Give Way, Blue Waves
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Dai lugar, altas e cerúleas ondas, Que, vedes, Vénus traz a medicina, Mostrando as brancas velas e redondas, Que vêm por cima da água Netunina. Para que tu recíproco respondas, Ardente Amor, à flama feminina, É, forçado que a pudicícia honesta Faça quanto lhe Vénus amoesta.
Give way, high blue waves, for you see, Venus brings the cure: she shows the white and rounded sails that come across Neptune's water. So that you, burning Love, may answer in kind the women's flame, it must be that their honest modesty do all that Venus urges upon it.
Venus commands the sea to calm itself so Gama's ships can reach the Island of Love, then charges Cupid to answer the nymphs' desire even as modesty holds them back.
This is Venus in command mode. She parts the sea like a stage manager clearing the wings, announcing herself as "the remedy" and pointing to Gama's approaching sails as the sign that her plan is in motion. The stanza is one long address, first to the waves, then swinging around to Cupid, whom she orders to make the sea-nymphs' desire meet the sailors' halfway.
The knot a first reader misses is in the last two lines. Venus does not simply unleash lust; she frames the coming union as a negotiation with "pudicícia honesta," chaste modesty. Camões keeps the nymphs virtuous even as he steers them toward the sailors, so the Island of Love reads as reward rather than seduction. The Latinate word pudicícia and the odd legal-sounding forçado ("it is required") do that work, dressing appetite in the language of decorum.
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