Portuguese literature

The plays of Luis de Camões (1524?-80) are in a sense typical of his genius, for they show him combining two great currents of poetry, the old indigenous and the classic new. A generation had sprung up accustomed to wide horizons and heroic deeds, and poets and historians regretted that there was no Homer or Virgil to describe them adequately. Camões was not a Homer nor a Virgil, but he was a more universal poet than Portugal had yet produced, and by reason of his marvellous power of expression he triumphantly completed the revolution which Sá de Miranda had tentatively begun. In a sense he was not a great original poet, but in his style he was excelled by no Latin poet of the Renaissance. The eager researches of modern scholars have succeeded in piercing the obscurity that enveloped his life, although many gaps and doubtful points remain. Four or five generations had gone by since his ancestor Vasco Perez had passed out of the pages of history,[401] and some of the intervening members of the family had also won distinction, but Camões’ father, Simão Vaz de Camões, was a poor captain of good position (cavaleiro fidalgo) who was shipwrecked near Goa and died there soon after the poet was born in 1524. Through his grandmother, Guiomar Vaz da Gama, he was distantly related to the celebrated Gamas of Algarve. His mother, Anna de Sá e Macedo, belonged to a well-known family of Santarem.[402] Whether he was born at Lisbon or Coimbra is still uncertain. His great-grandfather had settled at Coimbra. That Camões studied there scarcely admits of doubt. He alludes to it in his poems, and nowhere else in Portugal could he have received his thorough classical education. In the year 1542 or 1543 he went to Lisbon. The exact dates of events in his life during the next ten years are difficult to determine, but the events themselves are clear enough. His birth and talents assured him a ready welcome in the capital. Whether he became tutor to D. Antonio de Noronha, son of the Conde de Linhares (the Portuguese ambassador whom Moraes accompanied to Paris), or not, he soon had many friends and was probably received at Court. Referring later to this time he is said to have spoken of himself as cheo de muitos favores, and in this popularity he wrote a large number of his exquisite redondilhas and also sonnets, odes, eclogues, and the three autos. But Camões had fallen passionately in love with a lady-in-waiting of the queen, Catherina de Athaide.[403] Tradition has it that he first saw her in church on a Good Friday (1544?). We may surmise that Natercia’s parents objected to the suit of the penniless cavaleiro fidalgo, and that Camões pressed his suit on them with more vehemence than discretion. He was banished from Court, and spent six months in the Ribatejo (Santarem) and two years in military service in North Africa (Ceuta). He admits that he had been in the wrong, but not seriously so, and hints that envy had played its part in his downfall. It is probable that his play El Rei Seleuco had given a handle to the enemies that his growing reputation as a poet had made. It must be confessed that its subject was tactless, for in the play the king gives up his bride to his son, which could easily be interpreted as a reflection on the conduct of the late King Manuel, who had married his son’s bride. The two years in Africa passed slowly. In a letter (Esta vae com a candea na mão) he describes sadness eating away his heart as a moth a garment, and it was with his thoughts in Lisbon that he took part from time to time in skirmishes against the Moors, in one of which he lost his right eye. Hard blows, scanty provisions, and no chance of enriching oneself as in India were the features of military service in North Africa, and when Camões returned to Lisbon his prospects contrasted sharply with those which had been his when he first came from the University a few years before. He was now nearly thirty,[404] disfigured by the loss of an eye and embittered by the turn his fortunes had taken. He no longer looked on life from the inside, gazing contentedly at the show from the windows of privilege, but was himself in the arena. For the school of Sá de Miranda he had probably never felt much sympathy, considering it too severe and artificial. He wished to live and enjoy, and although the patronage of literary Prince João may have encouraged him to hope for better times, he meanwhile set himself to sample life as best he might, associating with rowdy companions (valentões), who brought out the Cariofilo side of his character at the expense of the contemplative Zelotipo. Whether he had intended to embark for India in 1550, or this be a pure invention on the part of Faria e Sousa, it is certain that he was still in Lisbon on June 16, 1552. On that day the Corpus Christi procession passed through the principal streets. In the crowded Rocio Camões was drawn into a quarrel with a Court official, Gonçalo Borges, and wounded him with a sword-cut on the head. For nearly nine months Camões lay in prison, and then, Borges having recovered and bearing no malice, he was pardoned[405] (March 7, 1553) and released, but only on the understanding that he would leave Portugal to serve the king in India. Before the end of the month he had embarked in the ship S. Bento. Hitherto he had hoped against hope for an improvement in his lot; now he went, he says, as one who leaves this world for the next, and with the words Ingrata patria, non possidebis ossa mea,[406] turned his back on the calumnies and intrigues