Explore "I Could not Think of Thee as Piecèd Rot" by Fernando Pessoa on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I could not think of thee as piecèd rot,
Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead; / Yet thou liv'dst entire in my seeing thought / And what thou wert in me had never fled.
Nay, I had fixed the moments of thy beauty --
Thy ebbing smile, thy kiss's readiness, / And memory had taught my heart the duty / To know thee ever at that deathlessness.
But when I came where thou wert laid, and saw / The natural flowers ignoring thee sans blame, / And the encroaching grass, with casual flaw, / Framing the stone to age where was thy name, / I knew not how to feel, nor what to be / Towards thy fate's material secrecy.