Deserve, Do Not Merely Possess
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E ponde na cobiça um freio duro, E na ambição também, que indignamente Tomais mil vezes, e no torpe e escuro Vício da tirania infame e urgente; Porque essas honras vãs, esse ouro puro Verdadeiro valor não dão à gente: Melhor é, merecê-los sem os ter, Que possuí-los sem os merecer.
And put a hard curb on greed, and on ambition too, which a thousand times over you unworthily indulge, and on the vile, dark vice of tyranny, infamous and pressing; for those empty honors, that pure gold, give no true worth to a man: it is better to deserve them without possessing them, than to possess them without deserving them.
Near the close of Canto 9, the poet turns from the story to the young King Sebastião and his nobles, urging them to bridle greed and ambition. This stanza ends the sermon with a maxim: worth is not bought by honors or gold.
This stanza is the moral clinch of the poet's address to the crown. After eight cantos of ships and battles, Camões turns to lecture his own king: rein in greed, ambition, and the itch toward tyranny, because honors and gold confer no real worth. The last two lines are built as a mirror -- deserve without having, versus have without deserving -- so the whole argument snaps shut on a single antithesis.
What a first reader misses is that this is not abstract wisdom. Camões is speaking to the boy-king Sebastião, and "merecê-los sem os ter" is close to a self-portrait: the poet who earned honor and got little, watching men who hold rank they never earned. The couplet's neat symmetry hides a real grievance -- the whole epic is offered as proof that the deserving are not always the possessing.
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