Maria Enters Weeping
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Entrava a formosíssima Maria Pelos paternais paços sublimados Lindo o gesto mas fora de alegria, E seus olhos em lágrimas banhados; Os cabelos angélicos trazia Pelos ebúrneos ombros espalhados: Diante do pai ledo, que a agasalha, Estas palavras tais, chorando, espalha:
The most beautiful Maria was entering through the exalted paternal halls, lovely of face but devoid of joy, and her eyes bathed in tears; she wore her angelic hair spread over her ivory shoulders. Before her glad father, who welcomes her, weeping, she pours out these very words:
Dona Maria, daughter of King Afonso IV and queen of Castile, comes to the Portuguese court to beg her father's aid against a Moorish invasion. Here she enters the palace in tears, about to speak.
Maria walks into her father's palace, and the stanza slows to catalogue her: superlatively beautiful, but with joy struck from her face, her eyes swimming, her loose hair falling over pale shoulders. The father is glad to see her; she is about to speak. Everything here is the wind-up before a plea — the whole stanza is one long approach to the words that will fill the next.
What a first reader misses is that this is a formal supplication scene, staged with classical iconography. The unbound hair and the streaming tears are the fixed signs of a woman come to beg, the same gestures Virgil and Ovid give their suppliants. Maria is Afonso IV's daughter and queen of Castile, arriving to ask Portugal's aid against a Moorish invasion; before she says a syllable, her grief has already been made visible and rhetorical. The beauty is not decoration — it is the argument.
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