of Lisbon. In one of his finest elegies[407] he described the voyage, a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, and the arrival at Goa in September 1553. The voyage was full of interest to him, and he made good use of it, becoming what Humboldt called him—a great painter of the sea[408]—but so far as comfort was concerned he fared probably much as would a modern emigrant. His disillusion at Goa is poignantly described in a letter[409] written soon after his arrival. He found it ‘the stepmother of all honest men’, money the only god and passport, and he sends a note of warning to aventureiros in Portugal eager to make their fortune in India. We know from the bitter pages of Couto and Corrêa how difficult it was for a private soldier to thrive there, and the position of a reinol newly arrived from Portugal was precarious. Camões joined a few weeks later (November 1553) in a punitive expedition along the coast of Malabar against the King of Chembe, and in 1554 probably accompanied D. Fernando de Meneses in a second expedition to Monte Felix or Guardafui (Ras ef Fil), the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. After his three years’ service (1553-6) he continued to live at Goa. He had found time to write poetry, and sent home a sonnet and an eclogue on the death of his friend D. Antonio de Noronha. His play Filodemo was acted, probably in the winter of 1555, before the popular Governor Francisco Barreto, who provided him with the post of Provedor Môr dos Defuntos e Ausentes (i. e. trustee for the property of dead or absent Portuguese) at Macao. Whether his satiric verses had anything to do with the appointment we do not know—some have maintained that the Portuguese of Goa appreciated his poetical powers best at a distance—but it is more probable that his appointment was a favour, since every post in India was eagerly coveted, and it was a kinder action to give him a comparatively humble one at once than the reversion to a more lucrative office, filled thrice or even ten times over by the deplorable system of ‘successions’.[410] He set sail in the spring of 1556, and after touching at Malacca, arrived at the Molucca Islands, the most lawless region in India. Camões himself, according to Storck, was wounded about this time, but in a fight at sea, not in one of the chronic broils at Ternate or Tidore. In 1557 or 1558 he reached Macao, but two years later he was relieved of his post owing to a quarrel with the settlers, whose part was taken by the captain of the silver and silk ship passing from Goa to China. On his authority Camões was sent to Goa, protesting against o injusto mando, which was a common fate of officials in India. He was shipwrecked off the coast of Tongking, lost all his possessions, and arrived penniless and perhaps in debt at Goa in 1560 or 1561. To these four or five chequered years are ascribed the wonderful quintilhas, the most beautiful in the language, Sobolos rios que vam, which may owe something to Vicente’s admirable paraphrase of Psalm l, the canção Com força desusada, the oitavas Como nos vossos, and the completion of the first six books of the Lusiads. Soon after his return he was probably imprisoned for debt, but was released, probably at the instance of the Viceroy, D. Francisco Coutinho, Conde de Redondo, to whom Camões addressed his first printed poem, the ode in Orta’s Coloquios (1563). Camões’ thoughts must have now more than ever turned homeward. Fortune had danced tantalizingly before him, holding out hopes which broke as glass in his hands whenever he attempted to seize them.[411] Of his life between 1564 and 1567 we know nothing. He did not occupy the post of factor of Chaul, the reversion to which indeed he may perhaps only have received after his return to Portugal. He was eager to get home. In 1567 he accompanied Pedro Barreto to Mozambique, glad to get even so far on the return voyage. There poverty and illness delayed him till 1569, when through the generosity and in the company of some friends, among whom was the historian Couto, he was able to embark for Portugal. They reached Lisbon in April, 1570.[412] Sixteen years had passed. The popular, impulsive, talented youth returned middle-aged, poverty-stricken, and unknown. Antonio de Noronha and many others of his friends were dead. Catherina de Athaide had died in 1556 (although she may have continued to receive Camões’ rapt devotion as the dead Beatrice that of Dante), Prince João, hope and patron of poets, two years earlier. The plague, to which nearly half the city’s population had succumbed, had only recently abated, and Camões may have witnessed the thanksgiving procession in Lisbon on April 20, 1570. Modern critics have even denied him the only consolation which probably remained to him in the patria esquiva a quem se mal aproveitou[413], but there seems no reason to reject the tradition that his mother was alive; in fact she survived him and continued to receive the pension of 15,000 réis[414] granted him from 1572 till his death on Friday, June 10, 1580. It was a sum barely sufficient to support life, and it was not always regularly paid, so that he is reported to have been in the habit of saying that he would prefer to his pension a whip for the responsible officials (almoxarifes). Tradition, to the indignation of reasonable historians, loves to represent a faithful Javanese slave, who had accompanied Camões to Europe, begging for his master in the streets of Lisbon. Camões did not go with King Sebastian to Africa. He may have been already ill when the expedition set out in June 1578—the plague soon began again to ravage Lisbon, and long years of suffering and disappointment must have sapped his strength. Two years later his life of heroic endurance, in patience of the juizos incognitos de Deos,[415] ended. He was perhaps buried in a common grave with other victims of the plague.