The Prize Kept at the End
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Assim a formosa e a forte companhia O dia quase todo estão passando, Numa alma, doce, incógnita alegria, Os trabalhos tão longos compensando. Porque dos feitos grandes, da ousadia Forte e famosa, o mundo está guardando O prémio lá no fim, bem merecido, Com fama grande e nome alto e subido.
So the lovely, valiant company spends almost the entire day, passing it in a sweet, unfamiliar gladness of soul, and so making up for their long ordeals. For upon great deeds, upon bold and famous daring, the world keeps the prize there at the end, well earned, together with great renown and a name lifted high.
The sailors and the nymphs of the Isle of Love spend the day together. Camões steps back to name what the whole reward means: fame earned by great deeds.
The stanza pauses the action on the Isle of Love and turns the day of pleasure into a lesson. The sailors and nymphs let the hours go by in a happy calm they have never felt before, and Camões reads that calm as payment: the long suffering of the voyage is being balanced out. Then he names the rule behind it. The world holds back its reward until the end, and only great and daring deeds unlock it.
What a first reader can miss is that the island reward and the poem's reward are the same argument. The nymphs are not a gift of chance but a wage, and the wage is really fame, a high name that outlasts the man. Camões is defending his whole epic here: pleasure is allowed because it stands for glory earned, and glory earned is what a life of hard deeds is owed.
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