The Leech and the Waterspout
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Qual roxa sanguessuga se veria Nos beiços da alimária ( que imprudente, Bebendo a recolheu na fonte fria) Fartar co'o sangue alheio a sede ardente; Chupando mais e mais se engrossa e cria, Ali se enche e se alarga grandemente: Tal a grande coluna, enchendo, aumenta A si, e a nuvem negra que sustenta.
Just as a purple leech might be seen on the lips of some beast — which, unwary, drinking, took it in at the cold spring — glutting its burning thirst on blood that is not its own; sucking more and more, it thickens and grows, and there it fills out and widens hugely: so the great column, filling, enlarges itself, and the black cloud that it holds up.
Rounding into the open Atlantic, Gama's fleet watches a waterspout draw the sea up into a black cloud. Camoes stops the narrative to explain it with a simile drawn from a farm pond rather than from mythology.
This is the second half of a simile: the waterspout Gama's men have just watched drink the sea up into a cloud is explained by a leech swelling on an animal's lip. The whole stanza is one long 'Qual … Tal' construction, the standard epic form for such comparisons, and Camoes fills it with slow-motion verbs of swelling — engrossa, cria, enche, alarga, aumenta — so that the sentence expands as the thing it describes expands.
The surprise is the register. Homer and Virgil answer a marvel at sea with lions, eagles, storms — images that keep the dignity of the marvel. Camoes answers it with a parasite on a cow's mouth at a farm pond, and lingers on the ugly part: the blood is alheio, somebody else's. That word is the hinge. A reader watching for weather-writing takes the simile as a physics lesson, which it partly is; but the poem is voiced by a sailor-narrator explaining what he has actually seen, and his instinct is to reach for something small, farmyard, and faintly repellent. The sky drinks, and what it drinks it took from somewhere else.
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