[416] Long absence had served to strengthen his love for his patria ditosa amada, and the news from Africa left him no heart to battle against disease, content, as he wrote to the Captain-General of Lamego, to die with his country, with which his name has ever since been intimately linked. Couto and Mariz agree that he brought Os Lusiadas with him virtually complete on his return to Portugal. It was published through the influence of the poet D. Manuel de Portugal in 1572. Camões has often been called the prince of heroic poets, but it is noteworthy that Faria e Sousa in 1685 says that ‘all have hitherto, especially in Spain, considered him greater as a lyric than as an heroic poet’.[417] Os Lusiadas rather than an epic is a great lyrical hymn in praise of Portugal, with splendid episodes such as the descriptions of the death of Inés, the battle of Aljubarrota, the storm, Adamastor, the Island of Venus. Apart from the style, its originality consists in the skill with which in a poem but half the length of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and a fifth of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso the poet works in the entire history of his country. It is this which gives unity to his ten cantos of oitavas, this and the wonderfully transparent flow of the verse, which carries the reader over many weaknesses and inequalities of detail. It is a nobler poem than the crowded garden of flowers in a high wind that is the Orlando Furioso, and at once more human and intense than the Gerusalemme Liberata. Camões, with a wonderful memory and intimate knowledge of the legends of Greece and Rome, read everything, and we find him gathering his material from all sides[418] like a bird in spring, from a Latin treatise of the antiquarian Resende, from the historians Duarte Galvão, Pina, Lopez, Barros, or Castanheda, or literally translating lines of Virgil, as in his shorter poems he imitated Petrarca, Garci Lasso, and Boscán. Tasso used the mot juste when in a sonnet addressed to Camões he called him dotto e buon Luigi.[419] If, as seems probable, he had early wished to sing the deeds of the Portuguese, the first volumes of Castanheda and Barros must have been an incentive as powerful as the destiny which made him personally acquainted with the scenes of Gama’s voyage and of the Portuguese victories in the East. It seems probable that cantos iii and iv, containing the early history of Portugal, were already written, and that around them he wove the epic grandeur revealed in the histories of the discovery of India. The poem opens with an invocation to the nymphs of the Tagus and to King Sebastian, and then, in a wonderful stanza of the sea (Já no largo oceano navegavam, i. 19), Gama’s ships are shown in mid-voyage. The gods of Olympus take sides, and Venus protects the daring adventurers in seas never crossed before, while Mars stirs up the natives of Mozambique and of Mombaça to treachery (i-ii). In contrast to the natives farther south, the King of Melinde receives them with loyal friendship, and Gama rewards him by relating the history of Portugal (iii-iv). He then continues his voyage, and after weathering a terrible storm brewed by Bacchus, arrives at Calicut (v-vi). After a visit to the Samori (the King of Calicut), the Catual (the Governor) accompanies Gama on board, and Paulo da Gama explains to him the warlike deeds of the Portuguese embroidered on the silken banners of the ships (vii-viii). On the return voyage they are entertained by Tethys and her nymphs in the island of Venus, supposed to be one of the Azores (ix-x), and the poem ends with a second invocation to King Sebastian (x. 145-56). Thus the time of the poem occupies a little over two years (July 1497-September 1499). Into this the previous four centuries had been ingeniously worked, but in order to include the sixteenth century fresh devices were adopted, by which Jupiter (canto ii), Adamastor (v), and Tethys (x) foretell the future. Almost every land and city connected with Portuguese history finds a place in the poem. Small wonder that it was well received by the Portuguese, combining as it did intense patriotism with hundreds of exotic names. The extraordinary number of 12,000 copies is said to have been printed within a quarter of a century of Camões’ death,[420] and by 1624 the sale had increased to 20,000 and his fame had spread throughout the world. It would have been still stranger if the murmuradores maldizentes had been silent. As early as 1641 we find a critic, João Soares de Brito (1611-64), defending Camões against the charges of plagiarizing Virgil and of improbabilities of time and place.[421] Not every one apparently was of the opinion of the Conde de Idanha, who considered that the only fault of the Lusiads was that it was too long to learn by heart and too short to be able to go on reading it for ever. Montesquieu found in it something of ‘the fascination of the Odyssey and the magnificence of the Aeneid’, and Voltaire, while objecting to its merveilleux absurde, adds: ‘Mais la poésie du style et l’imagination dans l’expression l’ont soutenu, de même que les beautés de l’exécution ont placé Paul Véronèse parmi les grands peintres.’

