Neptune's Horses in the Fray
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Ali se vêem encontros temerosos, Para se desfazer uma alta serra, E os animais correndo furiosos Que Neptuno amostrou ferindo a terra. Golpes se dão medonhos e forçosos; Por toda a parte andava acesa a guerra: Mas o de Luso arnês, couraça e malha Rompe, corta, desfaz, abola e talha.
There you could see fearful collisions, enough to shatter a high mountain, and the furious animals racing — those horses that Neptune brought forth when he struck the earth. Dreadful, mighty blows are exchanged; on every side the war blazed. But the man of Luso breaks, cuts, undoes, dents, and cleaves the harness, cuirass, and mail.
From Gama's chronicle of Portugal in Canto 3, amid the battle. Camões heaps up an epic simile — the charge of warhorses likened to Neptune striking the earth to make the first horse — before the Lusitanian sword hacks through Moorish armor.
The stanza is pure battle-din. Camões first inflates the clash to cosmic scale — collisions that could tear a mountain apart, horses charging like the ones Neptune drew out of the ground — then snaps back to a single Portuguese fighter and lets five hammering verbs land the blows: Rompe, corta, desfaz, abola e talha. The high myth sets up the fall to bare, physical butchery.
What a first reader skims past is that the horses carry a whole myth. Neptune "amostrou" them by striking the earth — the god who, contending with Athena for Athens, split the rock with his trident and made the first horse leap out. So even the enemy's chargers are given a pagan, divine pedigree. Then the Lusitanian sword simply cuts through it: the run of naked Portuguese verbs, with no ornament at all, is what makes the violence feel local and true after the borrowed classical grandeur.
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