Pure Love Despises All
Read the full text in our reader
De outras belas senhoras e Princesas Os desejados tálamos enjeita, Que tudo enfim, tu, puro amor, despreza, Quando um gesto suave te sujeita. Vendo estas namoradas estranhezas O velho pai sesudo, que respeita O murmurar do povo, e a fantasia Do filho, que casar-se não queria,
He rejects the longed-for marriage-beds of other fair ladies and princesses — for in the end you, pure love, despise all things when a sweet face subdues you. Seeing these lovesick strangenesses, the old, level-headed father, who heeds the murmuring of the people and the fancy of the son, who would not marry,
In the Inês de Castro episode: Prince Pedro spurns marriages to other noble ladies for love of a single sweet face, while his father, the old and prudent King Afonso IV, watches uneasily.
The prince turns down every royal match — the "desired marriage-beds" of other beautiful ladies and princesses — because one sweet face has taken him. Camões steps out of the story to address Love directly, as a power that levels everything before it, and then pulls back to the watching father: an old, cautious king who registers two things at once, the muttering of his people and the fixed refusal of his son.
The line "puro amor, despreza tudo" is Virgil turned inside out — "omnia vincit Amor" from the tenth Eclogue, love conquers all, but here love's victory is scorn, a rejection of duty and dynasty. What a first reader misses is that the stanza is quietly loading a gun: the father who "respeita o murmurar do povo" is Afonso IV, and that respect for public opinion is exactly what will drive him to have Inês de Castro killed. The prudence sounds like wisdom; it is the machinery of the coming murder.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 3.122 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Os Lusíadas — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Os Lusíadas 3.122 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/3.122/