In 1820 appeared José Agostinho de Macedo’s Censura dos Lusiadas, in which he noted with some asperity Camões’ erros crassissimos. Prosaic lines, hyperbole, the use of the supernatural, lack of proportion,[422] absence of unity, and historical improbabilities are the main heads of his indictment, and he quotes Racine as to Camões’ ‘icy style’. He also has much petty detailed criticism, for he finds in Camões a notavel falta de grammatica. And Macedo was certainly right. Most of the faults he attributes to Camões do exist in the Lusiads. Macedo himself could write more correctly. When he says that the line Somos hum dos da ilha, lhe tornou (i. 53) is unpoetical (não tem tintura de poesia), we agree; it is sheer prose. We can add other instances: the line as que elle para si na cruz tomou (i. 7) is as unmusical as the rhyming of Heliogabalo, Sardanapalo (iii. 92), or impossibil, terribil (iv. 54). Only Macedo forgot that genius is justified of its children, and that these details are all merged in the incomparable style, imaginative power, and lofty theme of the poem. If a man is unable to feel the heat of the sun for its spots, we will vainly try to warm or enlighten him, but it is not pedantic grammarians such as Macedo[423] who could obscure the fame of Camões. That could only be done by those whom Macedo calls os idolatras camoneanos. Lope de Vega[424] effusively professed to place the Lusiads above the Aeneid and the Iliad, and Camões’ fellow-countrymen have eagerly followed suit. He has also suffered much at the hands of translators. Since the Lusiads is clearly not the equal of the Iliad or the Odyssey, it may be worth while to consider by what reasons Camões really is one of the world’s greatest poets. There is celestial music in much that he wrote, in incidents of the Lusiads such as the death of Inés de Castro,[425] in his eclogues and canções and elegies, in many of the sonnets, and in the redondilhas, most of all perhaps in the seventy-three heavenly quintilhas beginning Sobolos rios que vam. But other Portuguese poets have been musical; Diogo Bernardez in this respect vies with Camões: Camões excels them all in the vigour and transparent clearness that accompany his music. But his principal excellence is that, still without losing the music of his versos deleitosos, he can think in verse[426]—the thought in some of his elegies and oitavas is remarkable—and describe with scientific precision, as in the account of the tromba (Lus. v. 19-22). Like Milton, he could transform an atlas into a fair harmony of names. His influence on the Portuguese language has been very great. Whether it was wholly for good may be open to doubt—a doubt mentioned by one of his earliest biographers, Severim de Faria, in 1624. The Lusiads, he says, ‘greatly enriched the Portuguese language by ingeniously introducing many new words and expressions which then came into common use, although some severe critics have censured him for this, considering the use of latinized forms a defect in his poem’.[427] An inch farther than he went in this direction, or in that of furia grande e sonorosa, and estilo grandiloquo, would have been an inch too far, and subsequent writers did not always observe his restraint, the sobriety due to his classical education. But his poem certainly helped to fix the language, and he cannot be blamed for the excesses of his followers, or for a change which had begun before his time.[428]

