Neptune's House Under the Sea
Read the full text in our reader
No mais interno fundo das profundas Cavernas altas, onde o mar se esconde, Lá donde as ondas saem furibundas, Quando às iras do vento o mar responde, Netuno mora, e moram as jocundas Nereidas, e outros Deuses do mar, onde As águas campo deixam às cidades, Que habitam estas úmidas deidades.
In the innermost depth of the deep, high caverns where the sea hides itself — there, the place the waves come raging out of when the sea answers the wind's furies — Neptune lives, and so do the merry Nereids and the other gods of the sea, down where the waters give up open ground to the cities that these watery deities inhabit.
Bacchus, still set against the Portuguese, goes down to the sea-floor to ask Neptune for a storm. Before he arrives, Camões shows us the address: the deepest cavern of the ocean, where the sea-gods live in cities of water.
The stanza is an address. Camões is taking us somewhere, and he spends all eight lines on the journey down: past the deep, past the high caverns, past the place where storms are born, until the camera stops on Neptune at home. Nothing happens here. It is pure setting, laid before Bacchus arrives to ask for the storm that will nearly drown Gama.
What is easy to miss is line seven. The waters "leave field" to the cities — the sea, which everywhere else in the poem is the thing that swallows ships, here politely steps aside so that streets and houses can stand. For a moment the ocean is not an enemy but a landlord. That inversion is the whole point of the descent: Camões wants the storm in Canto 6 to come from a household, from gods with an address and neighbors, not from blind weather.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 6.8 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 6.8 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/6.8/