Explore "35 Sonnets" by Fernando Pessoa on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We are born at sunset and we die ere morn, / And the whole darkness of the world we know, / How can we guess its truth, to darkness born, / The obscure consequence of absent glow? / Only the stars do teach us light. We grasp / Their scattered smallnesses with thoughts that stray, / And, though their eyes look through night's complete mask, / Yet they speak not the features of the day.
Why should these small denials of the whole / More than the black whole the pleased eyes attract? / Why what it calls «worth» does the captive soul / Add to the small and from the large detract? / So, put of light's love wishing it night's stretch, / A nightly thought of day we darkly reach.