Couto records the theft of the Parnaso in which Camões was collecting his lyrics with a view to publishing them. He must have written many more lyrics than we possess, but even so the number existing is not small. Successive editors have added to them from time to time, and often clumsily. Faria e Sousa, a century after Camões’ death, declared that he had added 200, and, while upbraiding Diogo Bernardez for his robos, was himself the thief. Camões might have been somewhat surprised to find in the first edition of his lyrics (1595) two poems which had been in print in the Cancioneiro de Resende eight years before he was born. This 1595 edition contained but 65 sonnets, but their number grew to 108 (1598), 140 (1616), 229 (1668), 296 (1685), 352 (1860), 354 (1873). D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos has already contributed much towards a critical edition, and it is to be hoped that before long it may be possible to read the genuine lyrics of Camões in a complete edition by themselves.[429] That would certainly cause him to be more widely read abroad. It is perhaps inevitable that a comparison should arise between Camões and Petrarca (although it must be remembered that they are separated by two centuries), yet he would be an extremely bold or extremely ignorant critic who should place the one of them above the other. In genius they were equal, but a different atmosphere acted on their genius, the artistic atmosphere of Italy and the natural atmosphere of Portugal. Petrarca was the more scholarly writer, so that if he perhaps never attains to the rapturous heights occasionally reached by Camões, he also keeps himself from the blemishes which sometimes disfigure Camões’ work. Camões’ life was far more varied, many-coloured as an Alentejan manta,[430] and this is reflected in his poems. Intensely human, he is swayed by many moods, while Petrarca is merged in the narrower flame of his love. Petrarca excels him in the sonnet, for although many of those by Camões are beautiful, and nearly all contain some beautiful passage, he was not really at his ease in this scanty plot of ground. His genius required a larger canvas for its expression. The following lines from his long and magnificent canção Vinde cá are worth quoting because they triumphantly display many of the noblest characteristics of his poetry:

Here we see the force and precision, the amazing ease and rapidity, the crystalline transparency, the sad saudade, and above all the deep sincerity that mark so much of his work. Both Petrarca and Camões are representative of their country, the latter not only in his poems, in which almost every Portuguese hero is included, but in his character and his life. In his wit and melancholy, his love of Nature, his passionate devotion, his persistency and endurance, his independence and sensitive pride, in his lyrical gift and power of expression, in his courage and ardent patriotism, he is the personification and ideal of the Portuguese nation.

Many of Camões’ friends were also lyric poets, but their poems have mostly vanished. One of them, Luis Franco Corrêa, compiled a cancioneiro of contemporary poems which still exists in manuscript. A few later poets, chiefly pastoral, have already been mentioned, but after Camões’ death the star of lyric poetry waned and set, and the only compensation was a brilliant noonday in the realm of prose. Camões was a learned poet, but he also plunged both hands in the songs and traditions of the people. The later poets withdrew themselves more and more from this perennial spring of poetical images and expression, till at last in the ripeness of time Almeida Garrett turned to it again for inspiration, even Bocage, devoted admirer of Camões though he was, having neglected this side of his genius, as was inevitable in the eighteenth century.

Epic poetry scarcely fared better than the lyric, despite a hundred honest efforts to eclipse the Lusiads. A favourite legend of Portuguese and other folk-lore tells how the step-daughter comes from the fairies’ dwelling speaking flowers for words or with a star on her forehead, but her envious half-sister, who then visits the fairies, returns uttering mud and toads or with an ass’s head. If the epic poems of those who emulated the fame of Camões are something better than mud they nevertheless fail for the most part lamentably in that inspiration which Portuguese history might have been expected to give.

