heavens, sphere by sphere. This stanza is about the outermost sphere, the primum mobile: its "rapto" is the swift daily whirl that seizes every heaven inside it and turns them all with it. That is why the Sun's day-and-night is a "curso alheio", a course that is not its own — the Sun is being carried, not walking.
The thing a first reader misses is the second, slow sphere hidden beneath the fast one. Camões is describing precession of the equinoxes: the eighth sphere creeps so slightly that the Sun completes two hundred of its own circuits before it shifts a single step. The "duro freio" is not decoration but mechanism — the whole cosmos is a bridled machine, each sphere reined to a different speed.
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