The Island's Ripe Fruit
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Abre a romã, mostrando a rubicunda Cor, com que tu, rubi, teu preço perdes; Entre os braços do ulmeiro está a jocunda Vide, com uns cachos roxos e outros verdes; E vós, se na vossa árvore fecunda, Peras piramidais, viver quiserdes, Entregai-vos ao dano, que, com os bicos, Em vós fazem os pássaros inicos.
The pomegranate splits open, showing the ruddy colour beside which you, ruby, lose your value; among the arms of the elm hangs the merry vine, with some clusters purple and others still green; and you, pyramidal pears, if you wish to go on living on your fertile tree, surrender yourselves to the harm that the wicked birds do to you with their beaks.
Canto 9, on the Isle of Love: Venus's enchanted garden that rewards Gama's mariners. Camões catalogues its fruits, each image quietly coded as courtship.
The stanza is a fertility catalogue for Venus's garden on the Isle of Love: a pomegranate whose red shames the ruby, a grapevine draped over an elm in ripe purple and green, pears so heavy they seem to invite the birds. Camões is not padding the scene; every fruit is a picture of readiness, of nature at the exact moment before it is taken.
What a first reader misses is that none of this is idle scenery. The vine married to the elm is Virgil's old image of the couple, the weaker plant climbing the stronger; and the closing conceit turns ripeness into consent — the pears are told that to keep living they must "give themselves to the harm" of the pecking beaks. Yield in order to survive: the garden is quietly rehearsing the nymphs' surrender to the sailors, courtship dressed as horticulture.
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