wrote Diniz da Cruz (O Hyssope, canto 1). The epic-fever had not abated even in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Madeira poet Francisco de Paula Medina e Vasconcellos (c. 1770-1824) alone wrote two: Zargueida (1806), Georgeida (1819); and José Agostinho de Macedo in his Motim Literario imagines himself at the mercy of a poet with an epic in sixty cantos entitled Napoleada, and himself became the mock-hero of one in nine: Agostinheida (Londres, 1817), written by his unfortunate opponent Nuno Alvares Pereira Pato Moniz (1781-1827). The strange poet of Setubal, Thomaz Antonio de Santos e Silva (1751-1816), published a Braziliada in twelve cantos in 1815. Of the earlier epics Camillo Castello Branco wrote sarcastically: ‘They contain impenetrable mysteries of dullness and inspire a sacred awe, but they are the conventional glory of our literary history, untouched and intangible.’[431]

Of the two long epic poems of Jeronimo Corte Real (c. 1530-1590?): Svcesso do Segvndo Cerco de Div (1574) and Naufragio, e Lastimoso Svcesso da Perdiçam de Manoel de Sousa de Sepulveda, &c. (1594), we may perhaps say that they are excellent prose. He dwells more than once upon the inconstancy of fortune, and this may be something more than a platitude. Of his life little is known. He is by some believed to have been born in the Azores in 1533. A document in the possession of the Visconde de Esperança shows that he died before May 12, 1590. He may have been a musician as well as a poet and a painter. It is probable, but not certain, that he accompanied King Sebastian to Alcacer Kebir and was taken prisoner. Faria e Sousa says that he was too old to go. After varied service by land and sea he wrote these poems when living in retirement on his estate near Evora, and his own experiences stood him in good stead for his descriptions, which are often not without life and vigour, as the account of the battle in canto 18 of the Segundo Cerco de Diu, or of the storm in canto 7 of the Naufragio. The former poem records the famous defence of Diu by D. João de Mascarenhas and its relief by D. João de Castro (1546), in whose mouth is placed a long and tedious speech. The last two cantos (21, 22) are tacked on to the main theme and occupy more than a quarter of the whole. They tell from paintings the deeds of past captains and prophesy future events and the ‘golden reign’ of King Sebastian. The prophetic vision, although it included a generation beyond the nominal date of the poem (1546), did not extend to the battle of Alcacer Kebir (1578). The hendecasyllables of the blank verse have an exceedingly monotonous fall and the lines merge prosaically into one another.[432] The use of adjectives is excessive, and generally there is an inclination to multiply words without adding to the force of the picture.[433] The same plethora of epithets, elaborate similes, and slow awkward development of the story mark the seventeen cantos—some 10,000 lines of blank verse, with some tercets and oitavas—which constitute the Naufragio. In cantos 13 and 14 a learned man tells from sculptures the history of the Portuguese kings, from Afonso I to Sebastian. The remaining cantos have a more lively interest, ending with the death of D. Lianor in canto 17, but the poet could not resist the temptation to round off with an anticlimax, in which Phoebus, Proteus, and Pan make lamentation. His short Auto dos Quatro Novissimos do Homem (1768) in blank verse is written with some intensity, but the style is the same.[434] His Austriada, composed to commemorate Don John of Austria’s felicissima victoria[435] of Lepanto, consists of fifteen cantos in Spanish blank verse.

Luis Pereira Brandão, born at Oporto about 1540, was present at Alcacer Kebir, and after his release from captivity is said to have worn mourning for the rest of his life. That later generations might also suffer, his epic Elegiada (1588)—in spite of his professed temor de ser prolixo—was published in eighteen cantos. Beginning with the early years of King Sebastian, it recounts the king’s dreams and ambitions, his first expedition to Africa, and the later disastrous adventure. Not even the story of D. Lianor de Sousa (canto 6) nor the excessively detailed description of the battle of Alcacer Kebir (canto 17) rouses the poet from his implacable dullness. The defects of his style have perhaps been exaggerated, but it is certainly inferior to that of Andrade, with whom he shares the inability to distinguish a poem from a history. The introduction of contemporary events in India (cantos 6, 10, 14), however legitimate in a history, is singularly out of place in an epic.

If the author of the history of King João III’s reign, Francisco de Andrade (c. 1535-1614), brother of the great Frei Thomé de Jesus, regarded his epic O Primeiro Cerco ... de Diu (1589) merely as a supplementary chapter of that history, we can only regret that he did not write it in prose. It is a straightforward account, in excellent Portuguese, of the first siege of Diu (1538), but oitava follows prosaic oitava with a relentless wooden tread, maintaining the same level of mediocrity throughout and rendering it unreadable as poetry. The author begins by imploring divine favour that his song may be adequate to his subject (i. 1-3). It is only when he has passed his two-thousandth stanza that he expresses some diffidence as to whether his ‘fragile bark’ was well equipped for so long a voyage, but he consoles himself, if not his reader, with the sincere conviction that his rude verse cannot detract from the greatness of the deeds which he describes (xx. 1-6).