The Flower and the Goddess Who Sighs
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Pois a tapeçaria bela e fina, Com que se cobre o rústico terreno, Faz ser a de Aqueménia menos dina, Mas o sombrio vale mais ameno. Ali a cabeça a flor Cifísia inclina Sôbolo tanque lúcido e sereno; Floresce o filho e neto de Ciniras, Por quem tu, Deusa Páfia, inda suspiras.
For the tapestry, lovely and fine, with which the rustic ground is covered makes that of Achaemenia seem less worthy, while it makes the shadowy valley more pleasant. There the Cephisian flower bows its head over the bright and serene pool; there blooms the son and grandson of Cinyras, for whom you, Paphian Goddess, still sigh.
Still in the Isle of Love, the poem lingers on the meadow where the flowers themselves are mythic. The Cephisian flower is Narcissus; the son-and-grandson of Cinyras is Adonis, whom Venus of Paphos still mourns.
The stanza does one plain thing: it praises the meadow of the Isle of Love by saying its natural carpet of flowers outshines the woven carpets of Persia. Camões sets the wild valley against human craft and lets nature win, then narrows from the whole field down to two particular flowers bending over the water.
What a first reader misses is that the two flowers are people. The Cephisian flower is Narcissus, still staring into his pool; the son-and-grandson of Cinyras is Adonis, born of Myrrha's incest with her own father, so Cinyras is both his father and grandfather. The Paphian Goddess who still sighs is Venus, who loved Adonis and lost him. Under the pretty botany runs a quiet catalogue of doomed loves, which is exactly the note Camões wants before his sailors are rewarded with love that does not end in death.
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